Whether you prefer buying beats on Bandcamp or raving in the woods—or you’re equally down with both—this was a great year for electronic music. House music continued to evolve, the UK workhorse genre jungle popped up in excellent ways, drum machine apps had a breakthrough, and disco vibes permeated techno. Overall, the weirdos got weirder and the drums got deeper. Rejoice!
The following list of songs and albums, sorted alphabetically, includes electronic releases found on Pitchfork’s main year-end tallies as well as an additional 20 records that did not make those lists but are just as worth your time.
Listen to selections from this list on our Spotify playlist and Apple Music playlist.
A.A.L (Against All Logic): 2012 - 2017
Throughout this decade, Nicolas Jaar has cultivated a brand of shadowy electronic music that aims to subvert, challenge, and disrupt everything we know about electronic music. These brainy exercises are great at poking at our preconceptions, but by consciously avoiding repetition, sticky melodies, and cresting dynamics, they can also come across as impenetrable, distant. In this context, 2012 - 2017, a compilation of tracks under Jaar’s A.A.L (Against All Logic) moniker, plays like a dancefloor-filling complement to all those head games—a record for the body. It’s one of the most accessible things he’s ever released, a contemporary house album stuffed with bass that thumps where you expect it to and glorious soul samples that wail to the heavens. And yet, no one would confuse this album with something by, say, Disclosure. Jaar still manages to work in some of his offbeat moves, like the pointillistic drums on “I Never Dream,” or the subterranean clatter that shades the ebullient piano chords of “Cityfade.” Jaar is a genius when it comes to upending dance music traditions, but here, he’s just as masterful at honoring them. –Ryan Dombal
Listen: A.A.L (Against All Logic), “Cityfade”
Aphex Twin: “T69 Collapse”
It’s hard to think of another electronic artist who’s enjoyed a late-career rejuvenation like Richard D. James. Instead of glum, self-plagiarizing stagnation, his artistic middle age has been a sustained eruption of surprise and delight. Continuing his current run, the Collapse EP bursts its skin with ripening creativity: a feeling of plenitude caught in its vocal snippet that promises to lead the listener to “the land of abundance.”
Opener “T69 Collapse” is an apt herald of the richness within. It starts with the whispery crispness of intricately edited beats, skidding and slipping like a tap-dancer on an oily floor: a flashback to the serene frenzy of late-’90s drill‘n’bass, when James and his IDM comrades strove to beat jungle at its own breakbeat game. But things get really interesting mid-song, when the collapse referenced in the title occurs: a juddering tumble of drums that feels like an astrophysical rupture, time itself swirling down the cosmic plughole. The tune then pulls itself together like reversed film of an explosion, gliding out with feverishly dainty beatwork offset by a typically Aphex pensive melody, daubed in milky synth so tonally smeared it feels like your ears are being pulled out of focus. Twenty-seven years into his recording career and approaching his life’s half-century mark, James exhibits a limber vitality and an evergreen joy in creation that’s as remarkable as it is enviable. –Simon Reynolds
Listen: Aphex Twin, “T69 Collapse”
Bambounou: “VVVVV”
Until this year, the French producer Bambounou was typically known for thundering club tracks fusing techno, bass music, and even IDM and ghetto house. But “VVVVV,” the B-side of his lone EP for Don’t DJ’s Disk label, is altogether different. Its booming drum tones evoke the wood and leather of hand-crafted percussion instruments—a sound far more tactile than your average electronic music—while its loping triplet cadence carves an irregular path through dancefloors more accustomed to 4/4 beats. Fringed with cricket-like chirps, it’s an animistic drum circle masquerading as a DJ tool, and the most hypnotic club track all year. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Bambounou, “VVVVV”
