The Best EPs & Splits of 2022

The extended play and split format are for discovery and looking forward to what comes next. Be it new artists bubbling up from beneath the surface, favorites furthering where they’ve already been or will be going, or the mutual inspiration between two parallel creative worlds, this year’s list include an eclectic palette of sounds in evolving form. Here are the Best EPs and Splits of 2022…

AKAI SOLO – Body Feeling [Backwoodz Studioz]

Body Feeling is AKAI SOLO’s first team-up with Backwoodz Studioz and serves as a prelude to his other standout in this year’s followup full-length, Spirit Roaming. The Brooklyn MC’s heady nature takes the opportunity here to touch the surface before sinking itself deep into the thought void, with production from a myriad of collaborators in Preservation, Nicolas Craven, Child Actor, and Argov churning the waters for AKAI to flow through existentially in what feels like the art of painting life with words over a surrealist, soulful beat ebullience.

ASkySoBlack – Autumn In the Water [New Morality Zine]

In the many splintering limbs of hardcore, ASkySoBlack are growing into several directions at once, and yet still come to the same conclusive idea that heavy music is at its most resounding impact when it’s as multi-dimensional as the emotions that envelope it. Pressing play on Autumn In the Water, the five-piece continue what they started on last year’s debut EP, What Is Yet To Come?, in tearing through the fabric of the heaviest atmospheres as their sound transforms the scene’s elemental form.

awakebutstillinbed & for your health – hymns for the scorned [Twelve Gauge Records]

hymns for the scorned, a split EP between awakebutstillinbed and for your health, make both band’s sound exponentially bigger than respective debuts. Like MTV2 peak commercial emocore big. Both mastered by Jack Shirley and with fyh’s half produced by Chris Teti of the World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die (who maybe the only studio guru besides Will Yip doing scaled-up production justice for today’s current of modern punk and hardcore bands,) these are only hints at how both artists have not only burned down former walls, but are now building towers with their furious elegies.

Big City – Liquid Times [K Records / Perennial]

As the combined creative forces of Katayoon Yousefbigloo, guitarist of buzzy-in-their-own-right noise pop bands Puzzlehead and Hotline TNT, alongside underground dance experimentalist Davey Biddle of Copyright Linda Fox, the duo’s debut EP, Liquid Times, is a certifiably sick trip for late night minds wandering and needing to be warped where you will encounter transfixing elements adjacent to the time-collapsing sensations of SVIIB-esque shoegaze, the light speed of trance, and grooving lounge sax intermittently apparition in pop form.

Burial – Antidawn [Hyperdub]

Consider ANTIDAWN’s Burial reset. After having prominently defined the last several years’ of experimental electronic music through bleary, romantically broken soundscapes, the enigmatic producer has retreated into an ambient wilderness i a listen devoid of kinetic waves and more so focused on the body in its fully present moment. The interpretation of it is more so malleable and upon the individual to feel their way through, although the wind effects, sparkle of echoes, chiming, frigid prisms, glow of hymns in crackling nightlight passing, and ceremonial ascent through crystallizing flakes very much venture into an alternate projection of this world that mirrors its tunnels.

Ela Minus & DJ Python – ♡ [Smugglers Way]

After rising against through movement sounds and strobing club lights on 2020′s breakthrough debut, acts of rebellion, Ela Minus softens the bulbs in a reprieve for personal space and meditation alongside fellow NYC-based producer DJ Python on the collaborative EP, ♡. Inside voice vapors through an immaculately designed space of peacefully meditating ambient pools and a well-paced glitch in the timeline, the pair of electronic artists remind you what it is to fall in love and stay in that feeling eternally.

Glitterer – Fantasy Four [ANTI-]

With the listen being dedicated to Riley Gale of Power Trip and Iron Age’s Wade Allison, Glitterer’s latest EP, Fantasy Four, lives in four songs which find Ned Russin in the throes of asking why to the sky and maybe hoping there’s a chance on another timeline that he’ll see his departed friends again. Musically, it cuts beneath the short-form glitch and static core of what’s come before it, and though the downtrodden waves toss his brain around roughly, it also taps into a deeper side within Glitterer’s psyche that will make it interesting to hear where these questions will take the band’s sound next.

Home Is Where & Record Setter – dissection lessons [Topshelf Records]

In their own breaths, Home Is Where and Record Setter are harsh and necessary on their split, dissection lesson. As two breakthrough bands advancing the forms of screamo and experimental hardcore well beyond an already unconventional atmosphere, they’re also two bands fronted by trans women who are loudly making their presence and their individual experiences known in a world that continues to try to hinder their existence. Home Is Where over-intensifies even last year’s standout “assisted harakari” with a righteous anger toward the rise in violence against members of the trans community. Meanwhile, Record Setter’s is set against a beautifully despondent Denton, Texas backdrop and is a awakening for the rest of us led by Judith Mitchell surrounding her own experience with transitioning, depression, and living under societal duress.

Hotline TNT – When You Find Out [Poison Rhythm]

Former Weed frontman Will Anderson and his band of cult DIY purists known as Hotline TNT carry on with the out of body, out of mind noise-pop oxytocin rushes carved out on last year’s breakthrough debut full-length, Nineteen In Love, with four more tracks of fuzz-indulgent spinouts that tangle the lines between colorful swaths of indie rock, hardcore’s coarse edges, and shoegaze’s daydream recollections. When You Find Out may hiss in cassette-quality feedback compared to the clearer visibility of its predecessor, but Anderson’s refinement in his songwriting craft continues to absorb rooms much bigger as time goes by.

