It’s been a pretty big year for Ringtone! Earlier this year, we revamped our site and introduced a new focus on internet music. Thanks to our broader focus, we were able to cover a lot of artists in 2022, including a Brazilian Jersey club collective, a fandom artist breaking through an invisible barrier of judgment, and a classic producer whose work we’ve been listening to for years. (Our new editor Allison even traveled to cover Elena Fortune’s avatarsona fashion show!)
To celebrate, we’re finally bringing back Ringtone Wrapped, where we review our favorite releases of the year.
Happy new year from the Ringtone team!
MOTOMAMI - Rosalía
For Rosalía, MOTOMAMI isn’t just an album, but a moment. After spending time in the critical underground as acclaim piled up for records like Los Angeles and El Mal Querer, she cashed in on the brightness of her star with collaborations that drastically raised her profile. “Con Altura” with J Balvin, “Yo x Ti, Tu x Mi” with Ozuna, and “TKN” with Travis Scott meant that Rosalía had suddenly become one of the Spanish-speaking pop world’s most promising up-and-comers with potential for both massive critical success and crossover appeal.
Enter MOTOMAMI, her third album, but also an opportunity to become the rare superstar who is just as critically acclaimed as she is commercially adored. The moment was big, but Rosalía was bigger. MOTOMAMI is mystifyingly charming, spawning crossover successes with hard-hitting singles like “SAOKO,” and “CHICKEN TERIYAKI” and supplementing them with deep cuts like one of the year’s best flex anthems, “LA COMBI VERSACE.” Not only do these songs hold nothing back, but they also see Rosalía pushing the sounds and styles she’s playing with into new directions that feel too instantaneous to be experimental, but they are.
But where Rosalía really shines on the record is in its most intimate moments. She’s joined by The Weeknd on the album’s lead single “LA FAMA,” a takedown of the shallowness of fame. She interpolates one of electronic music’s most beloved songs, “Burial’s Archangel,” on the beautiful ballad “CANDY.” She even addresses her fans, and the world at large, on the album's touching closing track “SAKURA.” But the moment where she really shows exactly what she, and only she, is capable of is on one of the year’s best songs, her icy meditation on sexuality, “HENTAI.”
MOTOMAMI is a rare album that brings together the ambitions of an experimentalist with the sentimentalities of a superstar, not to mention someone capable of not only crossing genre and language barriers but pushing their limits in the process. It’s triumphant in almost every way an album can be, and in a field of commercial smashes and massive critical successes, it became both in a way that nothing else could.
- Lavender Alexandria
“Two Ribbons” - Let’s Eat Grandma
Four years after I’m All Ears, Let’s Eat Grandma came out with an album called Two Ribbons. I’m All Ears was a critical masterpiece and one of my favorite albums of all time. It was also a favorite among the electronic and synthpop scene and even the hyperpop and PC Music spheres, with SOPHIE producing some of its songs such as their most popular hits, “Hot Pink” and “It’s Not Just Me.”
Members Rosa and Jenny take a different turn in their music on I’m All Ears by having a more acoustic and ballad-like approach. Though some critics may not have liked this album as much as I’m All Ears, it would have been difficult to top, and I was grateful for a comeback in general.
Though I shouldn’t compare it too much to their past album, I can’t help but personally resonate with their sound and how I got into their music. I discovered them through the internet, thinking their band name was funny and interesting, and then I was hooked. I’m All Ears greatly grew on me, as it felt like the sounds were me as a person. I even got into Donnie Darko thanks to them. In comparison, Two Ribbons is pretty accessible and helped me resonate my experiences with Rosa and Jenny’s visions for Let’s Eat Grandma.
Their lyrics and themes display friendship and relationships and their overall complexity. Rosa and Jenny themselves have been best friends for a large portion of their lives and seem to write about their own experiences. It’s pretty easy to imagine a storyline of this friendship portrayed throughout the album. In “Happy New Year,” the pre-chorus states, “Do you remember how we spent our days at the end of my garden? / Summertime, rope swings / Say the things that no one knew about us / Well, there’s no onе else who gets mе quite like you.”
