new rock biographies 2022

• facebook-rs

The Best Music Books of 2022

Miki berenyi, ‘fingers crossed: how music saved me from success’.

Lush were rock stars back home in London. In the U.S., they were a Nineties dream-pop cult band, starring Miki Berenyi as the iconic chanteuse with the neon-scarlet hair. Fingers Crossed is her candid, often brutally hilarious memoir of the mid-level rock hustle in the shoegaze and Britpop scenes. But it’s also the story of a loud woman in a male world that plainly doesn’t want her there. She hits the Lollapalooza tour, flirts with fame, meets loads of misogynistic men, many of them in bands. Yes, she names a name or two. (Anthony Kiedis’ pickup technique gets high praise, though it doesn’t work on her.) But you don’t need to know a thing about Lush to love Fingers Crossed — Berenyi makes her story so relatable, so poignant, so emotionally intense, it’s an irresistible rush of a book. —R.S.

James Campion, ‘Take a Sad Song: The Emotional Currency of “Hey Jude”’

A fascinating deep dive into the cultural history of one song: “Hey Jude,” the Beatles’ biggest hit and in many ways their weirdest. It’s a seven-minute song, half of it giving up to the most indelible “na na na na” chant this side of “A Long December.” Paul McCartney wrote “Hey Jude” in a time of turmoil for both the world and the band, yet it’s been consoling and uplifting people ever since. Campion, who has written studies of Warren Zevon and Kiss, brings fresh insights to the question of why this one Fabs tune keeps resonating so widely over the years. You might have heard it so many times you can hum every “na na na na” in your sleep, but Take a Sad Song makes it feel brand-new — and makes it all sound better-better-better. —R.S.

Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan, ‘Faith, Hope and Carnage’

“Music has the ability to penetrate all the fucked-up ways we have learned to cope with the world,” Nick Cave says to his friend the journalist Seán O’Hagan early on in Faith, Hope and Carnage . The same could be said of death. The book, a 304-page conversation conducted during the early days of Covid, is styled in a stark Q&A format, but it is incredibly moving, hopeful, and at times very funny. While Cave muses about the power of art and tells “fucked up” tales of rock-star  shenanigans , the book’s power is its quiet but deep reflection on the obliteration of loss — particularly the death of his 15-year-old son Arthur in 2015. Crushingly, in May, after the book was published, Cave’s son  Jethro Lazenby , 31, died. “Each life is precious and some of us understand it and some don’t. But certainly everyone will understand it in time.” Cave has no pat answers, but in opening himself up to the questions, he and O’Hagan provide more solace then scores of bestselling self-help books . —L.T.

Dan Charnas, ‘Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm’

In Dilla Time , journalist and New York University professor Dan Charnas delivers an authoritative biography and a provocative thesis: The enigmatic producer James “Dilla” Yancey invented a new metric structure of rhythm before passing away in 2006 at the age of 32. While Charnas illustrates his analysis with musical notations and Detroit city maps, he constructs a portrait of a quiet, wildly creative man from Conant Gardens whose life, lusts, and health were centered around his love for hip-hop culture. Elegantly written and deeply sourced, Dilla Time o ffers a story of a brilliant artist whose influence persists long after his death . —M.R.

Jarvis Cocker, ‘Good Pop Bad Pop: An Inventory’

As the slinky, pervy poet of Pulp, Jarvis Cocker wiggled his way into rock history with Nineties Britpop classics like “Common People.” But with Good Pop Bad Pop , he gives a delightful symposium from one of pop culture’s wisest, funniest philosophers. Cocker spends the book clearing out clutter from his tiny attic loft — old clothes, photos, ticket stubs, his first guitar. It’s a clever way to walk through his life story as a gawky kid, an obsessive music fan, an intellectual indie poseur. But he keeps returning to the eternal mystery: Why does pop trash play such a crucial role in our lives? As Cocker writes, “The idea that a culture could reveal more of itself through its throwaway items than through its supposedly revered artefacts was fascinating to me. Still is.” —R.S .

Joe Coscarelli, ‘Rap Capital: An Atlanta Story’

New York Times reporter Joe Coscarelli‘s Rap Capital offers a vivid account how rap music in Atlanta rose from the city’s Black community and created an industry stronghold for a generation of Black entrepreneurs. Through vignettes with the eclectic cast of characters that make the scene tick — rappers and businesspeople alike — Coscarelli paints a vivid portrait of the city’s unique wealth of talent and the opposing tensions inherent to Black wealth in America. The book’s concern with 2013 until 2020 lands right as the forces of racism and capitalism confronted the dawn of the streaming era. Throughout the book, Coscarelli makes complex business realities of the rap world feel colloquial. Streaming figures and social media followings all coalesce with the impressively sourced account of key moments in Atlanta rap lore. An essential history of one of rap’s most dynamic and influential movements. –J.I.

Bob Dylan, ‘The Philosophy of Modern Song’

The songs Bob Dylan analyzes, from vintage country, blues, and R&B artists up through the Clash and Cher, aren’t remotely modern, and the philosophy is too male-centric. But in this idiosyncratic, sometimes maddening, and often wondrous and funny set of essays, he zeroes in on why certain songs and records work so well, and he sprinkles those observations with historical nuggets and even a few peeks behind the Dylan curtain (his views on divorce and touring). His riffs on the characters in the Eagles’ “Witchy Woman” and Gregg Allman’s “Midnight Rider” are proudly uncouth, to say the least, and his takes on genuinely modern pop won’t make him any new fans. But the book adds up to a deeply personal tribute to the days when folk, country, and blues were the concrete-floor foundations of music, even if that era is now largely behind us. —D.B.

Michael Hann, ‘Denim and Leather: The Rise and Fall of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal’

Starting in May 1979, when the British rock weekly Sounds coined the term in a headline for a piece about a triple bill of Iron Maiden, Samson, and Angel Witch, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, as the London-based author Michael Hann argues, was when “metal as it came to be understood was codified.” A former Guardian music editor, Hann’s generous oral history starts with that canonical May ’79 show and ends when flagship NWOBHM band Def Leppard issued the studio-buffed, deca-platinum Pyromania in 1983. Denim and Leather taps into an enormous store of goodwill. This was a fan’s subculture, built on fanzines and tape trading, and the biggest stars are often the biggest fans, from Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott extolling the glam canon to Metallica’s Lars Ulrich recounting his famous 1981 trip to the U.K. to see Diamond Head, where he realized: “I could go back to America and do this myself.” —M.M.

Hua Hsu, ‘Stay True: A Memoir’

New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu met his best friend Ken in the 1990s when they were undergrads at UC Berkeley. It was a time when the music you liked was inextricably linked to your identity and personality, and Hsu sees it as a sign of “personal growth” that he can get along so easily with a Pearl Jam fan. “Yet the more we hung out, the less certain I was of these distinctions,” he writes. Ken was killed in a carjacking three years after meeting Hsu, and this gorgeous, generous-hearted memoir is both a fond remembrance of a pivotal friendship and a vivid reflection on coming of age in the Nineties. —M.M.

Steven Hyden, ‘Long Road: Pearl Jam and the Soundtrack of a Generation’

Steven Hyden is a brilliant rock chronicler, whether he’s writing about great bands or terrible ones. But with Long Road , as Eddie Vedder would say, he’s unleashed a lion. It’s a cultural/personal biography of Pearl Jam, the Nineties’ most popular rock heroes. What a weird story: Seattle punk dudes hit the big time, speak out about feminism and abortion rights, rebel against Ticketmaster, go in and out of style, yet refuse to die, with a Deadhead-level following. Hyden writes as a lifelong fan who’s listened to all 72 live albums from their 2000 tour. But Long Road is his opinionated account of why the music matters, how the music reflects the times, and how Pearl Jam’s story sums up all the ideals, dreams, and failures of Gen X. —R.S.

Greil Marcus, ‘Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs’

Greil Marcus on Bob Dylan is basically a sure thing, like Scorsese directing De Niro. Folk Music is The Irishman of this combination — elegiac, rough, languid, looking for new stories in the past, but finding old stories changing shape. The legendary music critic adds seven new essays to his Dylanology, which includes definitive studies like The Old Weird America and Like a Rolling Stone. In the finest and funniest chapter, Marcus discusses Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman,” revealing why it’s secretly the same song as “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.” Almost 50 years after the classic Mystery Train (which isn’t officially about Dylan, but argues with him on every page), Marcus keeps chasing America’s greatest songwriter down the highway. It’s cultural criticism as a long-running detective story — and a musical love story . —R.S .

Marissa R. Moss, ‘Her Country: How the Women of Country Music Became the Success They Were Never Supposed to Be’

The first book from Rolling Stone contributor Marissa R. Moss is a masterful mix of musical criticism, interventionist history, and in-depth reporting that illuminates profound new insights about 21st century country music and its ongoing and ever-present structural gender inequities. Particularly revelatory are the well-researched, narrative-upending accounts of the Texas backstories of its three protagonists: Mickey Guyton, Maren Morris, and Kacey Musgraves. “This book is the story of how country’s women fought back against systems designed to keep them down,” Moss writes in the book’s introduction. “About how women can and do belong in country music, even if their voices aren’t dominating the airwaves.” By interrogating country music’s recent history while pointing toward a possible brighter future for the genre, Her Country is an urgent and vital history that comes at a much-needed time for an industry searching for its identity . —J.B.

Margo Price, ‘Maybe We’ll Make It: A Memoir’

Most musicians wait until their twilight years to tell their life story, but Margo Price has already lived many. Inspired by Patti Smith’s Just Kids , the 39-year-old country star’s memoir chronicles her tumultuous life pre-fame — you won’t find any rock & roll decadence here. Instead, you’ll get an account of a struggling musician and her partner encountering substance abuse, trauma, and poverty, with a relentless drive to survive and create music. It’s as heart-wrenching and unflinchingly honest as Price’s songs — you might rip through it in just one sitting. “I’m not proud of all of it,” Price tells us in an upcoming interview. “But the way I figure, we’re all going to die. I want to be real with people.” —A.M.

Richard T. Rodríguez, ‘A Kiss Across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk & U.S. Latinidad’

One of music’s long-running romances: the bond between British 1980s New Wave stars and their Latinx fans in the U.S. What is it about Adam Ant, Siouxsie, Boy George, or the Pet Shop Boys that inspires such devoción thousands of miles away? A Kiss Across the Ocean explores the question, with Rodríguez drawing on his own experience as a fan — growing up as a queer Latino teenager, in the hostility of Southern California, identifying with “these fabulously made-up creatures.” He examines why young fans keep hearing their own Latinidad in the glam weirdness of outsiders like Soft Cell, Bauhaus, Scritti Politti, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. It’s an intriguing study of how music builds connections between different communities, and how pop desire translates over time and space. —R.S.

Jim Ruland, ‘Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records’

Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn started SST Records to put out his band’s music — because nobody else wanted it. Yet SST became the most legendary of American punk labels, the one every outlaw band wanted to be on. (Until they saw their royalty checks — or didn’t.) Jim Ruland tells the whole messy saga in his un-put-downable Corporate Rock Sucks . You might expect it to focus on the big names: Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth, The Minutemen. But it covers every record by every obscure punk band in the story, upholding the legacy of Saccharine Trust and Würm. All these years, fans always wondered why the hell SST released so many Zoogz Rift albums, but it turns out most of the SST crew wondered the same thing. (“Sweet Nausea Lick” is still a banger, though.) A classic story: It begins with punk ideals, then ends with everyone hating each other and lawyering up. But in between, a heroic shitload of music. —R.S.

Danyel Smith, ‘Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop’

Danyel Smith — a writer, magazine editor, and host of the excellent podcast Black Girl Songbook — weaves together a unique memoir that mixes in the story of musical icons like Whitney Houston,  Maria Carey , and Aretha Franklin, as well as less celebrated artists like Marilyn McCoo, the Dixie Cups, and Deniece Williams. “I weep because I want Black women who create music to be known and understood as I want to be known and understood,” Smith writes early on. For readers of  Shine Bright , mission accomplished. —L.T. 

RJ Smith, ‘Chuck Berry: An American Life’

Chuck Berry did more than anyone to establish the lyrical and musical parameters of rock and roll. RJ Smith, author of the definitive James Brown biography The One , brings Berry to vivid life, doubly impressive given his subject’s legendary caginess. He lays the terrain so adroitly — from Berry’s St. Louis youth to his multiple imprisonments — that when tiny bombs go off, he doesn’t have to explain that they’re bombs; they resonate. Smith is also first-rate on the electric guitar’s galvanic effect on music and the culture at large. “You have to remember, we didn’t have anything to compare it to,” he quotes Phil Chess as saying of “Maybellene.” “This was an entirely different kind of music.” —M.M.

Jann S. Wenner, ‘Like a Rolling Stone: A Memoir’

Jann Wenner founded Rolling Stone as a 21-year-old Berkeley dropout in 1967 and conducted some of its most memorable interviews, including revelatory chats with John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Bono. But most music fans knew little about his incredible life until this year, when he published Like a Rolling Stone . It’s a fascinating behind-the-scenes journey through five decades of American musical and political history, a frank look at the challenges all magazine publishers face in the age of the internet, and a chance for Wenner to confront some of his deepest regrets. “This book is about my own nine lives and about my failure to observe posted speed limits,” he writes. “Our readers often referred to Rolling Stone as a letter from home. This is my last letter to you.” —A.G.

See Arlo Parks Bring Alt Rock-Inspired 'Devotion' to 'Fallon'

• Late-Night Jams
• By Daniel Kreps

Olivia Rodrigo Brings Out Noah Kahan for Surprise 'Stick Season' Duet at MSG

• Manifesting
• By Charisma Madarang

Taylor Swift Soundtracks the Five Stages of Grief With New Apple Music Playlists

• Tortured Playlists Department
• By Ethan Millman

J Cole Brought A Knife To A Gunfight On '7 Minute Drill'

• Shots Missed
• By Andre Gee

Doja Cat, Young Miko, Vampire Weekend and All the Songs You Need to Know This Week

• By Rolling Stone

Most Popular

Joaquin phoenix, elliott gould, chloe fineman and more jewish creatives support jonathan glazer's oscars speech in open letter (exclusive), barron trump’s super-rare outing with dad donald may show why we never see them together, georgia secretary of state sent letter to larry david over 'curb' voting law plot, partynextdoor reveals nsfw 'partynextdoor 4' album cover, you might also like, miptv to tackle ai concerns, fast channels and more industry issues, what 2024 nominees wore to their first cmt awards: kelsea ballerini’s flowing costarellos dress, kacey musgraves’ sparkling gomez-gracia minidress and more, the best medicine balls, according to fitness trainers, danny mcbride ‘can’t stand’ movie theaters that serve food and alcohol: ‘you’re going to have to piss’, irs letter an ‘indictment’ of nil collectives’ exempt status.

