Top 20 electronic music albums of 2025: The Black Dog becomes Orange And Yellow Oblongs Dog

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

The Black Dog: Loud Ambient (Dust Science)

I’m dead arty, me. I own a watercolour set, and I have a pair of Mondrian-themed socks. I lied about the watercolour set. I appreciate a mooch around a gallery, and so it’s the art world we will turn for the next entry in my Top 20 Bangers of 2025.

The geometric work of the 20th century’s leading square pusher Mark Rothko was an inspiration for The Black Dog’s Loud Ambient. They used Rothko’s colour fields as the building blocks for the album’s varied tones. The Black Dog becomes Orange And Yellow Oblongs Dog.

As a result, their usual brutalist aesthetic has become, as visual metaphor, brilliant. Murky flows of befogged gloom are replaced by sunlit synth cycles. Several Rituals lays down a house beat with roof-raising claps. They Came For My Head is Global Communication surfing a rainbow.

They say they fell back in love with fall back in love with the 707, 808 and 909 while making this album. That’s a series of Roland drum machines, all with slightly different tones. The TR-707 is especially happy in tone, and has been used in italo-disco gubbins.

They did release another album this year, My Brutal Life 2, a continuation of their architecture-themed ambience. But it was this album that added colour to my 2025. 

I don’t want to make a habit of this, but I should also acknowledge the upsetting death of The Black Dog’s founding member Ken Downie. Robin Rimbaud, the musician better know as Scanner, put it best in a social media post. I hope he doesn’t mind me quoting him here:

“As a founding presence within The Black Dog, Ken helped carve a language that refused easy spectacle, and his passing leaves a quiet, resonant space in electronic music—one shaped by intelligence, restraint, and an unwavering belief that machines could think, feel, and remember.”

A quiet, resonant space indeed. RIP Ken.

See all of my Best electronic music albums of 2025

Top 20 electronic music albums of 2025: 160 reasons to like Sherelle's debut album

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

Sherelle: With A Vengeance (Impressed Recordings)

It’s the second day of January. 2026 has embedded itself like a persistent cold sore or the pigeons in your loft. However, I have two more days of blog posts highlighting my favourite 20 electronic music albums for 2025, and you’re not allowed to do any 2026 things until we’re done.

The publicity for Sherelle’s debut album calls it a “rally cry for the 160 scene”, which can mean one of three things. It’s an album bigging up people who are very good but not perfect at darts. It’s an album for users of the New Jersey bus service that runs past the Meadowlands Sports Complex. It’s an album for fans of high-energy electronic music.

Probably the latter. Dancefloor delectation abounds: the rubbery footwork of the defiant Don’t Need You; he rooftop sirens of the filthy With A Vengeance; the twin speed garage and propulsive jungle on Freaky (Just My Type), George Riley’s vocals adding a distinctly sweet flavour.

I saw Sherelle playing at the Repercussion club night a few weeks ago. She was on just after Special Request, another go-to for upfront party junglism. I should have taken notes if I had known she’d end up in my end-of-year list. Oh and shout out to the Leeds couple who had come over especially for the gig.

Where were we? Oh yes. Sherelle. With A Vengeance is the sound of a woman who has mastered her craft. She has previously presented a BBC radio programme about how The Winston's Hey Brother became the Amen Break. She knows what she’s doing regardless of BPM.

See all of my Best electronic music albums of 2025

Top 20 electronic music albums of 2025: Cain reaches God-tier with a highlands highlight

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

Cain: Lineage (Fine Grains)

Cain's lineage is detailed in chapter four of the book of Genesis, which means Bible scholars can trace the descendants of Cain, the firstborn son of Adam… oh wait. Sorry. Wrong Cain. Let’s start again.

For the past eleven years, since Cain’s addictive Savan EP, I’ve been growing increasingly impatient. Sitting there, looking at the internet, tapping my watch and tutting. Just when is he going to release a proper studio album?

What I wasn’t expecting was an album of pipe music featuring Gaelic singing and with an illustration of a Pictish boar on the cover. Nor would the expect it to be one of the best debut albums of recent times.

At his best, there’s a mystery and an endearing gawkiness to Cain’s work, and that’s all on display here. The boss drum thumps hard, the melodies paint chunky Prodigy primary shapes, and the droning synth lines add soundtrack oomph wherever they go.