The production and instrumentals also wonderfully complement the lyrics and singing. The production still has its electronic and synthpop roots, but takes a more acoustic direction. It fits the themes of the album, too, as the beauty of friendship is conveyed through the bright production.
The production seems to start with synthpop and gradually gets more acoustic. The starting tracks such as “Happy New Year,” “Levitation,” and “Hall of Mirrors” are the marketed singles and were their intended synthpop hits. However, their closing tracks, “Strange Conversations” and “Two Ribbons,” are acoustic ballads. The genres of the tracks seemingly contrast, but Rosa and Jenny help the tracks transition into each other fairly well, with the tracks in between being a broad middle ground.
Two Ribbons truly delivers a nice follow-up to I’m All Ears, being much more minimal and accessible to new listeners. In only ten tracks, they clearly tell and portray their story of friendship. The reason for their hiatus was perfectly reasonable, and I’m overall grateful that they made such a comeback. It truly makes me wonder what sounds and themes they will discover in the future, as it most likely isn’t their last album.
- Stella Sone
Neon White Soundtrack Part 1 “The Wicked Heart” and Part 2 “The Burn That Cures” - Machine Girl
I’ve said this before, but from the moment Machine Girl began remixing the soundtracks of Jet Set Radio and Sonic CD, the duo was destined to make a game soundtrack. It’s only fitting, then, that the duo composed nearly two and a half hours of music for the freakiest game of the year: Neon White, a platformer and first-person shooter filled with demons and sinners and corsets.
It’s hard to talk about Neon White’s soundtrack without talking a bit more about the game itself (sorry for being a games journalist, it won’t happen again) —it’s geared toward speedrunning, so Machine Girl’s soundtrack is naturally frantic to match the game’s fast pace. “Glass Ocean” kicks off Part 1 with atmospheric drum and bass, though later tracks like “Hellion” and “The World to Come” feel darker and more abrasive, drawing parallels to the game’s descent into an overly edgy story.
While Part 1 is largely filled with tracks from the game’s platforming sections, Part 2 encompasses everything that plays when you aren’t platforming — when you’re conversing with weird cats that rule over Heaven and hanging out in bars and perusing collectible items. Because of this, Part 2 feels a bit more disjointed and less coherent as a standalone album, though it has quite a few memorable tracks as well, like the peppy “Heavenly Delight” and the ambient yet foreboding “Mercy.”
If you’re a Machine Girl fan obsessed with frantic, long tracks, you’ll love Part 1. If you’re a gamer looking for an ambient listen, you’ll be satisfied by Part 2. And if you’re me (both of the above), you’ll be so in love with both parts that you desperately DM Machine Girl on Instagram before seeing them live in November, politely begging them to somehow slip a track from either album into their setlist (they did not respond).
- Amelia Zollner
“Hot Girl (Bodies Bodies Bodies)” - Charli XCX
From dropping her fifth studio album Crash to collaborating with Tiesto on their single “Hot In It,” 2022 was a big year for our angel Charli XCX. However, there is one single that I think flew under the radar. “Hot Girl (Bodies Bodies Bodies)” by Charli is the promotional single for A24’s bloody horror film Bodies Bodies Bodies. This meta take on a murder mystery was filled with other hyperpop classics from Alice Longyu Gao, Slayyyter and Shygirl. However, this single stands out the most among them.
This song encapsulated everything I love about Charli. The bitchy lyrics paired with heavy bass and car engines revving is the recipe for an amazing Charli song I never get sick of listening to. Lyrics like “I’m going skiing even when the slopes are closed / ‘cause I’m so hot with snow up my nose” reference Charli’s partying aesthetic that fits the themes of wealth, vanity and Gen Z culture seen in the film. The chorus “I’m a hot girl, pop girl, rich girl” are so badass and unforgettable. The upbeat production by The 1975’s George Daniel makes the perfect song for a house party or for pregaming.