Rolling Stone is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2024 Rolling Stone, LLC. All rights reserved.

Verify it's you

Please log in.

The Best Music Books of 2022

If you want to know the feeling of constantly failing… well, yes, you can read any number of musicians’ memoirs about their early years, but you can also try to keep up with the vast number of music books released every year. It’s like trying to keep up with multiple TV series at the same time, or the number of lies a certain former president tells every day — you keep up as best you can and hope you’re not missing a blockbuster. Of course, the upside is there are many, many great books released this year, and although we’re sure we are missing many of them, below are the best music books of 2022 that we actually managed to read.

“Moonage Daydream: The Life and Times of Ziggy Stardust” — David Bowie with Mick Rock (reissue) Despite its title, this book is not a direct companion to Brett Morgen’s sprawling David Bowie documentary released earlier this year — instead, it’s a long-overdue reissue of the lavish coffee-table book of Bowie’s epochal “Ziggy Stardust” era of 1972-73. Originally released in a pricey edition of just 2,500, it includes more than 600 photos taken by Bowie’s personal photographer at the time, the late Mick Rock, along with lengthy, fascinating commentary written by Bowie himself, which provides unequalled insight into the person, persona and master plan from a man who often did his utmost to avoid providing it. Throughout, there are stellar details and aside like this one about the lightning-bolt Ziggy logo: “I was not a little peeved when Kiss purloined it. Purloining, after all, was my job.” But most of all it’s a feast for the eyes: Bowie’s lurid costumes, makeup and stage presentation did much to light up the monochrome of early ‘70s Britain, and it evokes the period and the persona as much as any film. Absolutely essential for any fan. — Aswad

“The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music” — Tom Breihan Based on “The Number Ones,” Stereogum senior editor Tom Breihan’s ongoing column reviewing U.S. No. 1 pop hits, his new book of the same name looks at how 20 top tracks affected the culture, and/or changed the game, musically and sociologically. Ripe with opinion and spiced by peppery humor, Breihan’s new essays find the Beatles and the Beach Boys sitting comfortably next to fellow “Number Ones” Bon Jovi and Soulja Boy. Breihan ponders the co-dependency between Bob Dylan and the Byrds when it came to “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and touches on George McCrae’s disco-era smash, “Rock Your Baby,” as a track intentionally written to top the charts. Breihan’s book also lovingly looks into deserving artists (e.g., Dylan, Bruce Springsteen) who have never topped the singles charts. — Amorosi

“Faith, Hope and Carnage” — Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan Nick Cave is certainly capable of authoring starkly surreal fiction as he has in novels “And the Ass Saw the Angel” (1989) and “The Death of Bunny Munro” (2009), and in non-fiction writings such as “The Sick Bag Song” (2015). Yet, since 2015, Cave has undergone personal and spiritual transformations based on the passing of two of his sons, and the outpouring of emotion and support from fans and others. With that, Cave’s usual catalog of violence-driven characters and dire narratives now include more intimate metaphorical clues to his inner-life. In a series of interviews with Irish journalist-friend Sean O’Hagan — presented in Q&A format — Cave becomes an open narrator and a bold-faced conversationalist. He talks up the creative process with elements of hallucination and improvisation in the mix. But it is earnestness, hurt, and joy that come through during these fireside chats as Cave discusses finding religion and rehab in unexpected, moving ways. — Amorosi

“A Song for Everyone: the Story of Creedence Clearwater Revival” — John Lingan The sad story of Creedence Clearwater Revival has been told many times in the half century since the band split up, from “Behind the Music” to singer-songwriter-frontman John Fogerty’s 2016 autobiography. This extensive volume, which Fogerty declined to be interviewed for, looks at things largely from the perspectives of the band’s rhythm section, bassist Stu Cook and drummer Doug Clifford (the fourth member, Fogerty’s brother Tom, died in 1990). This account offers a strong history of the Bay Area band’s early days — they first began playing together in middle school — and follows as they develop a local reputation and as Fogerty increasingly asserts his dominance, eventually insisting on writing and singing all of the songs, playing lead guitar and even working as their manager. The latter decision in particular proved to be ill-advised, as 21-year-old Fogerty was no match for the aggressive business brain of Fantasy Records chief Saul Zaentz; he ended up making a very bad deal for himself and spent many decades railing against the unfairness of a situation of his own making.

“Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla” — Dan Charnas J Dilla — a.k.a Jay Dee, a.k.a. James Dewitt Yancey — was a pioneering hip-hop producer who never worked on a “hit” record, although his discography includes collaborations with or remixes of songs by greats like D’Angelo, A Tribe Called Quest, the Roots, Common, Busta Rhymes, the Pharcyde and many others. He died in 2006 of a rare blood disease at the age of just 32, with few except musicians and dedicated hip-hop fans aware of the pioneering work he had done. Yet in the years since his death, awareness of his brilliance and his innovations with rhythm and production — which often sounded like random accidents but are acknowledged by many musicians as genius — has spread dramatically: Questlove, one of the first and certainly the most vocal of his disciples, says Dilla’s work “was so perfectly imperfect that it redefined the way I thought about art.”

Longtime hip-hop journalist Dan Charnas, author of the definitive history of the hip-hop business “The Big Payback” and an associate professor at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, not only teaches regular classes on Dilla’s work, he dedicated four years of his life to writing the 450-page “Dilla Time.” It’s no ordinary book: equal parts biography, musical analysis and cultural history, it delves deep not only into Dilla’s history and music but also into the histories of rhythm and his hometown of Detroit; the three elements even come together in a mind-melting chapter that compares Detroit’s street plan with rhythm theory. “Dilla Time” is not a lean-back read — the segments on the science of rhythm can have readers tapping armrests, trying to follow his labrynthine explanations — but it’s among the deepest studies of the genre to date, and truly brings Dilla the flowers he long deserved. — Aswad

“Her Country: How the Women of Country Music Became the Success They Were Never Meant to Be” — Marissa R. Moss The subject of women in country music is almost too big for one book and Marissa R. Ross knows it, so for her where-we’re-at snapshot of the gender divide in the genre, she settles in on three artists — Mickey Guyton, Maren Morris and Kacey Musgraves — as her key go-tos, or come-back-tos. So in effect, you’re getting three nearly complete biographies for the price of one… even as her frame is constantly widening to survey other major figures in the music, too (like Margo Price, who gets enough due here that Moss’ book makes a pretty nice complement to that singer’s own memoir, also featured in this list). Moss has been so outspoken in her coverage of women’s issues for Rolling Stone Country and other outlets that you know she’s not going to suddenly turn dry and dispassionate in her writing on those subjects here. But once she’s laid out the list of obstacles women still face in just getting the proverbial seat at the table — a snapshot of the state of institutional sexism in and around 2022 that we very much need — she’s able to also, at leisure, provide exactly what you’d hope a book such as this would expend much of its time on: the joy and righteousness of how these women rose to the top, from winning talent contests and even yodeling competitions as girls to asserting themselves as great, mature artists in the present day, against almost impossible odds. They are all, as a Musgraves album title once cheekily put it, “pageant material” — and Moss’ book is a terrific pageant of bona fide heroines unto itself. — Willman

“Maybe We’ll Make It” — Margo Price Price had a hardscrabble upbringing as the daughter of an Illinois farming family that was just made to be grist for country songs — and eventually it was, when she released her Third Man Records debut, titled, yes, “Midwest Farmer’s Daughter” (the nod to Loretta’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter” being very much intentional). Yet it wasn’t till the mid-2010s that she really pursued country music, almost as an inadvertently successful afterthought, in the wake of the many years that she and husband Jeremy Ivey spent trying to get any kind of traction with their now-defunct rock band Buffalo Clover. Although Price’s account of her childhood is more than absorbing, some of the rock musicians who’ll pick up her memoir might be forgiven for skipping ahead to the chapters where she delves into Buffalo Clover’s ups (there were a few) and downs (numbering seemingly in the thousands). How many musicians won’t relate to the following: Spending thousands to go to SXSW, just to play for a handful of disinterested non-VIPs? Saving money while touring by crashing with venue waitresses, who may or may not want to crawl into the same bed? Bonding by binging? Intra-band romances and affairs that can make a group “like Fleetwood Mac, without the success”? Helping out friends by playing full sets on the drums while eight months pregnant? (OK, maybe everything  about Price’s road stories isn’t quite so relatable.) Her stoic attitude about being a working musician as well as poet makes Price seem like “one of the boys,” until harrowing pregnancy stories intervene. You remember the saying about how Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels? Price has some of the same tales to tell as her male counterparts, but with emergency C-sections, too. The book essentially wraps up with her breakout 2016 “Saturday Night Live” performance, leaving you hankering for a sequel this sharply remembered, keenly written and marvelously self-perceptive. — Willman

“Rap Capital” Joe Coscarelli

If ever a history was too big and too small at the same time, it’s this one. In his first book, the ace New York Times reporter Coscarelli puts a microscope on the thriving and enormously influential Atlanta hip-hop scene. His reportorial writing style is densely packed and starts off moving very quickly, with brief and concise histories of Atlanta and its Black music scene, while setting up a side narrative about Lashawn Jones, who eventually becomes the mother of top Atlanta rapper Lil Baby. But after 50 or so pages, he zooms into microfocus on Baby and the Quality Control label — home to Migos, Young Thug and others — while touching only in passing on the huge number of other artists involved in the scene and even the label, particularly female artists. There is also the problem of attempting to write a history while the subject matter is still very much current: The months-long imprisonments of Young Thug, Gunna and other members of the YSL collective get just a passing mention (as they took place just before the book’s publication), and Takeoff’s tragic and appallingly senseless murder was still in the future. Despite its excessive length and selective focus, “Rap Capital” does add up to a definitive history of the city that has spawned so much of the past decade’s best hip-hop. — Aswad

“Sly & the Family Stone: An Oral History” — Joel Selvin (reissue) In this era of eBay and ebooks and Dropbox, it’s hard to explain just how difficult it could be to find certain books back in the day — I scoured used-book stores for this fascinating oral history, originally published during the 1990s, for years before finally giving up. With Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Questlove at work on a film about Sly Stone, the timing for its re-release could not be much better. In this comprehensive volume, veteran San Francisco music writer Selvin recounts this generation-shifting group’s history by talking with basically everyone — from bandmembers and managers to label execs and Sly’s parents and other family members — chronicling Stone’s rise from precocious child church musician to DJ and producer and finally . What emerges is a first-hand account of both the kaleidoscopic talent that drove Stone to the top and attracted so many people to him, and the madness that he soon descended into and never truly returned from, a victim of ego, drug abuse sycophants and the era: There are harrowing scenes of his Hollywood Hills mansion being filled with drugs, thugs, guns and attack dogs. It amounts to a definitive history of one of the rock generation’s greatest and most tragic artists. — Aswad

“A Book of Days” — Patti Smith Having worked out much of her autobiography with “Just Kids” (2010) and “M Train” (2015), the poet-punk found a novel approach to continued memoir writing with “A Book of Days.” Meant to mimic her new-found love of connection through Instagram, Smith doles out snapshots from a life well lived – one-a-day during a Leap Year – with deeply ruminative descriptions of each photo. With many deaths among her friends and lovers, Smith’s snaps, such as those of Sam Shepard reading Beckett, and of a guitar from MC5’s Fred Smith (her late husband), are particularly poignant. Patti also has fun inviting viewers into her life and home with photos of her weedy garden in Rockaway, cherished old boots and books, and several affectionate snaps of her playful cat. Yes: Patti Smith likes cat selfies, a small gesture that makes “A Book of Days” as charming as it is elegiac and prosaic. — Amorosi

“Sun Ra: Art on Saturn: The Album Cover Art of Sun Ra’s Saturn Label” — Sun Ra and Chris Reisman Growing up in Philadelphia, working at the legendary 3rd Street Jazz, I was privy to visits from Sun Ra, the local Afrofuturist and avant-garde bandleader, carrying boxes of hand-drawn and self-painted album sleeves for his Saturn label records. The inventiveness of handcrafted covers, in league with the kaleidoscopic free jazz and quirky parade music within each sleeve, is what makes Chris Reisman’s colorful catalog so awesome. Like finding art aficionados clinging to their Banksys, hunting down Ra collectors with pieces of Saturn as their own is as much fun as seeing the tribal cartoon cover art (executed by Sun or whoever happened into the communal Ra House in Philly) and listening to the merry, experimental music. Editor-writer Reisman, Ra archaeological excavator Irwin Chusid, and fellow scholars John Corbett and Glenn Jones write about the “outsider” aesthetic of Ra’s album art and music within each sleeve, and pen playful essays about their hero. With that, “Sun Ra: Art on Saturn” is a true treasure, a jazzbo’s necessity and a joy to behold. — Amorosi

More From Our Brands

Trump says he’ll become ‘modern day nelson mandela’ over right to attack judge’s daughter, putter’s paradise: the $39 million pebble beach estate wants to help you sharpen your short game, irs letter an ‘indictment’ of nil collectives’ exempt status, the best loofahs and body scrubbers, according to dermatologists, rhoc’s josh waring, son of cast member lauri peterson, dead at 35, verify it's you, please log in.

From Madonna to Barbra Streisand, it was the year music took over books

• Show more sharing options
• Copy Link URL Copied!

If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

Maybe it was the continued rude health of indie bookstores in 2023, or perhaps a millennial fascination with the pop antiquities of the pre-smartphone era. Or maybe it’s just Mom and Dad Rockers desperate to reel in the years with the gods of their youth . For whatever reason, this year has turned out to be a banner publishing moment for musical giants who until now have not been graced with the full-dress books they deserve — some rigorously researched deep dives, other chatty memoirs or anthologies, many of them illuminations of life and art in urban milieus with all their messy interactions.

Our critics and reporters select their favorite TV shows, movies, albums, songs, books, theater, art shows and video games of the year.

Among the ill-served icons getting their propers in print this year is Lou Reed : New York’s leather prince, the street poet who launched at least three musical genres with his band the Velvet Underground , a lodestar for gender fluidity long before anyone else bothered to write songs about LBGTQ+ and the subculture that nurtured it. Before Will Hermes’ riveting biography “ Lou Reed: The King of New York ,” the artist’s biographers have tended to be either mean-spirited or bone-dry, glossing over the rough magic of Reed’s inner life.

The 13 best novels (and 2 best short story collections) of 2023

Three contributing critics pick their best fiction of the year, including work by Victor LaValle, Ed Park, Lauren Groff, Yiyun Li and Tania James.