The Scottish flavours, so folky and human, come from a very real placer. In his youth, Cain was a junior bagpipe champion. His wife Katie Mackenzie is a Gaelic singer, and her voice is featured prominently, as song or as Bicep-style samples.

Unlike the past 15 or so years, in this year’s best album’s list I have committed to NOT declaring a number one. But… y’know… Cain. Lineage. You absolutely have to rinse this album from now until the end of time.

One extra note. This beautiful and personal album also stands as a tribute to Alexander Horne, otherwise known as DJ Uraki Riddim, who founded the Fine Grains record label. I suspect his influence runs deep on Lineage, and his recent passing will be felt by many.

See all of my Best electronic music albums of 2025

Top 20 electronic music albums of 2025: an album that's child's play for Tim Reaper

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

Tim Reaper – sfs (self-released)

Let’s have another top 20 album of 2025. You wait a year for one, and then 20 come at once.

Sometimes it’s nice to have a change, like eating a chicken & mushroom Pot Noodle instead of the usual tapioca & cheese flavour. Tim Reaper has done a similar thing, although with music noodling, not with… well, you get the idea. For this album, he has veered away from the jungle stylings featured on 2024’s In Full Effect with Klondike – see last year’s best-of list.

But does this change work? Has he fluffed it on sfs? Or has he entered exciting new territory? It’s good news. The bloke is such a genius, he could release a mumble rap album and still make it one of the most listenable albums of the year.

It’s treat after treat after treat. Buzzy balaeric chords meet hyper-pop vocals on Haribo. A rolling samba parade sways and morphs on Native Land. The dubwise Weathered spins all over the place.

The cover of sfs depicts a boy – presumably a young Tim – making tunes with a Winnie The Pooh Play-along Piano Book. It suggests a childlike approach – playfulness, first principles, not taking things too seriously.

In fact, by self-releasing this album on Bandcamp for free, it’s almost like Reaper wasn’t taking the album too seriously. Not a core project. A DVD extra for the fans. However, this deserves to be considered as one of his most entertaining works. That boy is prodding those Play-along buttons hard.

This is all first-draft quality, so can we please forget about that tortured Pot Noodle metaphor? Thanks.

See all of my Best electronic music albums of 2025

Top 20 electronic music albums of 2025: Getting grubby – really, really grubby – with Black Sites

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

Black Sites: R4 (Tresor)

My countdown of the top 20 best electronic music albums of 2025 continues. Although it’s not a countdown. Everything in the top 20 has equal billing. No more Number 1 Album Of The Year: music taste is more complex than that. Jeez, I sound so pretentious.

ANYWAY. This new album on legendary techno label Tresor sees an old musical partnership revived. The first half of Black Sites is analogue knob-tweaker Helena Hauff. The other half is studio big-brain Kris Jakob, better known as the impressively obtuse name F##X.

R4 is the pair’s first album proper, and the first Black Sites release since 2014. They met years ago while DJing at Hamburg’s Golden Pudel club. You can tell when a partnership is nicely embedded: the rusted gears of this album spin with unfettered ease.

It’s a corrosive and deliciously grubby musical project. Rotted industrial snares, rickety mechanical jitters, overdriven synth crunches, frequencies smashed and crunched and bleeding for their lives. Yet it’s so listenable. So, so listenable.

When I interviewed Black Sites about this album earlier last year, I was fascinated about the yin and yang of it all. As I wrote at the time, it’s a mix of crabs-in-your-pants scratchiness and party-poppin’ electro bangers.

“Haha, it’s a fine line indeed,” said Hauff at the time. “We enjoy having fun and being playful, but we both love harsh and raw sounds. But having fun can be dirty, you know.”

And that’s why R4 works. In some ways, this album is as hard as it gets, but it’s such a good time.

See all of my Best electronic music albums of 2025

Top 20 electronic music albums of 2025: John Tejada is on rails with a dazzling new direction

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

John Tejada: The Watchline (Palette Recordings)

Not that you’ll be bothered if you’re reading this in the future, but my Top 20 Bangers of 2025 blog posting has slowed down. It’s New Year’s Day and I’m staggering through the minutes like a tortoise in molasses.