Beta Librae: Sanguine Bond
Beta Librae’s debut album, 2015’s Swope Park, was analog techno with a lo-fi finish, and solid enough. The ambient-leaning 2016 follow-up was more idiosyncratic, and better. The New York artist’s third album marks a major shift: a sullen tangle of drum-machine sequences, dubbed-out effects, and tarnished synths with a sour, metallic taste. An air of mystery pervades its slowed-down beats and sluggish, thickened low end; it’s a reminder that the American underground is making some of the most consistently, grippingly strange techno on the planet right now. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Beta Librae, “Just Drift”
Ciel: Hundred Flowers EP
It’s not hard to feel as if you're drifting off into a dream when listening to Hundred Flowers. Just listen to the almost 10-minute ethereal slow burner “Blo a Wish” or the aeriform arpeggio that Ciel introduces towards the end of “Hundred Flowers Groove.” There’s an undeniable, low-end sense of rhythm that grounds all of the atmospherics at play; Ciel proves to be a master at crafting fluttering songs that still retain some gravity. –Rachel Hahn
Listen: Ciel, “Hundred Flowers Groove”
DJ Healer: Nothing 2 Loose
Corny to a beautiful degree, this album might as well be a techno romantic comedy. Filled with huge, sweeping synth lines, emotional vocal samples, and song titles like “Hopes and Fears” and “Gods Creation,” there is nothing too subtle on Nothing 2 Loose, only grand statements and big sounds. While other artists (admirably!) try to create new directions, German producer DJ Healer doubles down on what we already know. This album sticks its hand in your chest and massages your heart in time to the beat, which is very much 4/4. It’s house music for those with too many feelings to leave the house. –Matthew Schnipper
Listen: DJ Healer, “Hopes and Fears”
DJ Koze: Knock Knock
Many voices float through Knock Knock, like spirits. One of them is the sampled croak of what sounds like a thousand-year-old man. He talks about his kinship with music—how he sells it, listens to it, and plays it during most of his waking hours. In a metaphysical flourish, the old-timer boasts, “Look at my teeth: You see music on it.” The line is a joke, but he means it—and it’s easy to think of this mysterious guru as an avatar for DJ Koze himself. The German DJ, producer, and label owner has spent the last few decades cultivating a parallel musical universe, one based on a collector’s knowledge and a sense of play, where the histories of dance music and hip-hop and psychedelia are all pulled together by the same gravitational force. In this utopia, Knock Knock, a life’s work, plays on a continuous loop, and no one tires of it.
Koze created much of the album in a remote Spanish village, a locale that he has described as “totally different from the desperate big city, where you try to make cool music.” The isolation plays out in Knock Knock’s bespoke frequencies: Each synth wobble is crafted with a watchmaker’s care, every snare hit manicured for maximum swing. And Koze has no truck with of-the-moment trends. The record’s featured vocalists—including Swedish folkie José González, Speech from the ’90s rap group Arrested Development, and modern dancefloor diva Róisín Murphy—are surprising and varied, the product of admiration rather than any type of algorithmic cross-referencing. So we get what could be a lost Van Morrison classic alongside an impossibly soulful Old Kanye-type beat alongside techno built for flying cars, everything holding everything else up. There are no barriers between genres, eras, origins—only freedom. –Ryan Dombal
