Best electronic albums of 2018: getting into the top 20 is a fragile path

Hold on to your monocle: this is going to be a longer-than-usual summary of albums that didn't quite make the final best-of-2018 list. They're all house music, or influenced by house music, or have once been in a house with some house music.

A choir from Hackney added a whole new direction for Simian Mobile Disco on Murmurations (Wichita) which led me to produce an alarmingly introspective review for Electronic Sound magazine ("Life is a fragile path that sometimes leads us to thin places we’d rather avoid"). There was solid house action on Specter’s Built To Last (Sound Signature): extra points for the insistent piano riff on Not New To This. I enjoyed the clean house stylings of Invisibility (Sushitech) from Romanian duo SIT – minimalism with sheen.

Essaie Pas's ominous New Path (DFA Records) was "enough to make you gleefully afraid of your own shadow" (Electronic Sound again). There was a masterclass in shrink-wrapped drum programming on Konduku’s Kıran (Nous'klaer Audio). Russian artist Evgenii Fadeev sounded restless on Litie (Gost Zvuk), turning up those bpms for his AEM Rhythm Cascade persona. And on my notes for Beta Librae's Sanguine Bond (Incienso), I've just got the word "hypnotic". So it must have been hypnotic. Ahem.

I liked rapper’s Galcher Lustwerk’s inconsequential chatter amid the smooth house of 200% Galcher (Lustwerk Music). RAMZi’s Phobiza Vol. 3: Amor Fati (FATi Records) was a heady mix of hazy house music. There was a dark urgency to Neville Watson's house breaks album The Midnight Orchard (Don't Be Afraid). Phew. Is this section over yet? It's going on a bit.

Shinichi Atobe sounded perkier than usual on Heat (DDS), not least in part because of his perfectly ratcheted snares. Underground favourite DJ Bone spilled a load of bright Detroit bangers this year on A Piece Of Beyond (Subject Detroit) – expect the trilogy to complete in 2019. And finally I utterly overlooked SCNTST's Scenes And Sketches From The Lab (Boysnoize Records) despite a previous album of his being in my 2013 top ten. I only just spotted it now. Blast. Maybe I should have been listening to that instead of writing this. Scandal. *drops monocle*





Scroll all of the best 2018 electronic albums by clicking here.