Dec. 5, 2023

Hermes, a veteran music critic, has written what will surely be the definitive Reed biography for years to come, a complete portrait of this inconstant, erratic genius, the most eloquent voice of the marginalized during the Nixon era. An elegant prose stylist with a sharp critical eye, Hermes appears to have scared up everyone alive whose life intersected with his subject. And he embraces the contradictions of a musical empath who could be heartless and malicious, tender and vulnerable to friends and lovers — a great bully poet much like Reed’s literary hero and mentor, Delmore Schwartz .

Hermes skillfully twines together the many strands of Reed’s singular life — a benumbing suburban childhood, electroshock therapy, heroin addiction and artistic flowering at the feet of Schwartz and the Beats. Providing fresh stories at every turn, he is particularly adept at conjuring the meth-enabled swirl of Andy Warhol’s Factory universe and Reed’s attachment to the Pop artist, his beloved mentor and bête noir. This is the best biography of a composer since Alex Ross’ 2020 book “ Wagnerism .”

One of Reed’s most talented acolytes graced us with a memoir this year. Thurston Moore hit New York as a 14-year-old Reed fanatic in the late ‘70s, right before his idol’s old, weird downtown was forever lost and Wall Street money moved in. Into this liminal space emerged the squalling, post-punk deconstructions of the No Wave movement : saxophonist James Chance and his Contortions, singer-poet Lydia Lunch and, most crucially for Moore, composer Glenn Branca , whose ear-bleed guitar symphonies alerted the Connecticut native to the beauty of Loud. He would harness that volume with his avant-rock band Sonic Youth for 30 years. Moore has a lot of great stories to tell, and he does so engagingly in “ Sonic Life ,” the tale of a record collector geek made good, a seeker after new sounds who in turn became a key architect of experimental rock in the two decades that followed.

In “Sonic Life” Moore, a suburban outcast like Reed, becomes a pilgrim in search of transcendence through noise and muscles his way into an East Village tempest of brash risk-taking. He meets future bandmates Kim Gordon and Lee Ranaldo . Sonic Youth pulls the throttle all the way out: Moore threads drumsticks into his guitar strings, Ranaldo utilizes an electric drill onstage, Gordon barks out her bold feminist anthems on the seductions of consumer-driven desire. Moore has set it all down, and his book is an engaging memory piece through a golden era of busted toilets and secondhand smoke that now seems as distant as Montparnasse in the 1920s. If you’re looking for juicy bits about Moore and his ex-wife Gordon , you mercifully won’t find it here. He keeps that part of his private life to himself.

Entertainment & Arts

The year women saved Hollywood

Winning the box office, playing record-setting concert tours, rallying striking unions, shaking up TV: Women ruled pop culture in 2023.

Dec. 4, 2023

While Sonic Youth was cultivating a following on the margins, another downtown scenester was hitting dance clubs like Paradise Garage and Danceteria with designs on something bigger. As a young Michigan exile, Madonna Ciccone found her people in these spaces, and when she insisted DJs spin her record “Everybody,” the fuse was lit. Mary Gabriel’s comprehensive biography “ Madonna: A Rebel Life ” can be read as the uptown analogue to “Sonic Life,” as this force of nature quickly outgrows New York clubland and in a few short years enters the pop icon pantheon.

Gabriel has done her homework, giving equal weight to Madonna’s private and public selves in a sprawling survey that offers a strong argument for Madonna as a sound-and-vision innovator every bit as crucial as David Bowie . But you have to really care about her relationships with Sean Penn and Warren Beatty to get there.

Decades before Madonna lit up the New York night, Ella Fitzgerald had audiences standing on their seats at the Savoy Ballroom as the singer for Chick Webb’s swing band, a powerhouse vocalist who had to overcome her “pretty plain looks” before she became the 20th century’s tower of song. In her excellent biography “ Becoming Ella Fitzgerald ,” Judith Tick makes a compelling case for Fitzgerald as a modernist innovator. Promoters and managers told her to stick to one marketable sound, but that wasn’t an option, as Fitzgerald contained multitudes: novelty songs (her self-penned 1938 hit “A Tisket-a-tasket” put her on the map); classic recordings of the Great American Songbook; and the expertly knotty ululations of her scat singing in the bebop era — a genre in which Fitzgerald became the acknowledged master.

Twenty-eight years after Fitzgerald recorded her 1945 hit “ Flying Home ,” a record that placed scat singing front and center in popular music, Sly Stone was recording his own half-whispered version of scat live in a Sausalito studio. It would become the vamp-out to 1973’s “If You Want Me to Stay,” the last big hit for Sly and his band, the Family Stone.

The year in theater: A time of struggle but with enough brilliance to sustain us

Alex Edelman’s ‘Just for Us,’ the genius of Stephen Sondheim and a Tony Award for the Pasadena Playhouse were among the highlights of Los Angeles theater in 2023.

Stone fans have been waiting a long time for the reclusive singer to finally break his silence about his life and career. While his memoir “ Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) ” offers up its share of gonzo tales involving drugs, guns and pet baboons, the erstwhile superstar, 80, provides only tantalizing crumbs of real insight into his messy life. Still, there are some ripping anecdotes (baboons!), and origin stories behind “Stand!,” “Everyday People” and Stone’s other funky one-world anthems.

Perhaps Stone surmised that it’s best to keep his mystique alive, as opposed to expounding on his life at great length in the fashion of Barbra Streisand ’s “ My Name is Barbra .” Alas, no one has ever told this to the countless fanboys (yes, they are almost always boys) and academics who continue to write books about Bob Dylan , coming at the Nobel laureate from every conceivable angle. And yet, somehow, this year has brought something entirely new: A lavish, glossy scrapbook with material provided by Dylan himself.

“ Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine ” is a stunning visual trip through the artist’s life and art as revealed via Dylan’s own ephemera and Zimmerman-adjacent mementos from friends and musicians. Published in conjunction with the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Okla., this immaculately designed coffee-table confection also features a collection of informative essays from Lucy Sante , Greil Marcus , Ed Ruscha and others. They provide context for what we’re seeing, which is quite a bit — grade school class photos, Dylan’s notebooks, manuscripts and legal pads and, yes, even photos that this Dylan freak has never seen before.

18 best nonfiction books for fans of Madonna, memoirs or cultural histories

2023 is the year of the star-studded gift book, with memoirs and biographies covering rockers, auteurs, poets, controversial executives and, yes, Julia Fox.

Nov. 1, 2023

Which reinforces a couple of valuable lessons from this year’s joyful glut of music tell-alls. First: While they’re no substitute for the brilliantly written, category-killing, milieu-rich biography, no format is inherently better or worse at delivering the goods. And second: There’s always something new under the sun.

Weingarten is the author of “Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and The Real Chinatown.”

Sign up for our Book Club newsletter

Get the latest news, events and more from the Los Angeles Times Book Club, and help us get L.A. reading and talking.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

More From the Los Angeles Times

Shaikin: Finlete says it supports ballplayers, but is it another form of gambling?

April 5, 2024

Preparing for Monday’s solar eclipse: What you need to do to watch safely

April 4, 2024

World & Nation

L.A. synagogue’s invite to Muslims for Ramadan ends in tears and resignations. Can they heal?

Scientology tried to ‘derail’ star’s rape trial by harassing prosecutor, suit says; church calls claim ‘false’

The Best Music Books of 2022 (So Far)

Whether you want to understand the social structures that shaped one of the best MCs, or the addiction that's haunted so many performers—or if you just want to celebrate the women who've shaped popular culture—there’s a book for that.

Every product was carefully curated by an Esquire editor. We may earn a commission from these links.

Lucky for us, this year has also brought about fun and informative reads . Whether you want to understand the social structures that shaped one of the best MCs to ever handle a microphone, or the addiction that's haunted so many vocalists—or if you just want to celebrate the women who've shaped popular culture—there’s a book for that. Below, we compiled the best music books of 2022, so far.

It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World That Made Him

Journalist Justin Tinsley is the latest documentarian to add to the tree of life after the death of The Notorious B.I.G. Back in May, Tinsely unveiled a well-researched biography of the late-wordsmith and hip-hop legend. Using interviews with those close to Biggie, Tinsely goes an extra mile by examining the sociological terrain like poor schools, Ronald Reagan, and the War on Drugs.

Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm

J Dilla is probably your favorite producer’s favorite producer. Dan Charnas, author of The Big Payback , shines a well-deserved light on Dilla’s life and musical career with Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla . Charnas stitches together cultural history, musicology, and biology to chronicle Dilla’s journey from his childhood in Detroit to his rise as a Grammy-nominated producer to the rare blood disease that caused his untimely death.

Roc Lit 101 Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop

Veteran journalist Danyel Smith adds another line to her resume—not to mention also to the fabric of American culture—with the recent release of Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop, which delves into the achievements of Black women in music. Mixing cultural history, criticism, and memoir, you'll be hard pressed to find a read as fun or informative on the subject as this.

Enter the Blue

For readers who appreciate a dive into fiction, Enter the Blue should find a spot on your bookshelf. In a search to save her teacher who lay comatose after collapsing during a performance, Jessie Choi finds herself meeting jazz legends, learning about the storied history of Blue Note Records—a jazz record label created by Alfred Lion in 1939—and, along the way, she's forced to face her deepest fears.

DJ Screw: A Life in Slow Revolution (American Music Series)

DJ Screw single handedly created a hip-hop culture in Houston. Screw’s invention has inspired superstars like Drake, Kendrick Lamar, and A$AP Rocky. And via interviews from family, friends, and Chopped and Screwed nerds, he finally gets his due.

Most Dope: The Extraordinary Life of Mac Miller

Most Dope works as a reminder of Mac’s passion for hip-hop and his gifts as a MC. But the new book from music journalist Paul Cantor absolutely soars as a cautionary tale about drug addiction.

Didn't We Almost Have It All: In Defense of Whitney Houston

Gerrick Kennedy dives into the life of one of the all time great vocalists, Whitney Houston, examining a journey rife with addiction, abuse, and fame. It's hardly a story untold at this point, but for fans of Houston it'll fit nicely on the shelf.

Every Good Boy Does Fine: A Love Story, in Music Lessons

In Jermey Denk’s stirring new memoir, the genius-piano player details his own coming of age. Using music as a metaphor, Denk unveils universal truths about life, exploring his own piano studies, Julliard PhD, relationships, and sexual identity through the lens of diligent practice.

Ugly Beauty: Jazz in the 21st Century (Culture, Society & Politics)

Here, Phil Freeman answers probing questions like, Has streaming lessened the value of music? What meaningful musical traditions are left to explore? Are there any sounds that are truly off-limits? For those who find their minds mulling over similar queries, your first stop ought to be here.

@media(max-width: 73.75rem){.css-1ktbcds:before{margin-right:0.4375rem;color:#FF3A30;content:'_';display:inline-block;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-1ktbcds:before{margin-right:0.5625rem;color:#FF3A30;content:'_';display:inline-block;}} Books

Holly Gramazio Can Solve Your Dating Burnout

Hanif Abdurraqib Knows What Makes Basketball Great

Percival Everett's New Novel Is a Modern Classic

The Best Books of 2024 (So Far)

The Best Memoirs of 2024 (So Far)

Is It A Betrayal To Publish Dead Writers' Books?

The Best Sci-Fi Books of 2024 (So Far)

A Crime Fiction Master Flips the Script

How to Read the 'Dune' Book Series in Order

Tommy Orange Is Not Your Tour Guide

What to Do If You're 'Divorce-Curious'

Hot New Releases in Rock & Pop Musician Biographies

• ← Previous page
• Next page →

• UK Modern Slavery Statement
• Sustainability
• Amazon Science
• Sell on Amazon
• Sell on Amazon Business
• Sell on Amazon Handmade
• Sell on Amazon Launchpad
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect and build your brand
• Associates Programme
• Fulfilment by Amazon
• Seller Fulfilled Prime
• Advertise Your Products
• Independently Publish with Us
• Host an Amazon Hub
• › See More Make Money with Us
• Instalments by Barclays
• Amazon Platinum Mastercard
• Amazon Classic Mastercard
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Payment Methods Help
• Shop with Points
• Top Up Your Account
• Top Up Your Account in Store
• COVID-19 and Amazon
• Track Packages or View Orders
• Delivery Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Amazon Mobile App
• Customer Service
• Accessibility
• Netherlands
• United Arab Emirates
• United States
• Conditions of Use & Sale
• Privacy Notice
• Cookies Notice
• Interest-Based Ads Notice

15 Memoirs and Biographies to Read This Fall

New autobiographies from Jemele Hill, Matthew Perry and Hua Hsu are in the mix, along with books about Martha Graham, Agatha Christie and more.

Supported by

• Share full article

By John Williams ,  Joumana Khatib ,  Elizabeth A. Harris and Alexandra Alter

• Published Sept. 8, 2022 Updated Sept. 15, 2022

Solito: A Memoir , by Javier Zamora

When he was 9, Zamora left El Salvador to join his parents in the United States — a dangerous trek in the company of strangers that lasted for more than two months, a far cry from the two-week adventure he had envisioned. Zamora, a poet, captures his childhood impressions of the journey, including his fierce, lifesaving attachments to the other people undertaking the trip with him.

Hogarth, Sept. 6

A Visible Man: A Memoir , by Edward Enninful

The first Black editor in chief of British Vogue reflects on his life, including his early years as a gay, working-class immigrant from Ghana, and his path to becoming one of the most influential tastemakers in media.

Penguin Press, Sept. 6

Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman , by Lucy Worsley

Not many authors sell a billion books, but Christie’s nearly 70 mysteries helped her do just that. Born in 1890, she introduced the world to two detectives still going strong in film adaptations and elsewhere: Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Her life even included its own mystery, when she vanished for 11 days in 1926 . Worsley, a historian, offers a full-dress biography.

Pegasus Crime, Sept. 8

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands , by Kate Beaton

This graphic memoir follows Beaton, a Canadian cartoonist, who joins the oil rush in Alberta after graduating from college. The book includes drawings of enormous machines built to work the oil sands against a backdrop of Albertan landscapes, boreal forests and northern lights.

Drawn and Quarterly, Sept. 13

Like a Rolling Stone: A Memoir , by Jann S. Wenner

In 2017, Joe Hagan published “Sticky Fingers,” a biography of Wenner, the co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine. Now Wenner recounts his life in his own words, offering an intimate look at his time running the magazine that helped to change American culture.

Little, Brown, Sept. 13

Stay True: A Memoir , by Hua Hsu

A New Yorker staff writer reflects on a life-changing college friendship cut short by tragedy. Hsu — interested in counterculture, zines and above all music — seemed to have little in common with Ken, a Dave Matthews Band-loving fraternity brother, with the exception of their Asian American heritage. In spite of their differences, they forged a close bond; this is both a memoir of their relationship but also Hsu’s journey to adulthood as he makes sense of his grief.

