DNA Counts Down The Ten Best Queer Albums of 2022
2022 has been a banner 12 months for out-and-proud music. It’s not often in a calendar year you’re spoilt for LGBTQIA+ album riches, choices and new voices but, if 2022 is anything to go by, this current decade will be the most interesting, diverse and queerest musical decade on record, so to speak.
10. Perfume Genius – Ugly Season
For his sixth album in a dozen years, this 41-year-old LA-based artist confounded expectations and critics at the same time. Ugly Season is the accompaniment to an immersive dance piece from Seattle-based choreographer Kate Wallich called The Sun Still Burns Here. Correct, it’s not your everyday summery, gay pop album; actually, much closer to a wintry, delicate indie soundtrack. While light, whimsical and wistful are not terms usually associated with this intense artist, on Perfume Genuis’ latest record, he magically transforms Ugly into a beautiful thing – just the season if you want to be the next Kate Bush. Certainly, the delightfully perky Pop Song, and hauntingly baroque Herem have all the ethereal charm and intricate beauty you’d expect from a most post-modern Genius.
9. Shamir – Heterosexuality
This 28-year-old Las Vegas singer/songwriter gifted with an androgynous voice, a love for Taylor Swift and perverting cisgender norms afforded horniness a whole new meaning (if not a double meaning too – touche!) on his eighth album. Opening with a track called Gay Agenda doesn’t pull any punches, but that’s what non-binary Shamir is all about – not shying away from any of their choices. On Cisgender they informed us, “I’m not cisgender, I’m not binary, trans/I don’t wanna be a girl/I don’t wanna be a man/I’m just existing on this godforsaken land”. The defining look they adopted for Heterosexuality was of antlers as a symbol of non-conformity… and because, they insist, “I look real cute with horns”. Can’t argue with that now.
8. Oliver Sim – Hideous Bastard
Any album beginning with the words “I’m ugly” is definitely making a personal statement and so it was on the debut solo album, pointedly and poignantly called Hideous Bastard, for The xx’s Oliver Sim, who once described himself as “Faggy Spice”. Likely to be considered an era-defining queer album, Oli tackles shame, loneliness, secrets and fear as a gay man living with HIV since the age of 17. The title track is like a primal scream against the myth of male beauty we’ve all bought into, before the timely arrival of Jimmy Somerville’s gorgeous falsetto. Rivalling John Grant for frankness and haunting moodiness, Hideous is brooding indie-pop, the perfect antidote to shiny, fluffy chart fodder and a hideously brave album to cherish.
7. Todrick Hall – ALGORHYTHM
In a year when top-line R&B artists like Beyonce and Drake calculated the time was nigh to plunder those gay underground house vaults, Todrick was well ahead of the curve. ALGORHYTHM was his ’80s-inspired album, meaning he got the jump on those one-name superstars who leapt in at the ’90s. The hardest working gayboy in showbiz didn’t let us rest up here either. The video for Pre-Madonna (Vogue – The Prequel, anyone?) was everything you may have hoped for, and then some, as Todrick declared emphatically, “The girls were voguing pre-Madonna,” alongside a throbbing beat he rightly dubbed “fagalicious”. Sorry Barbie (“Ken’s at the party kissing boys”) and the soaring Gay Excellence were two further succulent highlights. Shantay, Todrick, you stay.
6. Minute Taker – Wolf Hours
Among a multitude of covers, remixes and piano ditties, this British artist unleashed his third proper album in early 2022. Avantgarde popster Ben McGarvey, aka Minute Taker, wasn’t taking any chances with the artistic vision on his 12th album. He opted to crowdfund it entirely to ensure it was exactly how he wanted it to sound. Previewed last year by the fabulously fearless After The Rain featuring Bright Light Bright Light, Wolf Hours opens with the gripping Lead You Home, complete with big budget gay World War I bromance video. Then there were 10 more synthpop songs infused with his devotion to the 1980s, drawing influences from Pet Shop Boys, Kate Bush (her again!), Cyndi Lauper and Erasure. Feel that queer history!
5. Orville Peck – Bronco
Yessiree, it’s that Peck-er fella with a mean pair of jeans, not to mention a thang for face masks with glittery tassels! For his second album, Orville went less alt-country and more mainstream rock. Here fans of heartbreak ballads (“a thousand teardrops can’t be wrong”), with a queer spin on country, instantly found their next wild bucking bronco at the rodeo to lasso. The album’s first single, the jaunty C’mon Baby Cry, featured Margaret Cho and drag racer Kornbread, while Elvis Presley’s granddaughter, Riley Keogh, guested in Hexie Mountains. To honour Orville’s contributions to queerness, in June this year he was presented with the Tom Of Finland Cultural Icon Award for “artistic achievement and immeasurable contributions to the art and culture of our community”. Ya-hoo!
4. Calum Scott – Bridges
Let’s be real here, Calum could probably sing Grindr profiles and we’d all be sobbing into our tanktops, such is the power of his rich, majestic and emotive voice. The gay heartbreak, heartache and hurt that found its perfect starting point with Calum’s startling cover of Robyn’s Dancing On My Own finally delivered on all that promise on his second album. Bridges’ highlight is unquestionably the powerful Boys In The Street, written by Scottish singer/songwriter Greg Holden from his 2015 album Chase The Sun, about a father chastising his son for not being straight. This was an album of 14 strong tracks without a single dud. We can’t wait to hear what bridges Calum burns next with album #3!
3. Ezra Fuhrman – All Of us Flames
Trans indie rock musician Ezra’s last album, Twelve Nudes, came out pre-covid and before being trans became the political hot potato it later morphed into. Unsurprisingly on their sixth solo album, Ezra had a lot to get off their chest. Lead single Forever In Sunset set the tone with its pulsating, distressingly wry take on a hopeless love. But what was the big flaming message here? “A future in which we can survive and thrive, in which we care for each other and are cared for in turn,” Ezra declared. “Here’s to fucking hope, in spite of it all.” Vulnerability, tenderness and anger are all ballsy emotional centrepieces Ezra effectively employed to turbocharge their guitar-driven pop into hitherto unknown zones. Hot stuff!
2. Darren Hayes – Homosexual
After a ten-year absence from the pop world no one truly, madly, deeply expected this former Savage Gardener would radically reappear with a bright, thoughtful and unapologetically gay bent. Yet making up for a lost decade, Darren birthed the album he always had inside himself – a gay Australian equivalent, if not a response, to Madonna’s coming-of-age album Ray Of Light. It manoeuvres through a difficult suburban Brisbane upbringing and hollow popstar stardom, before ultimately finding not just himself, but true gay joy, on an album climaxing in hope, happiness and homosexuality. That Darren is still making exciting, if not “sexciting” music as an openly gay man, now in his fifties, proves you’re never too old for pop. Ageist radio/TV homophobes, are you listening?
1. Steve Lacy – “Gemini Rights”
If 2021 was all about Lil Nas X and his bootylicious Montero release, 2022 was pretty much owned by this here 24-year-old and his game-changing sophomore album. Mostly written about Steve’s break-up with his boyfriend, Gemini Rights’ genre-defying single, Bad Habit, hit #1 in the US and went top ten UK/Australia. Later single, Sunshine delivered even more cool, lo-fi, beachy funky soul with a queer twist (“Still gave you dick anytime you need”). So, what did his ex-boyf make of inspiring Gemini Rights? “He liked it,” Steve admitted, but, “there were certain lines where he was like, hmmm?” Now we can’t wait until Steve and Lil Nas get around to recording that great gay urban duet we’ve all been gagging for! Right on.