Listen: DJ Koze, “Illumination“ [ft. Róisín Murphy]
DJ Nigga Fox: Crânio EP
Lisbon’s DJ Nigga Fox (aka Rogério Brandão) has long been one of the stalwarts of the Príncipe label, the bleeding edge of the batida-indebted hybrid sounds spreading outwards from the city’s Afro-Lusophone ghettos. For his debut on Warp, Brandão really gets the room to deepen his dizzying grooves. With help from Angolan percussionist Galiano Neto, Brandão’s gurgling, technicolor compositions gain more texture, and his polyrhythms sound brighter and sharper than ever. –Rachel Hahn
Listen: DJ Nigga Fox, “Sinistro”
Eris Drew / Octo Octa: Devotion EP
Chicago venue Smartbar resident Eris Drew views her DJ sets, in which she expertly mixes breaky rave gems with the occasional birdsong or two, as shamanistic rituals. She’s developed a whole philosophy around what she calls the Motherbeat, a divine feminine energy that she accesses through these mixes. Her debut release, Devotion, a split EP with Octo Octa (aka Maya Bouldry-Morrison) sounds appropriately blissful given these esoteric leanings. Drew contributes two different versions of the charmingly retro sounding “Hold Me,” while Bouldry-Morrison’s “Beam Me Up (To the Goddess Mix)” is the easy highlight, a pure bleepy breakbeat symphony that does justice to the EP’s liner notes: “Each track here was made with ecstatic love energy.” –Rachel Hahn
Listen: Eris Drew, “Hold Me (T4T Embrace Mix)”
Gacha Bakradze: Word Color
Gacha Bakradze’s album begins strikingly with the sound of digitized raindrops. The plinks then break apart like they're being sent through a prism, a cymbal crashes repeatedly, and a ghost voice or two begins to wordlessly narrate. Electronic music, yes, but experimental in nature. The rest of the Georgian producer’s Word Color trips along down a similar path, confused and excited, trying to pry apart different sects of electronic music from the inside. It’s a trickster’s take on the underground’s zeitgeist. –Matthew Schnipper
Listen: Gacha Bakradze, “Prayer”
Helena Hauff: “Hyper-Intelligent Genetically Enriched Cyborg”
In its dark, hypnotic call-and-response of acid squibs and synths jumping over distorted snares, “Hyper-Intelligent Genetically Enriched Cyborg” feels like a peek into the best rooms of techno’s past: the clubs of 1994 Berlin, or the industrial spaces of Cleveland in 1988. But this standout track from Helena Hauff’s excellent second album, Qualm, is rooted firmly in the present, too, down to its title subject matter: This year, pop culture has percolated with paranoia about technology, and, quietly, we’ve already seen futurism realized in gene-modified births. The techno future is here, and if we haven’t spent a lot of time questioning its fancy new tools—who has them, how they should be used—then we ought to. Hauff’s radical politics make it easy to hear this track as a sonification of the mind of such a gene-“cleansed” genius cyborg, as unmoored from humanitarian ethics as the corporations who built it. So listen warily to this siren’s warning. –Daphne Carr
Listen: Helena Hauff, “Hyper-Intelligent Genetically Enriched Cyborg”
Jon Hopkins: Singularity
Jon Hopkins is a master sound manipulator: a bass technician, a texture craftsman, and a pastoral abstractionist. Five years after the release of his breakthrough album, Immunity, the British producer returned with Singularity, which further expands the scope of his heady electronic compositions. Tracks like “Emerald Rush” and “Everything Connected” are designed to translate in peak hours at the club and in meditative headphone sessions alike; songs like “Echo Dissolve” and “Recovery” display Hopkins’ penchant for raw piano, blending his performances with field recordings and digital noise.