Doubleday, Sept. 27

Wild: The Life of Peter Beard: Photographer, Adventurer, Lover , by Graham Boynton

A biography of the photographer Peter Beard, who had a fondness for risk, drugs and beautiful women. Boynton, a journalist and author, was a friend of Beard’s for more than 30 years.

St. Martin’s, Oct. 11

The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man: A Memoir , by Paul Newman

When Newman and his iconic blue eyes died in 2008, the actor left behind taped conversations about his life, which he had put together with hopes of writing his life story. Now, with the participation of Newman’s daughters, the transcripts have been turned into this book, which sees Newman on his early life, his troubles with drinking and his shortcomings as a husband and parent, as well as his decorated career.

Knopf. Oct. 18

Madly, Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman

Rickman, the English stage and screen actor who died in 2016, was famous for his roles in “Die Hard,” the Harry Potter movies, “Love Actually” and many other films. He kept a diary for 25 years, about his work, his political activism, his friendships and other subjects, and they promise to be “anecdotal, indiscreet, witty, gossipy and utterly candid.”

Henry Holt, Oct. 18

README.txt: A Memoir , by Chelsea Manning

Manning, a former Army analyst, shared classified documents about the U.S. military’s operations in Iraq with WikiLeaks. In this memoir, she explores her childhood and what drew her to the armed services, her eventual disillusionment with the military and her life as a trans woman.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Oct. 18

The White Mosque: A Memoir , by Sofia Samatar

Samatar, a novelist, turns to nonfiction in this complex work combining religious and personal history. Raised in the United States, the daughter of a Swiss-Mennonite and a Somali-Muslim, Samatar recounts her life while relating a pilgrimage she undertook retracing the route of German-speaking Mennonites who founded a village in Central Asia in the 1800s.

Catapult, Oct. 25

Martha Graham: When Dance Became Modern , by Neil Baldwin

The biographer Baldwin’s eclectic list of subjects has included William Carlos Williams, Man Ray, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. Here he turns his attention to Martha Graham, the American choreographer who revolutionized modern dance and founded her own company, which is still going strong, in 1926.

Knopf, Oct. 25

Uphill: A Memoir , by Jemele Hill

Hill, now a contributing writer at The Atlantic, rose to fame as a TV anchor on ESPN. Her memoir covers the time in 2017 when ESPN suspended her (she had criticized the politics of the Dallas Cowboys’ owner, Jerry Jones, and had called President Trump a white supremacist). But the book offers a much broader canvas that includes her upbringing in Detroit and the trauma of generations of women in her family.

Henry Holt, Oct. 25

Friends, Lovers and the Terrible Thing: A Memoir , by Matthew Perry

Perry, who played Chandler Bing on “Friends,” has been candid about his substance abuse and sobriety. In this memoir, he returns again to discussions of fame and addiction, but also reaches back to his childhood.

Flatiron, Nov. 1

I Want to Die, but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki: A Memoir , by Baek Sehee. Translated by Anton Hur.

A best seller in South Korea, Baek’s memoir recounts her struggles with depression and anxiety, told through discussions with her therapist, which she recorded over a 12-week period. The therapy sessions are interspersed with short essays that explore her self-doubt and how feelings of worthlessness were reinforced by sexism.

Bloomsbury, Nov. 1

Elizabeth A. Harris writes about books and publishing for The Times.  More about Elizabeth A. Harris

Alexandra Alter writes about publishing and the literary world. Before joining The Times in 2014, she covered books and culture for The Wall Street Journal. Prior to that, she reported on religion, and the occasional hurricane, for The Miami Herald. More about Alexandra Alter

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

Stephen King, who has dominated horror fiction for decades , published his first novel, “Carrie,” in 1974. Margaret Atwood explains the book’s enduring appeal .

The actress Rebel Wilson, known for roles in the “Pitch Perfect” movies, gets vulnerable about her weight loss, sexuality and money  in her new memoir.

“City in Ruins” is the third novel in Don Winslow’s Danny Ryan trilogy and, he says, his last book. He’s retiring in part to invest more time into political activism .

​​Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist and author of “The Anxious Generation,” is “wildly optimistic” about Gen Z. Here’s why .

Do you want to be a better reader?   Here’s some helpful advice to show you how to get the most out of your literary endeavor .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

Advertisement

30 Great Rock Memoirs

Many legendary musicians have taken literary guitar solos off-stage by penning great rock memoirs. Music fans adore delving into their favorite artists’ juicy, tell-all autobiographies. Rock memoirs allow average Joes to experience the scandalous debauchery of the rock and roll lifestyle. From hit records and red carpets to drug addiction and sleazy groupies, these memoirs take readers on the rollercoaster ride of stardom. Whether written in 1960 or today, rock memoirs capture the drama of music heroes journeying towards their big dreams.

However, rock memoirs aren’t always the fascinating, soul-baring reads you’d expect. The genre has plenty of autobiographies filled with fluff already well-known on the Internet. Rock memoirs can also become garbled, indecipherable accounts by musicians who are more accustomed to writing notes than paragraphs. The best memoirs avoid the usual road-worn clichés and plots to eloquently share unhindered truths about rock stars.

Below we’ll recognize 30 great rock memoirs that deserve a sacred space on your bookshelf or Kindle library.

#1 – I Am Brian Wilson: A Memoir

Brian wilson.

Releasing in October 2016, this much-anticipated memoir tells the story of Brian Wilson, the co-founder of the Beach Boys. Starting with his turbulent childhood with an abusive father, Wilson relays the mental illness, drugs, and sorrow that plagued his early life. He also offers glimpses into the songwriting process for hits like “Good Vibrations.” Readers witness his never-ending climb to survive the industry and remain one of music’s most revered figures.

#2 – Walk This Way

Divided in two,  Walk This Way  chronicles the history of the legendary hard rock band Aerosmith. Members Steven Tyler, Joe Perry, Tom Hamilton, Joey Kramer, and Brad Whitford take turns sharing recollections never publicly released. Book One focuses on the early years after their album  Toys in the Attic  debuted. Book Two takes place after their 1980s downfall and resurgence. Candid stories of concerts, drugs, partying, and women abound.

#3 – The Dirt

Motley crue.

Perhaps the world’s most notorious rock band, Motley Crue collaborated to publish  The Dirt  in 2001. Tommy Lee, Mick Mars, Vince Neil, and Nikki Sixx detail their 30-year career without holding back. Fans journey beyond their immortal music to learn about backstage scandals, love affairs, and addictions after their rise to fame. Over 100 photographs are included to depict the pleasures and perils of decadent rock star lifestyles.

#4 – Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir

Carrie brownstein.

Named a  New York Times  Notable Book of 2015, Carrie Brownstein’s novel allows a deeply personal look into how she redefined gender limitations in rock. From her childhood in the Pacific Northwest, Brownstein depicts the search for her true calling. The exuberant guitarist details her rise to prominence with Sleater-Kinney in the growing feminist punk rock movement. She also shares the experiences that spawned the TV hit  Portlandia.

#5 – Born to Run

Bruce springsteen.

After his Super Bowl halftime show, “The Boss” himself began writing an extraordinary autobiography detailing his life from a childhood in Freehold, New Jersey. Set for release in September 2016,  Born to Run  vividly recounts Springsteen’s relentless drive for music. Readers watch as his career progresses from playing bar bands to headlining the E Street Band. Bruce Springsteen details the light and darkness of his experiences with raw honesty.

#6 – Be My Baby: How I Survived Mascara, Miniskirts and Madness

Ronnie spector.

Ronnie Spector published this 384-page tell-all novel about her time as lead singer for the Ronettes, the hit 1960s “girl band.” Although there are glimpses into the glamour of rock stardom, much of the memoir centers on her rocky relationship with Phil Spector. She details how her powerful producer husband turned cruel and reclusive. Follow her inspiring battle to break free, overcome alcoholism, and recreate a life worth living.

#7 – Crazy From The Heat

David lee roth.

Van Halen lead vocalist David Lee Roth produced the ultimate rock memoir with  Crazy From The Heat  in 1998. The archetypal rock star shares his life’s narrative in guerrilla style with plenty of expletives. With candor, Roth depicts the backstage life for the Guinness Book’s highest paid American rock group of the ’80s. David Lee Roth also shares his recording experiences as a solo artist and several unpublished poems.

#8 – Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs

Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, wrote this unique rock memoir about his time with the ’70s punk band. The “God Save the Queen” singer depicts how the Pistols were working-class rockers with families, friends, and financial woes. Lydon is unabashedly spiteful in shedding light on the British class system and the music industry. John Lydon also adds perspectives on his band mates, including the notorious Sid Vicious.

#9 – Long Hard Road Out of Hell

Marilyn manson.

America’s most controversial rock idol Marilyn Manson published a shocking memoir titled  Long Hard Road Out of Hell.  Born as Brian Hugh Warner, Manson discusses his unstable childhood, including his grandfather’s sexual fetishes. Its pages go in-depth on how the Marilyn Manson & the Spooky Kids formed and recorded the infamous “Antichrist Superstar.” Like other rock memoirs, the book references bitter breakups and dysfunctional relationships.

#10 – Many Years From Now

Paul mccartney.

With author Barry Miles, Paul McCartney wrote  Many Years From Now  to disprove that the late John Lennon was the Beatles’ only creative leader. The 650-plus memoir centers on the duo’s 50-50 songwriting partnership through hits like “I Feel Fine” and “A Hard Day’s Night.” From Beatlemania on, McCartney reminiscences on the genesis for every song penned with Lennon while taking credit for the band’s immersion into the avant-garde.

#11 – Moonage Daydream: The Life and Times of Ziggy Stardust

David bowie.

David Bowie’s debut novel gives unprecedented insight into his intriguing, sexually ambivalent stage persona Ziggy Stardust. Photographer Mick Rock assists in chronicling imagery from Ziggy’s stratospheric two-year stardom. Vast albums of images compile to detail the onstage performances and backstage scandals through his blockbuster retirement. It’s among the finest rock memoirs that beautifully immortalizes the late icon in high-definition.

#12 – Chronicles: Volume One

Through his own eyes,  Chronicles: Volume One  details the critical crossroads in Bob Dylan’s early life to begin the planned three-volume memoir. The National Book Critics Circle Award finalist shows Dylan’s first arrival in magical Manhattan. The story poignantly shares details about his 1960s breakthrough album. From nightlong parties to fleeting loves, readers witness Bob Dylan’s rise into fame as the “spokesman of a generation.”

Johnny Cash

Having sold over 90 million records globally, Johnny Cash is deemed one of the most influential musicians for songs like “Ring of Fire” and “Man in Black.” Cash’s deep baritone voice crossed lines from country and blues to rock and roll. From his boyhood in Arkansas to super-stardom in Nashville,  Cash  reminiscences on the legend’s lifetime. The autobiography highlights his 40-year career, including his marriage to June Carter, with wry humor.

#14 – Scar Tissue

Anthony kiedis.

Released five years after  Californication,  this rock memoir follows the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ lead vocalist through his drug addiction battle. Son of Blackie Dammett, Anthony Kiedis first experienced drugs with his father at 11. When the band formed in the ’80s, Kiedis had a hardcore addiction. He details the effect of Slovak’s overdose death on his downward spiral. Audiences witness his fight against relapses to restart a productive, happy life.

#15 – Just Kids

Patti smith.

Chosen for  Publishers Weekly’s  top 10 best books, Patti Smith’s memoir provides the same lyrical quality as her influential album  Horses.  Beginning in 1967, the book portrays Smith’s early career homeless and hungry in Brooklyn. That’s when she encounters Robert Mapplethorpe, a young photographer, and her life forever changes. Patti Smith tells their inseparable friendship’s moving story during the halcyon days of the Hotel Chelsea.

#16 – My Damage: The Story of a Punk Rock Survivor

Keith morris.

Hardcore punk icon Keith Morris chronicles his revolutionary 40-year career as one of music’s hardest working men. Beginning with his childhood in Los Angeles’ South Bay, the book provides a lens into Morris’ development to legend status. From leading the Circle Jerks to appearing in cult films like  Repo Man,  Keith Morris shares interesting perspectives on the entertainment industry and his battle with diabetes.

#17 – The Beatles Anthology

The beatles.

Released with the documentary series in 2000,  The Beatles Anthology  is a large-format hardcover book infused with photographic artwork. Archived interviews with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr as well as producer George Martin are combined into one epic rock memoir. Every page is brimming with recollections from their early days in Liverpool to their ultimate breakup, including Lennon’s marriage to Yoko Ono.

#18 – I, Tina

Tina turner.

Adapted to the film  What’s Love Got to Do with It  with Angela Bassett in 1993, Tina Turner’s rock memoir retells her life from growing up as Anna Mae Bullock. The best-seller transports readers from her meager beginnings in Tennessee to her volatile relationship with blues musician Ike Turner. Her superstar account shares the pain and abuse that sparked one of rock music’s greatest comebacks.

#19 – Slash

Legendary Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash opens up to share his own experiences with the sex, drugs, and rock and roll lifestyle. The notoriously private musician pens a jaw-dropping memoir detailing the factors leading to the band’s demise. Beyond wild parties, groupies, drugs, and never-ending tours, Slash depicts the dictatorship rule of Axl Rose. He explains how Axl’s determination to change the band’s sound with synthesizers ripped them apart.

#20 – I Am Ozzy

Ozzy osbourne.

Prized for its laugh-out-loud humor,  I Am Ozzy  provides a rambling memoir of the Black Sabbath frontman’s life. Born John Osbourne, he grew up within an impoverished British family in Aston and seemed destined for manual labor. On a trip to prison, Ozzy became enamored with the darker side of rock and roll. Life spirals out of control with recording, drinking, drugs, and women. But the unpolished autobiography then shares the satanic rocker’s rebirth.

#21 – Clapton

Eric clapton.

Clapton  portrays the rock star’s life in an unseen light starting with his debut in Cream and their untimely breakup two years later. Eric Clapton shares his experiences working with Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, and long-time friend George Harrison. Here readers discover his love for George’s wife, Pattie Boyd. His heartbreak leads to heroin, despair, and hit songs like “Wonderful Tonight.” Life seemingly improves as he wins Pattie’s affection, until the devastating death of their four-year-old son.

#22 – Amy, My Daughter

Mitch winehouse.

Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse’s memoir was written in 2013 by her closest advisor and friend, her father Mitch. The intimate account separates fact from fiction by detailing the true events that shaped her music career. Mitch doesn’t shy away from discussing her drug addiction that inspired the hit song “Rehab.” Audiences witness what happened behind-the-scenes in the months leading to the talented musician’s tragic death.

#23 – I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp

Richard hell.

Since retiring from the music industry in 1984, Richard Hell has published countless books, including his own rock memoirs. This novel renders his shift from a bucolic childhood in Kentucky to New York City’s punk rock movement. Known for co-founding bands like The Heartbreakers and working with artists like Patti Smith, Hell forever cemented CBGB as the epicenter for punk. The memoir celebrates his passion while warning of its implicit risks.

