Top ten best electronic music albums of 2021: Ebende – Skimmer

Fat Roland's Best Electronic Music Albums of 2021 presents another brilliant album:

Ebende – Skimmer (All My Thoughts)

This top ten list is in alphabetical order by artist, but I'm not gonna lie: this very nearly was my number one album of 2021.

Every track on this Gothenburg artist's debut album has its Thing. Do you know what I mean by that? When people have their 'thing', it's the one trait they're known for. For example, Granny never steps on paving slab cracks, and she's the same with patterned carpets. Uncle Kenny wears those red hats, even indoors. Michelle at the newsagents wears those baggy anime t-shirts with crocs. You have that constant odour of old ham. Your Thing. You have your Thing. 

Each Skimmer track has a Thing. The plummeting choir notes on Shift. The woodpecker percussion on Warmth. The absolute banger For Love, its broken rave hitting so hard. The wobble-board synth effects on Soothing. The tinkling reverb on What I Come From. The disembodied choir on Ba Chill. The garage sparkiness of Nostalgia. The circling breakbeats that make Get Lost so addictive. And the title track's long ascent into something quite heavenly – just wait for those smoky chords to land.

Apparently, Ebende owes a lot to his multi-instrumentalist father. I wonder what his 'thing' was. He couldn't pronounce scissors? Eight fingers on his left hand? Had got to the age of 47 without ever using a phone? Always kept eggs in the shoe cupboard? Entirely made of corrugated iron? Everyone's got their Thing.

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