Within each song—and the album as a whole—Hopkins paints enormous sonic cliffs and valleys worthy of the psychedelic California desert adventures that inspired the record. It’s this understanding, combined with his earnest quest for spiritual catharsis, that informs every sternum-rattling drop and wistful synthesizer expanse on Singularity. Like all great producers, he knows that a song’s impact is only as great as its dynamic arc. –Noah Yoo
Listen: Jon Hopkins, “Emerald Rush”
Loidis: A Parade, In The Place I Sit, The Floating World (& All Its Pleasures)
From his earliest work as Huerco S. to his 2018 album as Pendant, the evolution of Brian Leeds’ work has represented a shift from clarity to diffuseness—relatively crisp techno beats have turned ambient, and his synths have crumbled like limestone dissolving in a fogbank. But his debut EP as Loidis reverses that process: Its three tracks, one clocking in at a quarter of an hour, foreground rhythm, with the bass-heavy grooves sturdier than anything else in his catalog. The EP stands out for another reason, too: Its rhythms and textures recall the early-2000s minimal techno and microhouse of artists like Vladislav Delay and Thomas Melchior, artists whose influence has waned. In this 33-minute record, you can sense a kind of slippage happening—of tastes rearranging, canons reshaping—and catch a glimpse of where underground techno may be headed in the coming year. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Loidis, “A Parade”
Machine Woman: Residency Tape 2
Some artists treat their studios like bunkers, a refuge from the world outside. Machine Woman, on the other hand, told Resident Advisor she could happily make music surrounded by screaming kids on the bus, tapping away at a free drum-machine app on her phone. You can hear that embrace of chaos in the Russian-born, Berlin-based artist’s four-song EP for the Frankfurt tape label MMODEMM, the result of a month-long studio residency at Künstlerhaus Mousonturm. Whether she’s making clean-lined electro-funk or ruminative piano sketches, her backgrounds are haunted by imperceptible details that compete to distract the ear, like the blast beats that underpin the slo-mo house chug of “Displacement of Mr.Sherman.” On the standout “A machine that is trapped in the Frankfurt’s,” a strip of tape-warped tone flutters nervously above rapid-fire kick drums, butterflies in the stomach of the ghost in the machine. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Machine Woman, “A machine that is trapped in the Frankfurt’s”
Mr. Fingers: Cerebral Hemispheres
Where do you turn, three decades after you basically invented house music? To smooth jazz, apparently, if your name is Larry Heard. The legendary Chicago innovator, also known as Mr. Fingers, outdoes himself with Cerebral Hemispheres, a triple LP of downtempo, jazzy numbers that are fully intoxicating. It still touches on the classic sounds he’s known for, but pours on the samba, the light funk, the radio-friendly disco touches. This is what international men and women of mystery, relaxing on vacation in Bali, or grabbing a deluxe hot cocoa after shredding the Swiss ski slopes, get down to. Join their ranks. –Matthew Schnipper
Listen: Mr. Fingers, “Electron”
Objekt: Cocoon Crush
Sound design in dance music is tricky: it can be a trap door for would-be Foley artists more interested in reverb tails than actual riffs. But Objekt, aka TJ Hertz, lets his interest in the finer points of synthetic sound—the particularities of a plucked coil, the heft of a metal slab dropped on concrete—lead him to rethink techno from the ground up. Instead of simply plugging novel sounds into the same old boom-tick template, Cocoon Crush snakes and meanders, absent-minded and agog, tugged this way and that by intuition alone. Too heavy to scan as ambient, but too freewheeling for conventional dancefloors. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Objekt, “Secret Snake”
Overmono: Whities 019
UK brothers Ed and Tom Russell, who release music as Tessela and Truss respectively, have mined their shared rave history under the name Overmono since 2016. Their latest, Whities 019, came out just last week, and it’s some of the duo’s finest work to date. From the hard-edged rolling breaks of “iii’s Front” to the reverberating textures on “Quadraluv,” the fraternal duo show off the full extent of their range. –Rachel Hahn
Listen: Overmono, “Quadraluv”
Pavel Milyakov: Eastern Strike
The isolated, crystalline trance loops that make up the bulk of Eastern Strike find Pavel Milyakov (aka the Russian producer Buttechno) taking Lorenzo Senni’s concept of rave voyeurism to an underground Russian club in the 1990s. Originally composed for designer Gosha Rubchinskiy’s Winter 2018 show, which took place at the old Soviet Palace of Culture in St. Petersburg, one of the first venues that hosted illegal raves in the country, Milyakov expertly manages to excavate the past in ways that still sound fresh. –Rachel Hahn
Listen: Pavel Milyakov, “B. A. D.”