#24 – Journals

Kurt cobain.

Originally contained in over 20 notebooks,  Journals  presents a collection of Kurt Cobain’s handwritten notes and drawings. From a kid in Aberdeen, Washington, to a morbid punk rocker, the entries depict Corbain’s unlikely rise to fame. Readers glimpse his innermost thoughts as Cobain signs with Sub Pop, forms Nirvana, and writes “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” But entries turn darker as coping with the fame ultimately leads to heroin addiction and suicide.

#25 – Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout

Laura jane grace.

Laura Jane Grace, the lead singer for Against Me!, will offer this vivid memoir of her tumultuous search for self-identity in November 2016. Born Thomas James Gabel, Laura shares how she grappled with feeling detached from her body.  Tranny  shares her struggles with gender transition, sex, failed relationships, and drug addiction while becoming a punk rock icon.

Keith Richards

As winner of the 2011 Norman Mailer Prize, Keith Richards’ memoir  Life  was written with journalist James Fox to chronicle the Rolling Stones guitarist’s rousing stardom. Richards delivers an unfettered story of his career from small gigs to sold-out stadiums. Rock fans are entranced with firsthand accounts on his love for Patti Hansen, rocky relationship with Mick Jagger, tax exile in France, and more. His journey becomes immortalized like the riffs of “Satisfaction.”

#27 – The Autobiography

Chuck berry.

Pioneering rock and roll guitarist Chuck Berry’s memoir not only shares his own past, but also uncovers dark truths about race in America. Growing up in a poor, segregated St. Louis neighborhood, Berry discusses his family roots and his feeling “black.” From performing with Johnnie Johnson’s trio to signing with Chess Records, he recounts his galloping success redefining rhythm and blues to the distinctive rock sound.  The Autobiography  also includes a discography of his musical masterpieces.

#28 – Don’t Try This at Home: A Year in the Life of Dave Navarro

Dave navarro.

After messy breakups with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jane’s Addiction, guitarist Dave Navarro partnered with writer Neil Strauss to chronicle 12 months of his life. He purchased a photo booth to record every celebrity, dealer, and hooker who stopped by his house. The resulting 57 chapters speak to the quasi-glamorous rock and roll lifestyle. However, readers eventually witness Navarro’s sobriety as his career and marriage restarts.

#29 – Girl in a Band

Published in 2015,  Girl in a Band  shares the autobiographical story of Sonic Youth’s bass guitarist and fashion icon Kim Gordon. The memoir’s vivid pages open several chapters of her life for inspection from California to New York City. She visually details her music and passion for taking women into the unchartered territory in the Alternative revolution. Gordon also describes her personal life, marriage, and relationship with her daughter, Coco.

#30 – Take It Like a Man

Boy George strutted into rock stardom in the early ’80s with “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” His platinum Culture Club hits, avant-garde style, and captivating melodies fueled media’s obsession with the English singer. That’s until his life took a downward spiral. Boy George’s relationship with Jon Moss disintegrated, Culture Club collapsed, and drug addiction wreaked havoc.  Take It Like a Man  retells his highest highs and most desperate lows in mesmerizing detail.

Search for these 30 great rock memoirs to read profound, inspiring recollections from one-of-a-kind music icons who’ve experienced successes and downturns in the public eye.

• 30 Great Books About Elvis Presley
• 50 Great Books about The Beatles
• 30 Great Small Towns for Book Lovers
• 30 Great Small Colleges for Book Lovers

Books We Love

• Historical Fiction
• Mystery & Crime
• Science & Technology
• Self Help & Relationships
• Social Science
• Spirituality
• Young Adult

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

The best memoirs and biographies of 2022

Heartfelt memoirs from Richard E Grant and Viola Davis, childhood tales of religious dogma, and vivid insights into Agatha Christie and John Donne

The best books of 2022

C elebrity memoirs often follow the same trajectory: a difficult childhood followed by early professional failure, then dazzling success and redemption. But this year has yielded a handful of autobiographies from famous types determined to mix things up. Richard E Grant’s vivacious and heartfelt A Pocketful of Happiness (Gallery) recounts a year spent caring for his late wife, Joan Washington, who was diagnosed with lung cancer shortly before Christmas in 2020, and the “head-and-heart-exploding overwhelm” that followed. The book interweaves hospital appointments with memories of the couple’s courtship plus showbiz stories of Grant at the Golden Globes, or hijinks on the set of Star Wars. This juxtaposition of glamour and grief shouldn’t work, but it does.

Minnie Driver’s Managing Expectations (Manila) comprises spry and amusing autobiographical essays that detail pivotal moments in the actor’s life. These include her experience of becoming a mother, cutting off all her hair on a family holiday in France and the time her father sent her home to England from Barbados alone, aged 11, including a stopover at a Miami hotel, as punishment for being rude to his girlfriend (Driver got her revenge by buying up half the gift shop on her dad’s credit card). She also recalls the disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein bemoaning her lack of sex appeal, which she notes was rich from a man “whose shirts were always aggressively encrusted with egg/tuna fish/mayo”.

Alan Rickman’s Madly, Deeply (Canongate) diaries provide insight into the inner life of the late actor who, despite his many successes, frets over roles turned down and rails at the perceived ineptitude of script writers, directors and co-stars. He nonetheless keeps glittering company, hobnobbing with musicians, prime ministers and Hollywood megastars, and almost single-handedly keeps the tills ringing at the Ivy. And while he seethes at critics’ reviews of his own work, his assessments of less-than-perfect films and plays are so deliciously scathing, they deserve a book of their own.

In Finding Me (Coronet), the actor Viola Davis gives a clear-eyed account of her deprived childhood and her rise to fame, along with the violence, abuse and racism she endured along the way. The book is not so much a triumphant tale of overcoming adversity as a howl of fury at the injustice of it all. Davis may now be able to survey her career from a place of Oscar-winning privilege, but she doesn’t hesitate in calling out her industry and its ingrained racial bias, which leads to white actors landing plum roles and “relegates [Black actors] to best friends, to strong, loudmouth, sassy lawyers and doctors”. In The Light We Carry (Viking), the follow-up to her bestselling memoir Becoming, Michelle Obama also touches on the impossible-to-meet expectations that dog anyone trying to make it in a world that sees them as different, or deficient. “I happen to be well acquainted with the burdens of representation and the double standards for excellence that steepen the hills so many of us are trying to climb,” she writes. “It remains a damning fact of life that we ask too much of those who are marginalised and too little of those who are not.”

Away from the world of global fame and its attendant scrutiny, the journalist Chitra Ramaswamy’s touching memoir Homelands (Canongate) documents the author’s friendship with 97-year-old Henry Wuga, who escaped Nazi persecution as a teenager and began a new life in Glasgow. Interwoven with Wuga’s recollections is Ramaswamy’s own family story – she is the daughter of Indian immigrant parents – through which she digs deep into matters of identity, belonging and the meaning of home. Similar themes are explored in Ira Mathur’s multilayered Love the Dark Days (Peepal Tree), which, set in India, Britain and the Caribbean, reads like a fictional family saga as it leaps back and forth in time. The book charts the lives of the author’s wealthy, dysfunctional forebears against a backdrop of patriarchal hegemony and a collapsing empire.

The Last Days (Ebury) by Ali Millar and Sins of My Father (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) by Lily Dunn each tell harrowing stories of families torn apart by religious dogma. Millar, who grew up as a Jehovah’s Witness on the Scottish borders, reflects on a childhood haunted by predictions of Armageddon and blighted by her eating disorder. As an adult she marries, within the church, a controlling man and has a baby, though at 30 she makes her escape and is “disfellowshipped”, meaning she is cut off for ever from her family. Meanwhile, Dunn recalls losing her father to a commune in India presided over by the cult leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, where disciples were encouraged to “live in love”, meaning they could engage in guilt-free sex. Dunn’s book is her attempt to pin down this charismatic, mercurial and unreliable figure and the ripple effects of his actions on those closest to him. In Matt Rowland Hill’s scabrously funny Original Sins (Chatto & Windus), it is the author who is the agent of chaos. The son of evangelical Christians, Hill shoots heroin at the funeral of a friend who died from an overdose, and tries to score drugs on a visit to Bethlehem. Were his account a novel, you might accuse it of being too far-fetched.

In Kit de Waal’s first autobiographical work, Without Warning and Only Sometimes (Tinder Press), the author recalls how she and her four siblings would go to bed hungry while their father blew his earnings on a new suit, and her mother would work off her rage by collecting empty milk bottles and throwing them at a wall in the back yard. After a bout of depression in her teens, De Waal eventually found comfort and escape in literature. Her book is a brilliant evocation of the times in which she lived, when children learned to make their own entertainment and adults didn’t talk about their feelings, and a funny and tender portrait of a complicated family.

after newsletter promotion

The Crane Wife (Viking), by the American author CJ Hauser, began life as a confessional essay about the time she travelled to the gulf coast of Texas to study whooping cranes 10 days after breaking off her engagement. Published in the Paris Review, the essay blew up online, prompting Hauser to expand her thoughts on love and relationships into this thoughtful and fitfully funny book. Across 17 confessional essays, we find her furtively spreading her grandparents’ ashes at their old house in Martha’s Vineyard, contemplating breast reduction surgery and reflecting on her relationships with a high-school boyfriend and a divorcee who is clearly still in love with his ex.

Finally, some excellent biographies. Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman (Hodder & Stoughton) by Lucy Worsley is a riveting portrait of the queen of crime viewed through a feminist lens. The book acknowledges Christie’s flaws, most notably in her views on race, while portraying her as ahead of her time in putting women at the centre of her stories and showing how older women “have more to offer the world than meets the eye”. Super-Infinite (Faber), winner of this year’s Baillie Gifford prize, is a biography of the 17th-century preacher and poet John Donne by Katherine Rundell, the children’s novelist and Renaissance scholar. Ten years in the writing, the book approaches its subject with wit and vivacity, bringing to life Donne’s inner world through his verse.

Jonathan Freedland’s The Escape Artist (John Murray) is a remarkable account of the life of Rudolf Vrba, a prisoner at Auschwitz who was put to work in “Kanada”, a store of belongings removed from inmates which revealed that the line fed to them was a lie: they were not there to be resettled but murdered. Vrba and his friend Fred Wetzler pledged to escape and tell the world about the Nazis’ industrialised murder, hiding beneath a woodpile for three days before slipping through the fence to freedom. The horror of this story lies not just in its account of “cold-blooded extermination” but in the slowness of authorities to react to the Vrba-Wetzler report, which laid out the workings of Auschwitz, complete with maps showing the chambers. Freedland recalls the words of the French-Jewish philosopher Raymond Aron, who, when asked about the Holocaust, said: “I knew, but I didn’t believe it. And because I didn’t believe it, I didn’t know.”

• Best books of the year
• Best books 2022
• Biography books
• Autobiography and memoir

Comments (…)

Most viewed.

• Craft and Criticism
• Fiction and Poetry
• News and Culture
• Lit Hub Radio
• Reading Lists

• Literary Criticism
• Craft and Advice
• In Conversation
• On Translation
• Short Story
• From the Novel
• Bookstores and Libraries
• Film and TV
• Art and Photography
• Freeman’s
• The Virtual Book Channel
• Behind the Mic
• Beyond the Page
• The Cosmic Library
• The Critic and Her Publics
• Emergence Magazine
• Fiction/Non/Fiction
• First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing
• Future Fables
• The History of Literature
• I’m a Writer But
• Just the Right Book
• Lit Century
• The Literary Life with Mitchell Kaplan
• New Books Network
• Tor Presents: Voyage Into Genre
• Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast
• Write-minded
• The Best of the Decade
• Best Reviewed Books
• BookMarks Daily Giveaway
• The Daily Thrill
• CrimeReads Daily Giveaway

The Best Reviewed Memoirs and Biographies of 2022

Featuring buster keaton, jean rhys, bernardine evaristo, kate beaton, and more.

We’ve come to the end of another bountiful literary year, and for all of us review rabbits here at Book Marks, that can mean only one thing: basic math, and lots of it.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be calculating and revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2022, in the categories of (deep breath): Fiction ; Nonfiction ; Memoir and Biography; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror; Short Story Collections; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature ; and Literature in Translation .

Today’s installment: Memoir and Biography .

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

1. We Don’t Know Ourselves by Fintan O’Toole (Liveright) 17 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan

“One of the many triumphs of Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves is that he manages to find a form that accommodates the spectacular changes that have occurred in Ireland over the past six decades, which happens to be his life span … it is not a memoir, nor is it an absolute history, nor is it entirely a personal reflection or a crepuscular credo. It is, in fact, all of these things helixed together: his life, his country, his thoughts, his misgivings, his anger, his pride, his doubt, all of them belonging, eventually, to us … O’Toole, an agile cultural commentator, considers himself to be a representative of the blank slate on which the experiment of change was undertaken, but it’s a tribute to him that he maintains his humility, his sharpness and his enlightened distrust …

O’Toole writes brilliantly and compellingly of the dark times, but he is graceful enough to know that there is humor and light in the cracks. There is a touch of Eduardo Galeano in the way he can settle on a telling phrase … But the real accomplishment of this book is that it achieves a conscious form of history-telling, a personal hybrid that feels distinctly honest and humble at the same time. O’Toole has not invented the form, but he comes close to perfecting it. He embraces the contradictions and the confusion. In the process, he weaves the flag rather than waving it.”

–Colum McCann ( The New York Times Book Review )

2. Thin Places: A Natural History of Healing and Home by Kerri Ní Dochartaigh (Milkweed)

12 Rave • 7 Positive • 2 Mixed

“Assured and affecting … A powerful and bracing memoir … This is a book that will make you see the world differently: it asks you to reconsider the animals and insects we often view as pests – the rat, for example, and the moth. It asks you to look at the sea and the sky and the trees anew; to wonder, when you are somewhere beautiful, whether you might be in a thin place, and what your responsibilities are to your location.It asks you to show compassion for people you think are difficult, to cultivate empathy, to try to understand the trauma that made them the way they are.”

–Lynn Enright ( The Irish Times )

3. Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton (Drawn & Quarterly)

14 Rave • 4 Positive

“It could hardly be more different in tone from [Beaton’s] popular larky strip Hark! A Vagrant … Yes, it’s funny at moments; Beaton’s low-key wryness is present and correct, and her drawings of people are as charming and as expressive as ever. But its mood overall is deeply melancholic. Her story, which runs to more than 400 pages, encompasses not only such thorny matters as social class and environmental destruction; it may be the best book I have ever read about sexual harassment …

There are some gorgeous drawings in Ducks of the snow and the starry sky at night. But the human terrain, in her hands, is never only black and white … And it’s this that gives her story not only its richness and depth, but also its astonishing grace. Life is complex, she tell us, quietly, and we are all in it together; each one of us is only trying to survive. What a difficult, gorgeous and abidingly humane book. It really does deserve to win all the prizes.”