Tejada describes his new album as “a place between memory and forgetting, between land and ocean, between who we were and who we’re becoming.” The last time I was in a between place was between Warrington and Runcorn because the train had broken down. I’m getting PTSD.

This one was a surprise. I was expecting something more straightforward. Headlights on, barrelling down the house freeway, 100 miles per hour. But this is way more subtle, with scurries of intricate percussion embedding rather beautifully into rich, fluttering IDM melodies.

It’s unfair to compare an artist too much to others, but I’m sniffing this album and I’m getting notes of Jon Hopkins, Massive Attack, Elrich Schnauss, Boards Of Canada and Plaid. The latter was a brilliant melancholic foil on their 2024 single Bittersweet.

His drum programming is pristine, and positive dazzles when he takes on breakbeats, namely on the similarly named Until The End Of The World (skippy, celebratory) and Until The Light Bends (insistent, urgent).

Another flashback to my aborted travel on the way to, as it happens, a writing weekend. On that halted train journey, I got a free packet of crisps and a Coke. This is a much better inbetween place, and if it’s a sign of things to come, you need to add John Tejada to your playlists.

See all of my Best electronic music albums of 2025

Top 20 electronic music albums of 2025: the Orb's millionth longplayer is a return to form

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

The Orb: Buddhist Hipsters (Cooking Vinyl)

The next album to feature in my 2025 gold-tier special fried bangers is a very familiar name. The Orb. The flipping Orb. Buddhist Hipsters is their 18th studio album or, as they say on their Bandcamp page, it’s “quite possibly the millionth longplayer.” Hey, we all lose count after a while.

This isn’t the first Orb album with a silly title. After all, these are the people that brought you U F Orb, Okie Dokie It's The Orb on Kompakt and Doughtnuts Forever. The title of this new album inspired by a dream about people going up and down escalators. It could have easily been called Hare Krishna Crusty Goths.

From Steve Hillage’s melted guitar to bouncy Ultraworld house beats, from fuzzed electro scuffles to low-slung dub, this is The Orb back on top form. I don’t know what Alex Paterson’s current Orb partner Michael Rendall is sprinkling in the mix, but I’d like a taste, please.

The guest line-up is as enjoyably ragtag as ever. Hillage, Youth and Falconer, of course. Roger Eno. Trevor Walters, so soulful on The Oort Cloud (Too Night). Miquette from Gong and System 7. The violinist from Steeleye Span. The drummer from Killing Joke. 

One thing sticks in the craw, and that’s the use of AI on Arabebonics. Yeah, you could argue it’s no worse than using the voice of a death row lifer, but there could have been a more artistic replacement for RRome Alone’s vocals.

Still. This is great. I’m getting on the escalator and hanging out with the gurus and the crusties, or whatever it was.

See all of my Best electronic music albums of 2025

Top 20 electronic music albums of 2025: can we please Facta my hangover into this, cheers

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

Facta: Gulp (Wisdom Teeth)

We continue with my list of favourite 2025 electronic music albums with another Top 20 Banger. I’m posting this a little later in the morning because I went to a New Years’ party and drank 8% beer while wearing a stupid rainbow wig, both of which have induced a hangover.

Facta does not do long albums. His first, Blush, was barely over half-an-hour in length. This new one is five minutes shorter than that. It’s part of the charm, I guess, like popping into Narnia to pester a magical flute-tooting man-goat then being back home in time for afternoon tea.

Blush was much more organic than this. My Electronic Sound review at the time waffled on about “woodland meanders”. Gulp drags us out of the countryside and onto the dancefloor. Blush was the daylight; Gulp is proper nightlife stuff.

Lead single BDB is in-your-face: a bouncy ball of a beat pushes along a snappy vocal sass while his synths chitter and bloop in the background. Elsewhere, there’s earworm UK garage and breezy electronics, all awash with radiant chords to add that Facta humanity.

He made this music on the move, hence the brevity suggested by the album’s title. He made it “dotting between festivals, European club shows and on tour in Japan.” Yeah, I see your humble-brag, matey. The cursory approach has clearly worked, and it’s pretty much the same method I apply to these blog posts. Nicely done. A gulp not a gobble, but just as tasty.

See all of my Best electronic music albums of 2025