Peggy Gou: “It Makes You Forget (Itgehane)”
Just two years ago, Peggy Gou dropped out of fashion school to focus full-time on music production. The Berlin-based producer’s early singles flashed a gift for balancing house, techno, and electro, and she soon became the first female Korean DJ to make a BBC Essential Mix. But with “It Makes You Forget (Itgehane),” Gou makes a quantum leap. Daydreaming about the chaotic state of the world in her native Korean, she taps into dance music’s underlying emotions. Amid acid squelches and a spot-on ’90s house beat, topped off with a dulcet vibraphone line and Gou’s own murmurs, “It Makes You Forget (Itgehane)” channels those feelings of wistfulness, of finding comfort among strangers. She captures that singular dancefloor sensation of shaking off the world’s troubles and giving in to the total euphoria of the moment. –Andy Beta
Listen: Peggy Gou, “It Makes You Forget (Itgehane)”
RAMZi: Phobiza vol. 3: Amor Fati
Some artists take stabs at world-building; the imaginary landscape of Phoebé Guillemot’s RAMZi project is so elaborate it has its own topographical map. Like its predecessors, the third release in the Canadian producer’s Phobiza series takes inspiration from all over: Its lopsided grooves are sticky with hints of dub, dancehall, Angolan kizomba, new age, kwaito, and more. (The records’ sleeves are even reminiscent of the French ethnographic label Ocora.) But instead of feeling like souvenirs on a shelf, or a list of boxes ticked, her passport stamps end up bleeding together into something more mysterious, where bird calls and barking dogs accompany radio voices in a foreign tongue. For anyone who’s ever marveled at the sunrise from the backseat of a taxi in a land far from home, it’s a welcome evocation of a very particular kind of dopamine rush. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: RAMZi, “Sunshini”
Rezzett: Rezzett LP
Lo-fi electronic music is not a new concept. London duo Rezzett pile on extreme amounts of fuzz throughout their debut LP, but it’s what they do with it that makes the record so captivating. The music is murky, with synths bubbling up from the tar pit to the surface. The drums and bass are sparkly and farty. It sounds like master musicians got wasted, improvised some jams, recorded them on a cassette tape covered in dirt and then it got half-ruined in a fire they set themselves. –Matthew Schnipper
Listen: Rezzett, “Worst Ever Contender”
rRoxymore: Thoughts of an Introvert, Pt. 2
rRoxymore‘s songs are always sure to take you in unexpected directions, and with Thoughts of an Introvert, Pt. 2, the French-born, Berlin-based producer piles on each twist and turn with glee. An eerie, brassy jazz riff appears out of nowhere at the end of “This Is Not What You Think,” and the frenetic, footwork-indebted drums of “Run…Feet” suddenly give way squelching, bassy techno. Each track is mesmerizing on its own, but taken together, the boundaries of rRoxymore's colorful experiments are bursting at the seams. –Rachel Hahn
Listen: rRoxymore, “This Is Not What You Think”
Skee Mask: Compro
Techno doesn’t get more sensual, tactile, or inviting than Compro. The music—a ripe and septic mix of dub and breakbeats, bangers and ambient interludes—feels so alive and unpredictable that it barely fits that genre tag for more than a minute at a time. As Skee Mask, Munich producer Bryan Müller uses his mix of analog and digital equipment to conjure a boggy landscape out of which all kinds of sumptuous notes emerge. The sharp, steely drum pads—which cut through “Soundboy Ext.” and “Dial 274” like wires passing through clay—are rough enough to keep you dancing in some cement basement all night, but Compro could also soundtrack an evening spent on an abandoned train platform, staring up at the sky. It’s some of the most astonishing and alive electronic music of the year; it thrashes, it seethes, it wails, it breathes. –Jayson Greene
Listen: Skee Mask, “Soundboy Ext.”
