Here me out and forget about Harry Styles for just one second.

I get it, I’m probably asking the impossible. But aside from the British pop icon’s smash hit “As It Was“, how many new hits released this year come to mind? If you can count those hits on more than one hand, you’re either severely misguided or you need to write a strongly worded letter to your local pop radio station to pick up the slack and/or give you a job.

Pop music is by no means dying, but the start to 2022 found the genre ignoring its alarm to wake up from hibernation. Just take a look at the Billboard Hot 100 and you’ll find that a miniscule percentage of the nation’s top songs were released within the last 3 months. The general public is feeding off 2021 hits, but the summer of 2022 can’t survive off of last year’s scraps. It may sound like a cheesy JG Wentworth commercial, but we need new hits and we need them now.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s no reason to write the year’s musical potential off just yet. There’s overwhelming anticipation for dozens of albums that will soundtrack the rest of 2022, including new albums from Kendrick Lamar, Maggie Rogers, Miranda Lambert, BTS, and many, many more. And yes, thank you for your patience, you can resume thinking about Harry Style again – his new album Harry’s House is set to release at the end of May.

In the meantime, while the pop universe has been hitting the snooze button on 2022, the FeenyFresh universe has not. The following playlist contains 40 of my favorite songs released over the past three months. As always, the songs are in no particular order with a restriction of only one song per artist. From golden hour-worthy songs like COIN’s “I Think I Met You In A Dream” or Rex Orange County’s “OPEN A WINDOW“, to workout playlist jams like Denzel Curry’s “X-Wing” or Avril Lavigne’s “F.U.“, to solo dance party theme music like Goth Babe’s “Running Around” or Alfie Templeton’s “Broken“, there’s something for every mood you’ve been dying to underline with a new song. Cheers to another year of off-brand hits, subtly slandering your local radio station, and discovering great new music!