30 best electronic music albums of 2021: 96 Back, Anz, Basic Rhythm & The Black Dog

The Top 60 becomes a Top 30. The excitement! Fat Roland's Best Electronic Music Albums of 2021 presents four more brilliant albums:

96 Back – 9696 Dream (Local Action)

Sheffield's Evan Majumdar-Swift has turned in a corker of a rave album, and there's barely a phat drop in sight. This is techno written in neon and hydrogen. Lines of melody have all the woozy weightlessness of waking from sleep, and even when it slaloms into a steady groove on, say, Freepass For Them, it still feels light on its feet. Incidentally, this was mastered by Warp Records founder Rob Gordon, so there's some serious heft behind the buoyancy. Hat doff to his other works this year, including the move into vocals on the compelling Love Letters, Nine Through Six.

Anz – All Hours (Ninja Tune)

Another EP has sneaked its way onto my list. Whaddaya gonna do? Report me to the list police? This unashamedly poppy collection of bass music feels like that moment in a movie when all is resolved and the protagonists just need to let their hair down. Stereo on, disco ball spinning, and let's not think too much about granny whose storyline was left unsolved. Did she escape the kidnappers? Who cares. Let's boogie to the glistening r&b, the funky electro jams, the gentle acid, the shuffling wub-wub techno. This is a Ninja Tune debut for this Manchester producer: the world is watching. Maybe granny was one of the bad guys. We'll find out in the sequel. Roll credits!

Basic Rhythm – Electronic Labyrinth (Planet Mu)

I've been watching East Man's output with interest, so it's pleasing to see Anthoney Hart's other alter-ego drop such a compelling album. As suggested by the East London landscape of the album cover, his second album under this name for Planet Mu, this is tower-block tough. Hunch-shouldered rhythms provide a base for a series of tributes to his pirate DJ days on Rude FM. Beats crumble, basslines bend, and euphoric rave lines are subsumed into the grittiness of it all. Hayward Road soars the highest, but its freewheeling arpeggio belies the fact that we barely leave the basement of modern UK bass music. Proper.

The Black Dog – Music For Photographers (Dust Science)

Brutal. No, literally. Dusty legends The Black Dog spent two years photographing Brutalist architecture, and this compendium of deep, hazy ambience has an intention as cemented as the structures that inspired it. "It should be played in full when visiting any location," say the Dogsters. So whip out their Brutal Sheffield book, Google Map your way to one of the buildings, and let this album consume you in situ. Chords are elongated, beats are reigned in, and bulldozers put on hold as we celebrate a quickly disappearing aspect of UK cities. A window into some serious concrete soul.

This is part of a series of the Best Electronic Music Albums of 2021. Read it all here.