This track immediately went to the top of my playlists and set the scene for an amazing summer. Although this single is underrated, it was a nice throwback to Charli’s earlier hyperpop era and could easily fit on her Vroom Vroom EP or her Number One Angel mixtape.
- Kyler Edsitty
Glitch Princess - Yeule
2022 was a weird year in listening habits for me because it wasn’t like I was necessarily tuned out of new music releases, but, more, nothing had quite stood out in the same way as years prior. The output from artists I had been looking forward to kind of came and went, liked ‘em or didn’t, and now here we are at the end of the year where it felt like my ear was a bit further from the ground than it normally is. So, it’s strange, then, looking back on my favorite project of the year as one released back in February still ringing vibrantly in my mind all these months later.
Yeule’s Glitch Princess is an ambitious and thoroughly haunting cyberpunk lament for the minds of a generation plagued with burdens of the past and the responsibility of an unknown future we find ourselves hurtling towards. Within this LP resides all this electronic interference synced up with recollections of the self and one’s own insecurities as if it's everything cyberpunk fiction typically grapples with, yet injected directly into your eardrums. “Flowers are Dead” might be my favorite track among them; it’s some melancholy-shaped shoegaze with a palpable sadness at its core, comparing love to an inherent process of damaging each other. The “flowers” in question are an organic material mangled in complex ways only we can understand, as in what we hold onto when everything else decays around us.
Themes are one thing, but it’s the textural ways in which Yeule toys with the conventions of electronic music that give this album such a unique feel. Yeule’s voice is completely elastic. Autotuned, overdubbed vocals aid Yeule in making their voice whatever the song needs it to be for that moment, for that purpose. The most popular track “Don’t Be So Hard on Your Own Beauty” weaves a very human, natural-sounding guitar with poetic lyrics — both in tone and how they’re sung — while draping an ethereal atmosphere atop these more mortal elements.
For a year where I wasn’t all too awestruck by the albums I was primarily looking forward to, I found it pretty cool to come across a new favorite by complete surprise. In concocting an elaborate technoscape of moody contemplation, Yeule has crafted a darkly beautiful milestone for the world of auditory cyberpunk. Glitch Princess is pumped with loads of room for you to rest your head in directionless introspection as the songs carry you through the rhythms of the dark corners in our collective mind. Plus, if I didn’t give you a reason to check back on it already, the final song is literally 4 hours and 44 minutes long and… that is just so damn cool.
- Dylan Robinson
can opener’s notebook: fish whisperer - Vylet Pony
Like the rest of her massive discography, Vylet Pony’s most recent album, can opener’s notebook: fish whisperer, is inspired by My Little Pony. So when I came across the album on a chart earlier this year, I was initially dissuaded by its fandom affiliation until I read a glowing review. After giving it a chance and immediately falling in love with it, I interviewed Vylet, which became somewhat of a turning point in the way I write about music. Better yet, it changed the way I perceive music overall.
Adopting a distinctly aquatic sound to match its story about a marine biologist, can opener’s notebook has some of the cleanest production I’ve ever heard. The album blends EDM-speckled synthpop (“the yak song”) with prog (“i’ve still got something to teach you”) and ambient tracks that really help nail the underwater feeling (“fisher’s landing”), creating a neat blend of styles that sounds like a blend between underscores and Porter Robinson.
What impresses me most about can opener’s notebook, though, is how Vylet is able to tell such tangible stories about art block and burnout and finding solace in interests through… ponies. It’s all portrayed through a story about ponies headed to Hippogriff festivals and fishing in Yakyakistan and unlocking neat magical powers, and even though I hadn’t cared about My Little Pony in nearly ten years, the album’s themes still really resonated with me. Ending on “for the love of music,” the album carries an uplifting (albeit slightly cheesy) message about discarding negativity and creating music instead.
In the face of plenty of negativity online, Vylet is breaking past the invisible barrier that prevents people from listening to fandom music, and she’s making some really incredible music on the way.
- Amelia Zollner