–Rachel Cooke ( The Guardian )

4. Stay True by Hua Hsu (Doubleday)

14 Rave • 3 Positive

“… quietly wrenching … To say that this book is about grief or coming-of-age doesn’t quite do it justice; nor is it mainly about being Asian American, even though there are glimmers of that too. Hsu captures the past by conveying both its mood and specificity … This is a memoir that gathers power through accretion—all those moments and gestures that constitute experience, the bits and pieces that coalesce into a life … Hsu is a subtle writer, not a showy one; the joy of Stay True sneaks up on you, and the wry jokes are threaded seamlessly throughout.”

–Jennifer Szalai ( The New York Times )

5.  Manifesto: On Never Giving Up by Bernardine Evaristo (Grove)

13 Rave • 4 Positive

“Part coming-of-age story and part how-to manual, the book is, above all, one of the most down-to-earth and least self-aggrandizing works of self-reflection you could hope to read. Evaristo’s guilelessness is refreshing, even unsettling … With ribald humour and admirable candour, Evaristo takes us on a tour of her sexual history … Characterized by the resilience of its author, it is replete with stories about the communities and connections Evaristo has cultivated over forty years … Invigoratingly disruptive as an artist, Evaristo is a bridge-builder as a human being.”

–Emily Bernard ( The Times Literary Supplement )

1. Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

14 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Rundell is right that Donne…must never be forgotten, and she is the ideal person to evangelise him for our age. She shares his linguistic dexterity, his pleasure in what TS Eliot called ‘felt thought’, his ability to bestow physicality on the abstract … It’s a biography filled with gaps and Rundell brings a zest for imaginative speculation to these. We know so little about Donne’s wife, but Rundell brings her alive as never before … Rundell confronts the difficult issue of Donne’s misogyny head-on … This is a determinedly deft book, and I would have liked it to billow a little more, making room for more extensive readings of the poems and larger arguments about the Renaissance. But if there is an overarching argument, then it’s about Donne as an ‘infinity merchant’ … To read Donne is to grapple with a vision of the eternal that is startlingly reinvented in the here and now, and Rundell captures this vision alive in all its power, eloquence and strangeness”

–Laura Feigel ( The Guardian )

2. The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World by Jonathan Freedland (Harper)

12 Rave • 3 Positive

“Compelling … We know about Auschwitz. We know what happened there. But Freedland, with his strong, clear prose and vivid details, makes us feel it, and the first half of this book is not an easy read. The chillingly efficient mass murder of thousands of people is harrowing enough, but Freedland tells us stories of individual evils as well that are almost harder to take … His matter-of-fact tone makes it bearable for us to continue to read … The Escape Artist is riveting history, eloquently written and scrupulously researched. Rosenberg’s brilliance, courage and fortitude are nothing short of amazing.”

–Laurie Hertzel ( The Star Tribune )

3. I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys by Miranda Seymour (W. W. Norton & Company)

11 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Pan

“…illuminating and meticulously researched … paints a deft portrait of a flawed, complex, yet endlessly fascinating woman who, though repeatedly bowed, refused to be broken … Following dismal reviews of her fourth novel, Rhys drifted into obscurity. Ms. Seymour’s book could have lost momentum here. Instead, it compellingly charts turbulent, drink-fueled years of wild moods and reckless acts before building to a cathartic climax with Rhys’s rescue, renewed lease on life and late-career triumph … is at its most powerful when Ms. Seymour, clear-eyed but also with empathy, elaborates on Rhys’s woes …

Ms. Seymour is less convincing with her bold claim that Rhys was ‘perhaps the finest English woman novelist of the twentieth century.’ However, she does expertly demonstrate that Rhys led a challenging yet remarkable life and that her slim but substantial novels about beleaguered women were ahead of their time … This insightful biography brilliantly shows how her many battles were lost and won.”

–Malcolm Forbes ( The Wall Street Journal )

4. The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I by Lindsey Fitzharris (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

9 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Grisly yet inspiring … Fitzharris depicts her hero as irrepressibly dedicated and unfailingly likable. The suspense of her narrative comes not from any interpersonal drama but from the formidable challenges posed by the physical world … The Facemaker is mostly a story of medical progress and extraordinary achievement, but as Gillies himself well knew—grappling daily with the unbearable suffering that people willingly inflicted on one another—failure was never far behind.”

5. Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life by James Curtis (Knopf)

8 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Keaton fans have often complained that nearly all biographies of him suffer from a questionable slant or a cursory treatment of key events. With Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life —at more than 800 pages dense with research and facts—Mr. Curtis rectifies that situation, and how. He digs deep into Keaton’s process and shows how something like the brilliant two-reeler Cops went from a storyline conceived from necessity—construction on the movie lot encouraged shooting outdoors—to a masterpiece … This will doubtless be the primary reference on Keaton’s life for a long time to come … the worse Keaton’s life gets, the more engrossing Mr. Curtis’s book becomes.”

–Farran Smith Nehme ( The Wall Street Journal )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

• Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)

Previous Article

Next article, support lit hub..

Join our community of readers.

to the Lithub Daily

Popular posts.

Follow us on Twitter

Between Shame, Desire, and Destiny: On the Genius of Annie Ernaux

• RSS - Posts

Literary Hub

Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature

Sign Up For Our Newsletters

How to Pitch Lit Hub

Advertisers: Contact Us

Privacy Policy

Support Lit Hub - Become A Member

Become a Lit Hub Supporting Member : Because Books Matter

For the past decade, Literary Hub has brought you the best of the book world for free—no paywall. But our future relies on you. In return for a donation, you’ll get an ad-free reading experience , exclusive editors’ picks, book giveaways, and our coveted Joan Didion Lit Hub tote bag . Most importantly, you’ll keep independent book coverage alive and thriving on the internet.

Become a member for as low as $5/month

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Best Music of 2022

The 10 best rock albums of 2022.

Nilüfer Yanya's PAINLESS is one of NPR Music's top 10 rock albums of 2022. Photo Illustration: Jackie Lay/NPR/Steve Jennings/Getty Images hide caption

Nilüfer Yanya's PAINLESS is one of NPR Music's top 10 rock albums of 2022.

All Songs Considered

Discussion: the 10 best rock albums of 2022, countdown: the top 10 rock albums of 2022.

• LISTEN & FOLLOW
• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• Amazon Music

Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free feed.

We still believe in rock and roll — as a force for good, laughter, debauchery, introspection or whatever revs your energy on a Saturday night. In 2022, the top 10 rock albums took a pilgrimage to Memphis, communed with theologians and poets, found the interconnectedness of all beings and danced through pain and pleasure.

Below, find a ranked list the year's most essential rock music, along with a short list of personal favorites, by NPR Music staff and contributors. You can also hear a conversation about 2022 in rock via All Songs Considered .

10. Kevin Morby, This is a Photograph

Another young, white rock songwriter pilgrimages to Memphis, mining the river city's heritage of tragedy, triumph and soul-baring music that maps the route between the two? Stop the presses. But sequestered in a Peabody suite as the pandemic raged outside, Kevin Morby used Memphis' legacy as a lens to look inward, to ask incisive questions about family, love, fame, careerism and what he wants from life itself over nuanced soul, folk and chamber ballads that unspool like a deep eddy. "The living took forever," he offers during one such slow beauty, "but the dying went quick." It's a fitting existential mantra for these times, dispatched from a place accustomed to transmuting loss. — Grayson Haver Currin

9. Soul Glo, Diaspora Problems

Soul Glo 's Epitaph debut is as thematically bold as it is musically visceral. Trauma, family, self-love, racism and the fecklessness of white leftists are all addressed on Diaspora Problems . Songs like "We Wants Revenge" and "Coming Correct is Cheaper" build upon hardcore's decades-long tradition of fury and catharsis, and distill it into a potent, 40-minute punch. It's refreshing and exhilarating to hear such a sharp critique of contemporary Black life that sounds this wild and unhinged. —John Morrison, WXPN

8. Special Interest, Endure

When Earth's human race finally meets its demise — whether via climate catastrophe or impending asteroid or zombie apocalypse — the sound emitting from the last nightclub standing amid the rubble might sound like Special Interest 's Endure . The New Orleans band crafts a pummeling, righteous dance-punk opus that takes aim at fascism, gentrification and corporate greed while espousing the importance of community and pleasure. The sounds of '80s post-punk, house music and the spitfire cadence of ballroom manifestos melt into a chaotic, magnetic vision unmatched by any punk album this year. —Hazel Cills

7. caroline, caroline

There's a seed inside every caroline song; sometimes it's a weighted-blanket chord progression, a mournful interval or a simple phrase repeated. And in that fragile inkling of an idea, something grows outward and seeks light. On its self-titled debut, the London-based octet pulls from minimalism, Midwestern emo, post-rock, free-jazz, folk and chamber music not as genetic genre splice, but as a way to build community sprouted from an unforgiving Earth. —Lars Gotrich

6. Hurray for the Riff Raff, LIFE ON EARTH

"Nature teaches us that our work has to be nuanced and steadfast," adrienne maree brown writes in Emergent Strategy , "and more than anything, that we need each other ... in order to get free." Alynda Segarra's eighth album as Hurray for the Riff Raff , deeply inspired by that text, embodies that maxim. Its eleven tracks of "nature punk" are sharply constructed and deeply felt, finding hope in the power of compassion and the fundamental interconnectedness of all living things. —Marissa Lorusso

5. Alvvays, Blue Rev

The general feeling of disaffection — tempered by urgency, turbulence and angst — is masterfully relayed in Alvvays ' third and best record so far. Replete with hooks, licks and clever lyrics that are never too-clever, Blue Rev is a monument to power pop furnished with a rich cultural and musical lexicon, and delivered with explosive defiance. Simply put, and as my best friend said, "It makes me wanna put my head inside a speaker." —Vita Dadoo

4. Wet Leg, Wet Leg

Wet Leg 's "Chaise Longue" was one of last year's greatest songs, an introductory single whose deadpan come-ons exuded wiry wit and playful cool. Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers' full-length debut lives up to that track's enormous promise, with songs that tap into several generations' worth of rock and post-punk influences while still capturing a cocktail of moods that's unmistakably of-the-moment: somehow both over- and under-stimulated, introspective but distant, lusty but numb. —Stephen Thompson

3. Nilüfer Yanya, PAINLESS

Listening to Nilüfer Yanya sometimes makes me feel like I'm handling one of those self-defense trinkets designed for girls — a plastic comb that splits at the center to reveal a switchblade, a pretty, innocuous thing with grim intent. The British singer-songwriter often pairs her gorgeous voice with devastating electric guitar melodies and chillingly simple lyricism that only reveals its bruising later. On her second full-length album PAINLESS , she drags her listener into a maximalist swirl of insecurity and existential dread like never before, filling its tracks with brooding, grungy rock that masterfully honors the quiet darkness of her work. —Hazel Cills

2. Alex G, God Save the Animals

Alex G 's most confessional album builds its lofty questions about morality with the base reactions of animals, human and not. For an artist of few clarifications, God Save the Animals is ambitious in its questions about consciousness, flitting between transcendentally aware observation and nearsighted emotional desperation — and forgiveness, a maybe-fake thing made real all the time by people who choose to give it. This fragmented meditation is given flesh by, in addition to theologians and poets, Alex G's baroque melodic sensibility, sick groove and the ascetic simplicity of his observation: "Yes, I have done a couple bad things." —Stefanie Fernández

1. Big Thief, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You

I wouldn't normally associate tenderness and humor with rock music, but those are just a few of the outstanding qualities that make Big Thief 's Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You deserving of our No. 1 spot. Recorded in four cities and produced by drummer James Krivchenia, this double album is both a sonic adventure and an insightful lyrical exploration. In a single song, there are words of whimsy (rhyming "finish" with "potato knish") while at the same time exploring and accepting the differences in ourselves and those around us. And that's just one of 20 songs in an album that reveals something new for me on every listen. —Bob Boilen

And 12 more, in no particular order:

Tomberlin, i don't know who needs to hear this... 2022 brought us many records birthed in isolation and none more stunning than this. It's an album bathed in ambiance and uncertainty, yet somehow warm and compelling. —Bob Boilen

Enumclaw, Save the Baby Pacific Northwest rock in the classic fashion: heartfelt, rebellious and as rough-edged as a dock stained by salt air, with a view as big as Puget Sound. —Ann Powers

Jockstrap, I Love You Jennifer B A great, mind-expanding, constantly surprising, possibly controversial answer to the perpetually re-upped question, "What does 'rock music' even mean anymore?" —Jacob Ganz

MJ Lenderman, Boat Songs The Asheville, N.C., guitarist and singer-songwriter (and member of Wednesday) brings exceptional humor, wit and empathy to twangy tracks about fulfillment and failure. —Marissa Lorusso

Editrix, Editrix II: Editrix Goes to Hell Like Van Halen beamed from an alternate dimension via cable-access television, this is a noisy and sometimes goofy rock record that smiles through crooked teeth and baffling riffs. —Lars Gotrich

Metric, Formentera Formentera is escapism that doesn't buy the possibility of escape from modern decay. Instead, it makes its dark peace with synth-rock clarity, a companion that offers to sit with you in late-night lost time. —Stefanie Fernández

Just Mustard, Heart Under This Irish five-piece has found its happy place: in a basement corner, incanting obliquely and confidently towards the scrappy concrete in deep, dark thuds. The whiff of desperation underlying it all feels like a native species to the present day and age. —Andrew Flanagan

Angel Olsen, Big Time I was head over heels in love with this deeply earnest, beautiful album from singer-songwriter Angel Olsen, that dives into the sound of classic country. —Hazel Cills

Soccer Mommy, Sometimes, Forever On Soccer Mommy's dreamy and assured third album, Sophie Allison's indie-pop palette seamlessly incorporates everything from blissful early-'90s shoegaze to throbbing, glitchy industrial sounds. —Stephen Thompson

Young Jesus , Shepherd Head A compendium of natural sounds funneled through snares and synths, Shepherd Head is delicate and grand at once — an open-air monastery or agora with the traces of a dance floor. —Vita Dadoo

Peter Matthew Bauer, Flowers The Walkmen member wrestles with age, not to mention the joy and sadness of being alive. Flowers conjures a feeling of grandeur that recalls I Am the Cosmos , the only solo album by Big Star's Chris Bell. —John Morrison, WXPN

Drive-By Truckers, Welcome 2 Club XIII Following a suite of timely sociopolitical screeds that delivered necessary messages to its Southern brethren, this century's most consistently great rock band digs deep into its own archival baggage. The result is a galvanizing reminder that it didn't earn that honorific without catastrophe or controversy. —Grayson Haver Currin

• caroline [U.K.]
• Special Interest
• Nilüfer Yanya
• Kevin Morby
• Hurray For The Riff Raff

Find anything you save across the site in your account

The 38 Best Rock Albums of 2022

By Pitchfork

In 2022, the best rock music sought to expand the borders of the genre. Breakthrough bands like Soul Glo and Chat Pile made thrashing, thrilling records that never stayed in one place for too long, while elusive lifers like Destroyer’s Dan Bejar and Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser returned sounding more mystifying and hypnotic than ever. Indie favorites Big Thief and Weyes Blood upped their ambition for records that sprawled like epic, feature-length films, while power-pop quintet Alvvays and death-doom duo Dream Unending crafted immersive headphones listens tailor-made for the chilly seasons. Below, check out some of the year’s most essential releases.