Jivebomb – Primitive Desires [Flatspot Records]

Sometimes music – especially hardcore music – has the ability to destroy everything around it from the inside-out. Primitive Desires, Jivebomb’s heavy-handed debut EP, offers those emotions in combustible motion within minutes as vocalist Kat, guitarist Harper, bassist Ethan, and drummer Mees scourge the soundboard with scathing vocals and heated electricity from self-immolation. Carnal instincts kick in, and then destroy societal structures like they’re coming at it like an inside job.

Jobber – Hell In A Cell [Exploding In Sound Records]

Fans of pro-wrestling know that behind every great persona or gimmick, there’s a human behind it all bringing those characters to life in front of them. Jobber is kind of like that, but for indie rock and wrestling nerds who enjoy their storylines being a mirror of their own lives, too. Helmed by Kate Meizner, who has spent her musical career playing in live bands for Snail Mail, Potty Mouth, and more recently, Maneka, she steps out to the front to lead a faction (including former Speedy Ortiz guitarist / current Hellrazor frontman Mike Falcone) of grunge and ‘90s alternative riff rockers on the Brooklyn band’s debut EP, Hell In A Cell, that goes toe-to-toe with the daily grind inside the squared circle, and attempts to avoid submission.

Mo Dotti – Guided Imagery [Smoking Room Records]

Mo Dotti’s second EP, Guided Imagery, delivers with six solid singles-worthy tracks that concentrate woozy color forms with lush pop and a knack of heaven-scent melody that naturally boosts serotonin despite any forecast. That vocalist and guitarist Gina Negrini, guitarist Guy Valdez, bassist Brian Rodriguez, and drummer Shelly Schimek perform as equals in tandem as well means that no corner of their outweighs the other, which make them a more docile form on the sound, be it climactic sparks, wave-splashed daydreams, or psychedelic detours into the mind.

Mr Twin Sister – Upright and Even [Twin Group]

Upright and Even, a four-song EP recorded in adjacent to its predecessor, Al Mundo Azul, suggests that Mr Twin Sister are still at their best when they’re embracing more uninhibited ambitions. Stretching and contorting their musical limbs further out into dark club spaces with tracks that absorb themselves in ecstasy, a lounge sophisticate and jazz molecularization through Andrea Estella’s guiding light, the New York City groups binds unexpected motions together in a remarkable manner neither still or symmetrical, even if by their own titular definition.

Poorly Drawn House – Home Doesn’t Have Four Walls [Self-released]

Poorly Drawn House are the kind of band who defy any certain clear-cut definition in what to expect from their sound, as the Spartanburg, South Carolina three-piece look to their surrounding darkness only to inform them on their latest EP Home Doesn’t Have Four Walls. There’s a stop-and-start entanglement between loud bursts and deafening silence that would suggest a foundation in slowcore and post-hardcore, but the presence of clarinets and horns throws a wrench of dark free jazz into their music. Spoken word verse, a mournful presence behind them, and field recordings turn the dead leaves of emo and natural experimental elements onto their canvas.

SPEED – GANG CALLED SPEED [Flatspot Records / Last Ride Records]

Sometimes it takes a group of outsiders to be that change, and because SPEED are far removed physically from the hardcore scene’s central roots here in the States – they hail from Sydney, Australia – their vantage point on a certain sound and fury comes from a different perspective. On their breakthrough EP, GANG CALLED SPEED, that’s most apparent in their fast approach on NYC’s gritty past, Los Angeles current fault lines, and whatever is wilding out of Baltimore with hard-grooved riffs and vocalist Jem Siow’s nasty charge into the pit.

Stand Still – In A Moment’s Notice [Daze / Triple B Records]

Born out of Long Island’s storied scene, Stand Still double down on what made last summer’s debut EP, A Practice In Patience, a promising first step. Heart-on-the-sleeve melodic hardcore will always be a full-proof method, with Stand Still’s binding of vocalist Gerry Windus’ personal admissions on tumbled relationships, be it romantic or familial, in lyrical prose behind five tracks – three recorded live to seamless cohesion. Microdosed with anthems in burled riffs and a well-paced headcharge against life’s seasons, In A Moment’s Notice leaves a timeless imprint.

They Are Gutting a Body of Water & A Country Western – An Insult to the Sport [Topshelf Records]

An Insult to the Sport, a split introducing the world at large to the strange wonders of local peers They Are Gutting a Body of Water and A Country Western through Topshelf Records, immerses the soundboard in wavering shoegaze and weirdo pop that flickers in the Phllly spirit of Strange Ranger and Spirit of the Beehive on the former’s first half, and a gonzo take on the slanted and enchanted with the latter. It in turn collectively piques the senses with sonic schisms, be it synthetic or electric, for two rising artists beyond concrete definition who’ve been quietly prolific in the background of the DIY scene, but maybe not for too much longer…

Weeping Icon – Ocelli [Fire Talk]

Born out of the hellscape that was 2020, Ocelli’s purpose in feeding off the anger from those times’ political and social dumpster fire helps Weeping Icon dig deeper into their crass-coated drive, and it burns through their art. Uniform’s Ben Greenburg recording vessel holds the Brooklyn noise-punk band’s collective rage through the dizzying sardonic static, a menacing, industrial warped timeline, and the combustible accelerant, as if to tell the story of that year in three parts that begins in anger and ends with them throwing that dumpster fire right into a bottomless pit.