The 25 Best Latin Albums of 2022: Staff Picks
Written by djfrosty on December 19, 2022
In 2022, Spanish-language music comprised a big chunk of what was being streamed beyond just Spanish-speaking countries and households. This year, Latin – which is defined as music predominantly sung in Spanish – saw a continued steady growth in the U.S. market and across the globe.
Latin’s big year was led by Bad Bunny’s game-changing release Un Verano Sin Ti, which is (of course) included in our 25 favorite Latin albums of this year. The 23-track genre-hopping set became the first all-Spanish album to be ranked No. 1 on the Billboard 200 year-end albums chart, and it also earned the first-ever Grammy nomination for album of the year for an all-Spanish release.
Genre-blurring albums were a trend this year. Perhaps the most experimental was Rosalía’s Motomami, which is impossible to box into one particular style or genre. Instead, the 16-track set, which won album of the year at the Latin Grammys, was an invitation into the Spaniard’s global-spanning inspiration. She isn’t afraid to go on an exploratory journey where jazz and reggaeton can coexist in one song.
That experimental nature was also found in Mexican music albums such as Eslabon Armado’s history-making Nostalgia and Ivan Cornejo’s Dañado. The faces of a new generation of regional Mexican acts, these artists may be labeled as sierreño artists but, at their core, they’re fusing their songs with the sounds (rock, alternative, pop) that inspired them growing up as a Mexican-American kid in the U.S. There was also Natalia Lafourcade’s masterpiece De Todas Las Flores, Romeo Santos’ third installment of his La Formula series and Jorge Drexler’s poignant Tinta y Tiempo.
Here are our 25 favorite Latin albums from this year, in alphabetical order.