Listen to selections from this list on our Spotify playlist and Apple Music playlist .

Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2022 wrap-up coverage here .

(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)

The 1975: Being Funny in a Foreign Language

In 2018, the 1975’s Matty Healy admitted that emotional deflection can be a temporary balm on a song called “Sincerity Is Scary.” But on their fifth album, the British quartet embraces the discomfort that comes with being direct. Atop stripped-back arrangements befitting 11 tracks consumed by matters of the heart, Healy reckons with his tendency to sabotage his own happiness. “I got it/I found it/I’ve just gotta keep it,” he sings of love midway through the record, psyching himself up. Loving—and living—may be a daunting pursuit, but the 1975 sound more than ready to try. –Quinn Moreland

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Self-released

40 Watt Sun: Perfect Light

Before he made gutting, gorgeous, pitch-perfect slowcore under the name 40 Watt Sun, Patrick Walker was a member of the doom metal band Warning, whose 2006 album  Watching From a Distance stands among the high water marks of the genre. Just like that cult classic,  Perfect Light  is destined to be passed among fans of immersive mood music meant to soundtrack our lowest moments. In another era, “Behind My Eyes” might be the centerpiece of a winter-doldrums-heartbreak mixtape, slotted between, say, Codeine and Galaxie 500. In 2022, it feels like a transmission from another time, the nostalgia pre-loaded in every slow-motion refrain. –Sam Sodomsky

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Alex G: God Save the Animals

From breakbeat to grunge-pop,  God Save the Animals integrates Alex G’s impish genre-muddling into folkish songwriting buffed to a pearlescent sheen. On his most elegantly produced album, Alex Giannascoli welcomes disparate ideas with ease, with images that wiggle like iron filings drawn to a magnetic pole. In mantra-like phrases, he conjures a criminal at confession, the hard-won relief of domesticity, or a seafarer holding onto the fragile hope of love on dry land. As one of indie rock’s great empaths, Giannascoli crafts his songs’ characters with a care that hits poignantly close to home. You feel that the record’s title is no accident, given that humans are animals too. –Owen Myers

Polyvinyl / Transgressive

Alvvays: Blue Rev

Alvvays writes songs about what lasts, what fades, and what young pains resurface in the slipstream of memory. On their third album, the Toronto band returns like one of the old flames in their songs, ready to shatter your every defense. Blue Rev is a crinkled collection of small dramas—a run-in at the pharmacy, a drive-thru break-up over milkshakes—with panoramic feeling. Although Molly Rankin and co. have ascended into the wiser terrain of their 30s, they still summon the dizzying emotions of your rookie years, when the sense of paralysis and betrayal seemed so acute; in their world, college is a bore, pedantic poetry sucks, and solace is that one good song on the radio. This is an album to come home to, with squalling arrangements and melodies so immediate and sublime it’s like you’ve been singing them your whole life. On  Blue Rev,  Alvvays prove they were the ones all along. –Cat Zhang

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify

Animal Collective: Time Skiffs

With  Time Skiffs  and its accompanying tour, Animal Collective—for years in the 2000s, the most interesting and unpredictable band in indie rock—made yet another transformation into something they’d never quite been before: an  actual indie rock band. Burbling samples and chantlike vocals still abounded, but here too was a bass guitar, a full drum kit instead of the usual collection of floor toms and electronic triggers, a set of songs that follow familiar contours of chorus and verse. The relatively straightforward setup seemed to rejuvenate a band whose recent albums tended toward knotty inwardness, shaking loose the sense of exuberant discovery that animates their best work. –Andy Cush

Arctic Monkeys: The Car

“I’m keeping on my costume,” Alex Turner croons halfway through  The Car , “and calling it a writing tool.” A string quartet does its stately dance behind him; a ghost of a backing vocalist appears and then flickers away. That lyric could be a mission statement for the Arctic Monkeys in 2022, spinning rock albums as elaborate genre fictions. If  Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino echoed J.G. Ballard’s  Vermilion Sands  stories, chronicling disaffected characters at an interstellar resort,  The Car  is more like  Concrete Island  or  High-Rise : science-fiction of the present. The arrangements are sumptuous to the point of being uncanny; the lyrics filled with jet skis, simulation cartridges, and spies. Beneath the artifice and deception lies naked yearning: For Turner and company, donning a costume reveals as many truths as it obscures. –Andy Cush

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

Beth Orton: Weather Alive

Each track on Beth Orton’s eighth album—the first one she self-produced—feels prompted by a forecast: One a warm, rainy night; another a rocky coastline socked in by fog; or a gray countryside bracing for snow. Funded by a personal bank loan Orton took out after she was dropped by her label,  Weather Alive ’s slow-moving atmospheric systems carry her memory back to times of grief, solitude, and unhealthy self-medication. (Orton summed up her album nicely: “It’s heavy as fuck.”) Amid a palette of muted trumpets, hushed drums, and dampened piano, Orton’s voice crackles and pops out of these songs, like little orange embers. Nothing feels forced out or jammed together; it’s perfectly sturdy, and just a little creaky. –Jeremy D. Larson

The Beths: Expert in a Dying Field

The Beths’ third album is less a relationship autopsy than a painstaking vivisection: a razor-sharp scalpel dissecting a love that’s slowly fading out on the operating table. Songwriter Liz Stokes throws caution to the wind, daring to archive every messy detail and new discovery—emerging doubts, backslide fantasies, leering regrets—with near-scientific honesty and hypermelodic abandon. Trading in their last scraps of punk to hone their newfound instincts for lean, clean power-pop, the band turns the painful clarity of post-breakup anguish into one addictive headrush after another. –Phillipe Roberts

Big Thief: Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You

Big Thief have always been defined by the interplay between folksy singer-guitarist Adrianne Lenker and her expansive, improvisatory group. In 2019, they released a pair of albums,  U.F.O.F. and  Two Hands , that seemed to map the range of their sound, from airy and ethereal to ragged and visceral. Three years later, the 20-song double album  Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You brings all their breathless styles together, and then some: Consider it contemporary Brooklyn indie rock’s answer to the Beatles’  White Album or Prince’s  Sign o’ the Times . Stretching into cracked trip-hop, country hoedowns, and something involving icicles as percussion,  Dragon suggested that the limits to what they could do within this framework have yet to be glimpsed. –Marc Hogan

Black Country, New Road: Ants From Up There

It’s almost too apt that the making of an album so fixated on departures ended with its focal creator giving notice to the rest of the band, as singer Isaac Wood did just days before Black Country, New Road released this sophomore triumph. Wood makes the most of his grand finale, packing this sprawling canvas with sorrowful, often bitterly funny musings. Over carnivalesque post-rock as dense and cathartic as his prose, he sings each regret as if he’s Hamlet addressing Yorick’s hoisted skull. Now that’s how you make an exit. –Evan Rytlewski

Rough Trade

Black Midi: Hellfire

As Black Midi’s compositions have grown ever more demanding and unhinged, so have the characters that guide us through them. Barely a moment of  Hellfire  passes without a virtuosic time-signature change or jarring orchestral interjection. Vocalists Geordie Greep and Cameron Picton spend much of their third album berating ostensible lessers: “idiots,” “nonentities,” people “as useless as lids on a fish’s eyes.” But Black Midi’s real sympathies clearly lie with the objects of their narrators’ imperious disregard. The bludgeoning absurdism of the music evokes a world where fresh debasements lie around every corner, planted by the indifference and contempt of those with real power. And the lyrics—shouted exhortations from a maniacal ship captain, a media-obsessed murderer, the literal devil—add up to a critique that implicates even the band members themselves: Never trust the man with the microphone. –Andy Cush

Run for Cover

Camp Cope: Running With the Hurricane

On their third album,  Running With the Hurricane , the Australian trio stand firm at the center of a storm, confident in their strength and in a sound that crosses their punk roots with a soft twang. On tracks like “The Mountain” and “Caroline,” they exude tender openness and discover newfound resolve. “There’s no other way to go,” Georgia Maq sings on the title track. “The only way out is up.” –Quinn Moreland

caroline: caroline

In the mid-’00s indie scene, drunk on Sufjan Stevens, Belle and Sebastian, and university-level quantities of beer, it sometimes seemed like no band was complete without at least seven members, a violin, and a glockenspiel. The lowercase UK eight-piece caroline revived that pre-Great Recession period’s beautifully doomed optimism on their self-titled debut album, which calls to mind the post-rock intro from Los Campesinos’ “You! Me! Dancing!” in its vast instrumental stretches, along with the cathartic grandeur of Black Country, New Road in its quavering team vocals. Colored by pensive Midwest emo and creaky British folk, it’s a sprawling testament that, no matter how much may have changed over the past few presidential administrations, a collective imagination can still achieve transcendence. –Marc Hogan

Mexican Summer

Cate Le Bon: Pompeii

Faith gets people into all kinds of trouble across  Pompeii , the lockdown-era excavation by Welsh seeker Cate Le Bon.  The heavens’ inscrutability sends her out of her mind ,  no relic can hold her pain ,  God’s routine is good for nothing , and  iconography is a con . (Not that she ever stood a chance in the first place: “I was born guilty as sin to a mother guilty as hell,” she sings on “Cry Me Old Trouble.”) To dodge these disappointments, Le Bon suggests, we must learn to embrace ambiguity and to “trust in love, just as you are,” as she intones in the album’s opening words.  Pompeii is spectral and sensuous, playful and ruined, like Roxy Music performing “Avalon” on a flickering black-and-white television set—majestically open-ended art rock that exerts an unyielding grip. –Laura Snapes

The Flenser

Chat Pile: God’s Country

God’s Country  might be unbearable if it weren’t so funny. Oklahoma City sludge-noise band Chat Pile’s debut album deals in extreme bleakness: tales of violence and societal collapse, riffs that sound like they’re on the verge of throwing up. Still, there is something sly—and even a little silly—about these songs that somehow heightens the album’s urgency even more. It’s most obvious in “grimace_smoking_weed.jpg,” where the purple McDonald’s mascot appears as a hallucination during a drug-fueled suicidal episode. But it’s also there in “Why,” the album’s most straightforward political critique. “Why do people have to live outside when there are buildings all around us?” asks singer Raygun Busch, his exaggerated matter-of-factness underscoring one of the album’s major themes: America’s oppression and neglect of its most vulnerable residents isn’t just cruel, it’s absurd. –Andy Cush

Positive Jams / Thirty Tigers

Craig Finn: A Legacy of Rentals

Plenty of songwriters have attempted to wrap their heads around the pandemic—its grand, unifying effects and its incalculable damage. But has anyone hit as close to home as Craig Finn with “The Year We Fell Behind”? The highlight of the Hold Steady frontman’s fifth and finest solo album, it’s a beautiful, heartbroken portrait of two people locked in a dimly lit apartment and a cycle of repetitive, dead-end arguments: “I was trying to bring up any other topic,” he sings, just before giving in. Throughout  A Legacy of Rentals , Finn leads us through these familiar scenes of desperation—not to preach or point a way out, but to remind us that we’re never as alone as we may feel. –Sam Sodomsky

Destroyer: Labyrinthitis

Dan Bejar has long been a master of dislocation, and on  Labyrinthitis , his 13th album as Destroyer, his songwriting hits some profoundly chaotic new peaks. On “June,” a six-and-a-half-minute disco-rap odyssey, his cast of characters includes an idiotic snow angel and a Cubist judge. “Tintoretto, It’s For You” reimagines the Italian painter as some sort of skulking creature of the night. Then, on “Eat the Wine, Drink the Bread,” he describes a conversation between dogs before unleashing a put-down for the ages: “Everything you just said/Was better left unsaid.” It’s all deliberately obscure, and in that obscurity lies beautiful clarity. –Sophie Kemp

20 Buck Spin

Dream Unending: Song of Salvation

Song of Salvation  stands as one of 2022’s most daring metal albums and one of its most rewarding psychedelic experiences. On one level, you can listen for the expert songcraft of guitarist Derrick Vella and drummer/vocalist Justin DeTore, who shift gracefully from gloomy post-rock to guttural death-doom to their ghostly, depressive vision of jazz fusion. Or you can surrender completely to the music, losing sight of its moving parts and becoming part of its swirling landscape—a corner of the universe that now belongs entirely to these two artists. –Sam Sodomsky

Double Double Whammy

Florist: Florist

The fourth album from understated indie rockers Florist lands like two decks of hand-crafted playing cards being lovingly shuffled together. One half is a collection of quietly grand folk songs, the other is a stack of ambient fragments sneakily loaded with magnetic, microscopic details that resembles frontwoman  Emily A. Sprague’s solo releases . When they dovetail, acoustic reflections sidle up against tiny electrical currents crackling through nature, like fireflies in a humid forest. –Steven Arroyo

Gilla Band: Most Normal

If you’ve ever seen Gilla Band live, you know that silence is a warning sign. The Dublin quartet, touted as post-punks with noise proclivities, structure its songs more like EDM sadists. On their latest album  Most Normal , bassist Daniel Fox and guitarist Alan Duggan stretch their instruments to distorted and squealing extremes, shaping colossal slabs of racket. Then they tear it all down to reveal Adam Faulkner’s clacking, elemental snare. Dara Kiely—who rants like a self-appointed prophet teetering on a high ledge—is the rare vocalist who understands that he isn’t always the star of a song. On “Capgras,” his screams are devoured by surges of static. On opener “The Gum,” he sounds more like a malfunctioning machine being dismembered by Duggan’s shrapnel guitar pulses. It’s as if Gilla Band have created a trapdoor to some festering industrial hell—and they know just when to open and close it. –Madison Bloom

