Top 20 electronic music albums of 2025: Squarepusher plays to (Stereo)type

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

Squarepusher: Stereotype (Warp Records)

80-plus albums later – probably closer to 90 but no-one’s counting – and we finally come to my last entry of Fat Roland’s Best Electronic Music of 2025, subsection Top 20 Bangers. Except this next album is not from 2025. It’s a cheat. Don’t tell anyone.

In July 1994, Wet Wet Wet were wedged at the top of the UK singles chart with Love Is All Around. Somewhere in the Essex suburbs, Tom ‘Squarepusher’ Jenkinson was recording two albums. One of them was Feed Me Weird Things which would be released on Rephlex Records two years later. The other one, originally released under the artist name Stereotype, was this.

Whooshki is a beefy 16-minute opener, gliding from silky, spiralling IDM into a clumping 909 tantrum. 1994, which I suspect is named after the year 1994, is a scratchy home-knit of tangled hi-hats and dystopian ambience. O'Brien sounds like Clark slipping off a cliff.

There’s early Aphex feel to Greenwidth, with its muffled rhythmic charge drizzled in oily ambience. Falling is drum ‘n bass compacted and tarnished by weighty, wistful analogue chords. We finish with O’Brien again, this time remixed and sounding like it’s come back for a sulk.

I don’t know how people remaster old tapes to make them sound better. I asked William Basinski this about his remaster of The Disintegration Loops. Surely a muffled old analogue tape is a muffled old analogue tape. Anyway, I’m none the wiser, but thank the gods for 1990s Squarepusher, redone and refreshed 32 years later. Old is the new new.

If you've been reading along, this is the last blog post for my 2025 album highlights. Excellent reading, well done. Someone tell Jools Holland that 2026 can now officially start.

See all of my Best electronic music albums of 2025