Slikback: Lasakaneku
Kenya’s Slikback has been producing music for less than two years, amassing an archive of some 400 songs. Perhaps he’s making up for lost time: He played on three separate occasions at this year’s Nyege Nyege Festival, in Kampala, Uganda, and three more times at Krakow’s Unsound. His debut EP, for Nyege Nyege Tapes’ Hakuna Kulala sublabel, is a fascinating snapshot of all the ideas jostling for space in his brain: a sui generis mix of synths, 808s, and sampled percussion that nods simultaneously to dembow, UK bass, trap, South African gqom, Portuguese batida, and more. Since releasing the EP, he’s remixed PAN artist STILL; check back in a year to see how much more ground he’s covered. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Slikback, “Bantu Zen”
SMX / Koehler: (Whities Blue 02)
For the second single in Whities’ Blue series, SMX (Max O’Brien and Sam Purcell, who runs UK label Blank Mind) and Bristol-born, Berlin-based Koehler go in vastly different directions with their individual EP sides. SMX craft a blaring, entrancing lead that sounds like a passing ambulance over a sludgy, electro bassline, while on the flip, Koehler transforms Vangelis’ iconic Blade Runner theme into a rattling burner. It’s a pairing to trip out—or heat up—any dancefloor. –Rachel Hahn
Listen: SMX, “Sleep”
SOPHIE: OIL OF EVERY PEARL’s UN-INSIDES
Graduating from the glossy, cyborg music crafted with her PC Music collaborators to a dynamic world of lurching machinery, heavily distorted pop, and uncanny beauty, SOPHIE came into her own on her auspicious debut album. OIL OF EVERY PEARL’s UN-INSIDES is a vivid artistic statement made by a musician finally prepared to step into the spotlight, a fact made manifest on opener “It’s Okay to Cry.” It finds SOPHIE singing her own lyrics for the first time, delicate yet unerringly passionate. Elsewhere, the record renders SOPHIE’s world in bold pops of color and mercurial transitions, from the serrated, post-club squeals of the dom-sub fantasy “Ponyboy” and the beauty complex-defying “Faceshopping” to the stirring, stripped-back atmospherics of “Is It Cold in the Water?” SOPHIE’s willful deconstruction of self and form, tearing away at expectations and norms with cacophony and ambience alike, makes OIL a startling, moving experience. –Eric Torres
Listen: SOPHIE, “It’s Okay to Cry”
тпсб: Sekundenschlaf
A mix of jungle music, Chicago footwork, horror film scores, and what sounds like old Animal Collective practice tapes, Sekundenschlaf came from nowhere early in the year and stayed on the brain for the rest of it. The producer тпсб fits well on Blackest Ever Black, a label whose electronic tendencies are solidly industrial. It’s a grim listen, but the album also shines when it edges away from its bleaker moments and dips briefly into the neon light. –Matthew Schnipper
Listen: тпсб, “Walking Distances”
Topdown Dialectic: Topdown Dialectic
The press-shy Burial starts to look positively attention-starved when compared to Topdown Dialectic, an anonymous artist, connected to the equally murky /\\Aught collective, whose intricately abstracted electronic music obscures all traces of its origins and methods. On their sixth album (self-titled, as usual, with all eight untitled tracks lasting exactly five minutes each), dub-techno rhythms extend like a hall of cracked mirrors caught on hi-def video—a striking web of shimmering texture and repetitive patterns that’s both captivating and confounding. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Topdown Dialectic, “A2”
Yaeji: “One More”
Polyglot club phenom Yaeji spent 2017 offering up track after track of deep house filtered through the minimalist insouciance of modern R&B. She was strong enough to blow through electronic music’s biases and remix nightlife in her own image, all the while launching lyrical doozies like “I don’t fuck with family planning.” But the rolling bullshit of this year left her personally betrayed, frustrated with the industry, and rationally furious. So Yaeji returned this fall with “One More,” a self-made and self-released middle finger to men who expect women to do all the work. It is a mood, tossing and turning from gauzy quiet storm to Björk-y drum breaks and heartbreak, where even a quick turn towards euphoria ends up twitchy. It not only moves the body, it surely moves on. –Jesse Dorris
Listen: Yaeji, “One More”
