We hope the new year meets you all with joy and happiness, and that it will be successful and better in every way than the previous.
2022 has been quite a year for everyone. A lot of bad news has gone through the cycle, but for the most part we’re all keeping on, trying to make it by. So many people have had massive hardships, especially considering events here in Europe. But it’s also been an enlightening year, when we’ve seen people lending hands to each other in such huge and monumental ways.
We at Smartsound Cloud definitely hope 2023 has many good things find their way to you. From the bottom of our hearts, we thank you for all the support you have given us and wish you a very successful year to come.
2022 was an eventful year for us, and we wanted to take the time to share with you the albums we thought were the best. We polled the staff at the office and here were everyone’s favorites:
This album is simply powerful. When you put the music onto anything, it makes it sound absolutely epic. “This is a great help to any project that needs this extra bit of cinematic scale and big powerful orchestral hybrid sound,” says Smartsound team member Simon. It was made by our in-house composer, Nicolai Patricio, who we sat down and had a chat about the music with on an earlier blog. “Once the idea started to take shape,” Nicolai said, “it’d give me energy to finish it because the music in itself is exciting… When your own music is making your hair stand up – that’s exciting.”
This is another album made by one of our in-house composers. Written by Marc Rosenberger, it’s full of beautiful, jazzy riffs and experimental Coltrane-esque stylings. “Jazz Club is right there with them cause it adds such a classy element to the sound palette which we haven’t heard on Smartsound for quite some time,” says Simon.
Though 2021 saw us put so many synthwave tracks out that I even wrote a blog on the genre, in 2022 we released decidedly less. Retro Technology was one of the few that made the cut, taking a lot of cues from horror and science fiction soundtracks to give it a more modern vibe. “Retro Technology was an interesting take on the 80s synth aesthetics, combining it with a modern musical approach,” says Simon. Hannes, another team member, says of the album: “It just hits my nerve, I love the 90s aesthetic synthesizers with their now clearly outdated, almost cheap sounding patches which can get utilized in a lot of creative ways in music production.”
This dark ambient album was perfect to capture the Halloween mood, with all kinds of haunting sounds and weaving drones. “I also enjoyed Sinister Machinations with its Noire-like vibe, very gloomy and yet tense,” says Hannes. The piano sequences were all quite haunting, with distorted guitars and electronic rhythms really making it reminiscent of a noire murder mystery but set sometime in the near future. If you’ve ever heard the masterpiece theme album Outside, by David Bowie, then you’d know the sound that Sinister Machinations captures expertly.
A classic ambient album with much lighter tones than Sinister Machinations. It transports the audience to much more heavenly and contemplative places with its cosmic waves, bouncing arps, and pumping progressions. “Another one I liked was Earthbound with its driving but melancholic vibe,” says Hannes of the album. Check out “Wanderer” for a real, inspired ambient anthem, or “Retired” for a more Lo-Fi exploration.
We hope you’ve enjoyed all the albums from this past year and find a couple more from our list of favorites this year! Remember, that all our tracks are fully customizable. You can change the length, mix, and variation to match it to your exact needs. Try out our app today and take advantage of our free tracks as well!
