Top 20 electronic music albums of 2025: E's aren't good – Clark is back at his best

This is part of a series, posting between 30th December 2025 and 3rd January 2026

Clark: Steep Sims (Throttle)

Can I please get something off my chest? In their write-up for this album, Boomkat compare one of Clark’s tracks to “his namesake Vince Clarke”. This is wrong. Clarke cannot be a namesake for Clark, nor vice versa. One has an E and the other doesn’t. It’s like saying Iain and Ian are the same name. Absolutely not. Iains with two i’s are salt of the earth, their hearts pure. Ians with one solitary i are all sub-human scum. Namesake indeed. Pah.

Clark had this album without fuss and in record time. He relied on a Virus synthesiser for a dancefloor feel – you’ll know its sound: think of the Prodigy in full techno mode. The result is Clark at his most ravey and most rebelliously bleepy.

The start is brilliant: on Gift And Wound, ghostly chords glow as the rave synths line-up for a full-on assault. The words bumps and goose come to mind, not necessarily in that order. The middle is brilliant too: on Globecore Flats, a fussy breakbeat leads the saddest detuned rave in history. And the end is brilliant: the fuzz of Micro Lyf is Clark at his most emotional.

No rich soundtracking or obtuse electronics here. Clark has gifted us perhaps his most in-your-face work on Steep Sims. Reducing his toolbox of available gear has clearly worked. He says his Virus synth was awkward to program, as a lot of old gear would be. You wouldn’t think it. This is Clark-with-no-e at his natural best.

See all of my Best electronic music albums of 2025