Dead Oceans

Mitski: Laurel Hell

Has exhaustion ever sounded as horribly seductive as it does on Mitski’s sixth album?  Laurel Hell was the record that Mitski didn’t want to make: In 2019, she was spent by the success of  Be the Cowboy and withdrew from music. But it was the only record she  could make, a wearily gorgeous work of dark synth lines, droning guitars, and semi-industrial noise. The album centers around the remarkable one-two punch of “The Only Heartbreaker” and “Love Me More,” two songs so alive with pop zest they seem to have arrived from the hit parade of a parallel universe 1986. –Ben Cardew

MJ Lenderman: Boat Songs

On a sonic level, no rock album in 2022 felt quite as cozy as  Boat Songs. Everything at Asheville, North Carolina singer-songwriter MJ Lenderman’s disposal—his electric guitar tone, his distorted vocals, those thwacking snare drums—blends into a satisfying whole, like a particularly crunchy bite into a grilled cheese sandwich. But what makes  Boat Songs  transcend mere indie-rock comfort food is Lenderman’s songwriting, which weaves together poetic hallucinations with unglamorous imagery of daily life. When he sings that the food at a recent dinner with friends was great, “if only for being homemade,” you know he means it. In fact, you can almost taste it. –Sam Sodomsky

Moin: Paste

Each song on  Paste , the latest album from the forward-thinking post-hardcore trio Moin, has the structure of a bold, hand-crafted collage. Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead, also known for their work as electronic duo Raime, neatly tear vocal samples from ’80s spoken word albums in place of traditional singing, and then stick those fragments onto craggy guitar passages. They splice in atmospheric synth presets while drummer Valentina Magaletti colors around the outlines with splashy percussion.  Paste is a composite of such layering; some edges sound rugged and ripped, others cleanly trimmed. Like painters energizing a piece with a sudden slash of color, Moin can calibrate a song’s tone with one meticulously selected detail. –Madison Bloom

Nilüfer Yanya: PAINLESS

Time follows feeling on Nilüfer Yanya’s second album: The urgent arpeggios on highlight “stabilise” match the manic all-nighter the British singer-songwriter details in its lyrics, and by the time the drums drop out on the bridge, she’s practically flying. There are whooshing heartbreaks propelled forward by sharp breakbeats, and languid ones that slink alongside alien synths. All the while, Yanya keeps the album’s steady pace with her virtuosic guitar and coolly disciplined vocals. When she finally sinks into the relaxed comfort of closer “anotherlife,” it’s akin to a runner’s afterglow—an elevated heartbeat melting into a deep stretch, as she takes in the marathon she just finished. –Arielle Gordon

Northern Spy

Office Culture: Big Time Things

Office Culture are adept students of the cerebral-but-heartfelt school of pop, building on the legacy of romantic sophisticates (or is that sophisticated romantics?) like the Blue Nile, Prefab Sprout, and Destroyer circa  Kaputt . Their third album,  Big Time Things , is their plushest yet, lacquering the Brooklyn quartet’s ambient ECM synth-pop with strings and horns. But it’s also their tenderest and most intimate: “Baby, no more games of telephone/Saying coded things in whispered tones,” sings Winston Cook-Wilson (a former Pitchfork contributor), and yet those are exactly the structured forms of play he’s up to, slipping his twisty melodies through a hushed disquiet that’s as piercing as it is cryptic. –Marc Hogan

Triple Crown

Oso Oso: Sore Thumb

On  Sore Thumb , Jade Lilitri offers a nonstop sugar rush of power-pop melodies, suggesting that even downtrodden emo kids deserve Gatorade-fueled hangs where you laugh so hard you cry. Oso Oso use every tool at their disposal—multi-tracked harmonies, tinkering piano, acoustic guitar fit for a Sugar Ray song—to give songs like “computer exploder” and “father tracy” that warm, fuzzy feeling. “Some days a sound mind sounds like high maintenance,” Lilitri sings, spinning the negative into a positive. Happiness can be hard work, but  Sore Thumb posits it doesn’t always have to be. –Nina Corcoran

Saddle Creek

Palm: Nicks and Grazes

Are you sick and tired of hearing the same time signatures all the time? Are simple chord changes dragging you down? Palm fight the tyranny of the familiar-sounding with  Nicks and Grazes , a wigged-out psych-rock album made almost entirely of zigs and zags. The band’s language descends loosely from Liars or Frank Zappa—noisy, proggy, zany—but hearing Palm just talk amongst themselves is part of the fun. Every sound feels like its DNA has been rearranged either digitally or physically (or both) for the sole purpose of being anything but boring. If it seems incredibly bewildering at first, spend some time with the record, give it a little patience: It might just become regular bewildering. –Jeremy D. Larson

Plains: I Walked With You a Ways

Vocal harmony is at the heart of I Walked With You a Ways , the first album from Katie Crutchfield and Jess Williamson under the name Plains. “People always react to harmony as a listener, but for anyone who sings, the most satisfying feeling on Earth is to sing harmony with somebody,” Crutchfield  explains . Bonding over their love for country music and the twangy stars of their youth—among them Shania Twain, the Chicks, and Trisha Yearwood—the pair trades off heartfelt songs of hope, heartache, and redemption with warm, easygoing melodies. Together, they crafted an album that makes the best of their mutual interests. –Allison Hussey

Sharon Van Etten:  We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong

As wildfires scorched the landscape around her Los Angeles home in 2020, Sharon Van Etten became overwhelmed. The weight of climate disaster, the pandemic, parenthood, and life in a precarious music industry had left her wondering about the accumulated outcomes of her life’s choices. As she sifted through answers, she started work on  We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong at her home studio. Throughout her sixth record, she plunges into the unknown, with cavernous instrumentation that reflects the depths of her anxieties. Instead of collapsing beneath the mayhem of modern times, however,  We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong reaches out of the darkness and toward a more tranquil way of being. –Allison Hussey

The Smile: A Light for Attracting Attention

The Smile’s debut resembles a dossier of the sounds and themes favored by Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood throughout their more famous band’s long career, but recording under a different moniker seemingly allowed the pair to escape the paralyzingly high expectations of a new Radiohead album. There’s the familiar doomsaying about contemporary society and those spectral melodies that suspend and fall like snow illuminated beneath a streetlight, but also a conceptual playfulness, like “You Will Never Work in Television Again”’s sneering kiss-off to famous perverts. Coming from a different point of view, Yorke and Greenwood find renewed urgency—and seize upon it like young men who’ve never once been burdened with their own reputation. –Jeremy Gordon

Soccer Mommy: Sometimes, Forever

From her very first bedroom recordings, Sophie Allison has wrung every ounce of feeling out of her Stratocaster with minimal adornment, the reverb on her vocals emanating outward like a ghost floating through empty space. But where earlier albums found a woman  drowning in her own emotions,  Sometimes, Forever  reveals that Allison has learned how to swim. She writes the hell out of a hook, whether while holding a candle in the dark (“newdemo”) or aiming a double-barrel at a lover (“Shotgun”). And even though she’s traded in her bedroom for a multi-million-dollar studio and an assist from synth sorcerer Oneohtrix Point Never, she's retained her signature acerbic wit. Against richly textured arrangements that have swelled to match her ambition, she's never sounded more sure of herself. –Matthew Ismael Ruiz

Epitaph / Secret Voice

Soul Glo: Diaspora Problems

Hardcore is the sound of mortal urgency, of one band dodging obstacles only they can see, at a speed no one could possibly maintain. Part of what makes riotous Philadelphia band Soul Glo’s  Diaspora Problems so powerful is how raw and real those obstacles are—cyclical poverty, emotional abuse, the ever-present threat of institutional violence—and how completely vocalist Pierce Jordan turns himself inside out in response, howling and screaming and rapping about generational trauma and the harrowing realities of life as a Black American in a militarized police state. Despite the subject matter,  Diaspora Problems  feels celebratory, not grim: a scream of pain that testifies, above everything else, to an ironclad will to live. –Jayson Greene

Special Interest: Endure

The tradition of punks making unvarnished pop is vast, but no one has done it like Special Interest, tying in technoise textures, pop-house vocals, and rap cadences while putting hooks inside of screams. On its astounding third full-length, the New Orleans band polishes and chisels its once-blistering sound into a force more palatable and anthemic, but also much more confrontational.  Endure  is a fiercely original experiment, a world where pleasure and fight entangle into a liberationist menage of club fog, Telfar bags, and discomfiting truths demanding that we “burn it down to build it again.” –Jenn Pelly

Sun’s Signature:  Sun’s Signature EP

Starting with her influential albums as frontwoman for Cocteau Twins in the 1980s and on through her scattered appearances as a solo artist, Elizabeth Fraser’s voice has stood for otherworldly elegance. The lush psych-rock on the debut EP from Sun’s Signature, her duo with romantic partner Damon Reece, is still plenty spacey and stately, but it is also endearingly earthy. Just listen to that iconic voice, warmer and more approachable now, nestled with waltzing timpani, harp, and calliope-like keys as Fraser sings, “Daughter, I kiss you.”  Heaven or Las Vegas ? Here, the destination is more like a fairy cottage in a misty Scottish moor. –Marc Hogan

Undeath:  It’s Time... To Rise From the Grave

Come for the punishing death metal, stay for the sick jokes. Rochester quintet Undeath’s second album  It’s Time... To Rise From the Grave is teeming with brutal kick drum and saw-toothed guitar riffs. But listen closely to vocalist Alexander Jones—who sounds like he’s gargling with gravel—and you’ll also notice nightmarish nursery rhymes (“D-e-a-d, with them I procreate”), etiquette tips for dining on human remains, and a section dedicated to corpse-based arts and crafts. On the scorching “Human Chandelier,” he growls about a serial killer-cum-interior decorator who spends his evenings delicately joining filaments and bone sockets to fashion a hanging trophy. Undeath have a sense of humor, albeit a morbid one. –Madison Bloom

Wednesday:  Mowing the Leaves Instead of Piling ’em Up  

Wednesday’s covers album,  Mowing the Leaves Instead of Piling ’em Up , has no business being so great. Across nine tracks, the Asheville group run through tributes to their influences, from frontwoman Karly Hartzman’s woozy hound dog rendition of Gary Stewart’s “She’s Actin’ Single (I’m Drinkin Double)” to guitarist MJ Lenderman’s sludgy take on Smashing Pumpkins’ “Perfect.” With nods to Southern rock legends Drive-By Truckers and rising New York shredders Hotline TNT in between, Wednesday expand on their sound without sacrificing their own magic. –Quinn Moreland

Wet Leg:  Wet Leg

As the unofficial torchbearers of the 2000s blog-rock revival, Wet Leg relish in succumbing to the digital realm, with its deadpan sarcasm, meme accounts, and inside-joke-filled DMs: “It feels nice/I’m scrolling, I’m scrolling,” the UK duo confess on their debut LP.  Wet Leg is rife with glitzy post-punk spirals (“Angelica”), washed-out fuzz (“Being in Love”), and disco-indebted drumming (“Wet Dream”). But as detached as their  Mean Girls  references and keyboard commands sound, their music is conversely spirited, summoning a collective burst of energy akin to the one toddlers get just before bedtime. By the time they let out an eardrum-shattering scream on “Ur Mum,” it couldn’t be clearer: Wet Leg stopped giving a fuck a long time ago and so should you. –Nina Corcoran

Weyes Blood: And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow

How do you mourn the loss of what we’re all still living through? Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering has spent the last few years wrestling with difficult questions about the human species’ slow descent into climate apocalypse, writing tender ballads that situate individual melancholy within a larger politics of collective grief. The second in a series of three albums dedicated to this theme,  And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow  wades further into the lonesome nostalgia that has long been among the songwriter’s strengths, finding moments of near-religious ecstasy at the depths of her despair. It’s a eulogy for a dying world, born from a hope that the next one will be better. –Rob Arcand

By Nina Corcoran

By Matthew Strauss

By Madison Bloom

• History of cooperation
• Areas of cooperation
• Procurement policy
• Useful links
• Becoming a supplier
• Procurement
• Rosatom newsletter

© 2008–2024Valtiollinen Rosatom-ydinvoimakonserni

• Rosatom Global presence
• Rosatom in region
• For suppliers
• Preventing corruption
• Press centre

BN-800 fast reactor undergoes the first full refueling with MOX fuel

• 24 February, 2021 / 16:00

This site uses cookies. By continuing your navigation, you accept the use of cookies. For more information, or to manage or to change the cookies parameters on your computer, read our Cookies Policy. Learn more

• Victor Mukhin

Victor M. Mukhin was born in 1946 in the town of Orsk, Russia. In 1970 he graduated the Technological Institute in Leningrad. Victor M. Mukhin was directed to work to the scientific-industrial organization "Neorganika" (Elektrostal, Moscow region) where he is working during 47 years, at present as the head of the laboratory of carbon sorbents.     Victor M. Mukhin defended a Ph. D. thesis and a doctoral thesis at the Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology of Russia (in 1979 and 1997 accordingly). Professor of Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology of Russia. Scientific interests: production, investigation and application of active carbons, technological and ecological carbon-adsorptive processes, environmental protection, production of ecologically clean food.   

Title : Active carbons as nanoporous materials for solving of environmental problems

Quick links.

• Conference Brochure
• Tentative Program

Nina Sorokina

Age, biography and wiki.

Nina Sorokina was born on 13 May, 1942 in Elektrostal, Moscow Oblast, Russian SFSR, USSR [now Russia], is an Actress. Discover Nina Sorokina's Biography, Age, Height, Physical Stats, Dating/Affairs, Family and career updates. Learn How rich is She in this year and how She spends money? Also learn how She earned most of Nina Sorokina networth?

We recommend you to check the complete list of Famous People born on 13 May. She is a member of famous Actress with the age 69 years old group.

Nina Sorokina Height, Weight & Measurements

At 69 years old, Nina Sorokina height not available right now. We will update Nina Sorokina's Height, weight, Body Measurements, Eye Color, Hair Color, Shoe & Dress size soon as possible.

Dating & Relationship status

She is currently single. She is not dating anyone. We don't have much information about She's past relationship and any previous engaged. According to our Database, She has no children.

Nina Sorokina Net Worth

Her net worth has been growing significantly in 2022-2023. So, how much is Nina Sorokina worth at the age of 69 years old? Nina Sorokina’s income source is mostly from being a successful Actress. She is from Russia. We have estimated Nina Sorokina's net worth , money, salary, income, and assets.

Nina Sorokina Social Network

She was an actress, known for Bolshoi Ballet '67 (1965) and Anna Karenina (1975).

Nina Sorokina was born on May 13, 1942 in Elektrostal, Moscow Oblast, Russian SFSR, USSR.

Celebs Wiki

Nina sorokina fans also viewed:, asha sachdev, brümilda van rensburg, semra özdamar, svetlana orlova (actress), paige o'hara, glynnis o'connor, cindy o'callaghan, makdah murah, tere marichal, swarna mallawarachchi.