Have we ever needed new worlds so much? Probably not. And once again, electronic producers continued—bloody-mindedly and brilliantly—to build them. Some of them were rooted on very specific, very local dancefloors; some were built on visions of the universe beyond out planet; some were evocations of altogether other realities. But as ever, they provided succor—expansions of our own horizons, and moments when you realized that everything could be different. Is that enough? Who knows. But it’s a lot.
Kayla Painter
Fractures
Vinyl LP, Cassette, Compact Disc (CD), 2 x Vinyl LP
It’s been an extraordinary year for big dance albums, even aside from the ones in this list—think Caribou, Floating Points, Confidence Man, the list goes on… But among them all, this one really shines. Kayla Painter has previously released music with themes that draw on everything from her Fijian ancestry to owls; here, she’s painting on a grand canvas, inspired by the Europa Clipper mission to one of Jupiter’s icy moons. The record reaches across techno, ambient, slo-mo industrial chug, and more, but those are just tools to express feelings about human ambition, the precision of science, the emptiness of the infinite universe, imaginary landscapes, and more. It’s a true sci-fi vision that draws you in, then launches you way out into the cosmos.
EVA808
Let’s B Havin U?
Vinyl LP
Icelandic bass-wrangler Eva Jóhannsdóttir made what was easily one of last year’s greatest albums in ÖÃRUVÃSI—a huge, complex, personal, and elemental statement. For this EP for dBridge’s abel EXIT, she’s aimed more obviously at the club—including one deeply, albeit disturbingly, comedic track about the risks of ketamine abuse. But the production is every bit as advanced, and the vision every bit as unique. Whether it’s rock guitars, rave riffs, or the sounds of splashing water, everything is morphed and twisted into a hallucinogenic rush that’s frazzlingly fast and crushingly slow at the same time.
Alley Cat
The Widow Project
Cassette
Sometimes adhering to genre rules can lead to startling originality. The formula here is very simple: The deepest, heaviest minimal dubstep of the late ‘00s meets the most poised goth/new wave of the mid-‘80s—including vocals on three tracks from Johnette Napolitano of Concrete Blonde. But somewhere in the mix, Alicia Catherine Bauer has found a way to use the shades of black and grey to paint incredibly individual and emotional pictures. Over 16 tracks, she takes you on an intense and dreamlike journey, even as any given one of those tracks still functions as an earthquaking rave-beast in its own right.
Heavee
Unleash
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
The classic sound of Chicago footwork was alive and kicking in 2024. In fact, one benefit compilation alone demonstrated the range of OG talents who are still at the top of their game. But there were also Chicagoans taking its rhythms forward into new dimensions: notably Heavee. Where many outsiders only end up gentrifying the sound, Heavee took it to new levels of sonic sophistication without losing one iota of the delirium and fierceness that originally characterized it. This album is a beautiful, dazzling, immersive sci-fi movie for the mind—but the louder you play it, the more it reveals itself to be deep-rooted hyper-funk for the feet too.
T. Williams
Raves of Future Past
Vinyl Box Set, Vinyl LP, Vinyl
Tesfa Williams has, for many years, taken a circuitous route through jungle, grime, UK funky, and both underground and mainstream house music—always in one way or another representing the London he’s come up through. Though he’s usually stuck to one sound at a time, now that he’s finally ready to make an album, he’s decided to represent the whole journey in one go. And ye gods, it’s a monster. Each of the aforementioned styles, and a dash of super-swung UK garage to boot, is delivered with deadly precision and certainty, utterly perfect as a DJ tool in itself. But taken all together, something else emerges: A kaleidoscopic view of decades of underground and soundsystem culture—a thrilling tour you’ll want to take again and again.
NikNak
Ireti
Cassette, T-Shirt/Shirt
London-via-Leicester-and-Leeds experimental turntablist, sound artist, and producer Nicole Raymond says she wanted this album to sound like a soundtrack to a “Black Blade Runner.†She nailed it. Her previous albums, generally constructed using live turntable manipulation, have all been meticulously crafted but extremely abstract in their ambience. Here, she’s stepped everything up a notch, with high-velocity cosmic rave beats, live jazz instrumentation, and both vocals and lush strings weaving through the more free-form sound-making. It’s still every bit as full of captivating fine detail as before; but here it feels like flying through an overwhelmingly huge city of the future.
ZOiD & Seo
Butterflies
Lagos singer-songwriter-producer Seo is the outsider artist’s outsider artist, pumping out release after release—some of them simultaneously—that span fractured abstraction and dreamy pop. Teamed up with Irish jazz/techno/electro auteur ZOiD, she’s a little more conventional here—but only a little. The title track and “Divine Timing†remain roughly in dance music territory, but Seo’s quirky vocal stylings take it elsewhere altogether. “Rememo†showcases her songwriting at its catchiest and poppiest, but perversely combines it with a fully deranged jazz-country cut-up. A tripped out pseudo-dancehall cover of “Walk on By†is outright spooky, and a “GRGY mix†of “Butterflies†takes it into more straightforward Underground Resistance-ish techno—but at just two minutes, still remains resolutely weird.
Gagarin
Komorebi
Compact Disc (CD)
The late Graham Dowdall knew he was not long for the world when he made this album. Incredibly, it’s perhaps the prettiest and most optimistic record the veteran post-punk and electronica explorer ever made. There’s melancholy and darkness here, to be sure; but far more prevalent is a deep sense of the British pastoral, with distant sublimated echoes of Elgar and Vaughan Williams, as well as Plaid, Boards of Canada, and folktronica. All of it is defined by a composed, confident, contemplative sense of taking deep pleasure in the moment. It’s hard to think of a more elegant creative finale to a life well lived.
Anna Schreit
Duck
There’s a particular kind of house music that used to get lumped in with formulaic “lo-fi,†but which is actually way more musical and more deep-rooted than that tag implies. It operates at the point where Matthew Herbert, Theo Parrish, and Rhythm Section International intersect, where warmth and good-natured groove are everything. Anna Schreit hits that sweet spot on these three tributes to friends, friendship, and the kind of everyday fun—smoking spliffs, playing video games—that accompanies those things. It sounds unassuming at first; but get inside these tracks, live with them for a bit, and they too will start to feel like old, very dear friends.
Karen Nyame KG
Rhythm Vol. 1
Karen Nyame has had a relatively low-key year, but has still managed to roll out some quietly extraordinary remixes and collaborations that show why she remains the supreme talent channeling Afro-house into the UK. These four tracks all ride four-to-the-floor patterns, but they all show just how much variety there is in the forms that have come from hybridizing gqom, amapiano, and co. into the wider diasporic flow. From high drama to velvet sensualism, trance induction to party vibes, it’s all here. And as ever with Nyame, the secret weapon is texture: There is simply nobody else in dance music right now whose production has such a distinctive luxurious sheen and evident delight in the physicality of sound.
A Taut Line
Restoration
Occasionally you come across an album that’s like an art gallery or an anthology of short stories. Each album is a window into a particular unique creative world, but the whole thing is curated so they tell a bigger story all together. So it is with this from Englishman-in-Tokyo Matt Lyne. There are house and techno beats here, there are dub basslines, there’s abstract electronic fizz, there are hip-hop sample manipulation techniques—but all of those are secondary to the construction of super specific, super sculpted little worlds in each track. Some are buzzing and welcoming, some are odd and dreamy, but each feels like a glimpse into a different private world within a bigger community.
