Best electronic music albums of 2025: deeply dubby about Neapolitan ice cream

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

My 2025 highlights continue. Here are bunch of albums I have categorised under "experimental", which is a cop-out way of saying "assorted genres but let's not get too hung up on labels, yeah?". Despite my laziness, it is still an excellent summary, and you should get these albums down your ears.

Adrian Sherwood – The Collapse Of Everything (On-U Sound)

Despite its apocalyptic title, Sherwood's first solo album since 2012's Survival & Resistance is an uplifting affair. It's got lashings of deeply dubby delights, more than a few jazzy soiree moments, and Brian Eno pops up on production duties for one track. The most fun moment is Spaghetti Best Western, which I guess is better than a Brown Rice Britannia.

Barker – Stochastic Drift (Smalltown Supersound)

It's nice to have Barker back for a second album. His music is sometimes called "post-club", which means chilled dance music rather than an enthusiast organisation dedicated to the Royal Mail. He keeps thinks clean and minimal, shifting and shiny, and thoroughly emotional throughout. The very definition of a headphone listen.

In Transit: In Transit (Felt)

Oh hello there. Dave Huismans appeared in two previous end-of-year blog posts: as his alias A Made Up Sound in 2016, and as 2562 way back in 2019. Nice to have him back. This album has only just come out, and develops his ex_libris work into an even deeper, duskier ambience. You'll get lost in the smokiness and the speckles of it all.

Josef Tumari – Dubovaya (DSL System)

All the way from Tashkent comes a killer collection of ambient dub, slamming house and spiritual breaks. Sublimation Collective's Josef Tumari gives us a real pick 'n' mix here, but that's part of the charm:. Once a groove lock in, it's truly transportive: his sounds and vocal use is never less than hypnotic. I'm off to check some Uzbek playlists.

Lyra Pramuk – Hymnal (7K!)

Techno, folk and classical music collide in a tasty Neapolitan ice cream mix for Pramuk's second album. The building blocks for this album are wild: a German classical music quartet, the poet Nadia Marcus, the I Ching, the artist Jenna Sutela, slime moulds, and some nifty CDJ work. Yes, I said slime moulds. Yet again, her vocal work is on point.

Powell – We Do Recover (Diagonal Records)

We do indeed recover. This album was collated over an eight-year period, finally achieving form after Powell lost a friend to suicide. This tragic loss forms one of the themes here, and it feels like an experimental producer working things out in real time. There are moments of contemplation, of grief, of darkness, of wonky piano and broken circuits.

See all of my Best electronic music albums of 2025

Best electronic albums of 2019: seventeen

17 – Barker – Utility (Ostgut Ton)

I once went to a Leisure System night at Glasgow's ill-fated Art School and a pilled-up Glaswegian shouted at me and my mate for what seemed like 92 minutes. We didn't catch a word amid the thick accent and pumping beats, bar the phrase "do you like heavy metal".

So Leisure System's great. Its co-founder Sam Barker held off releasing anything for ages, but finally he's plopped out an album. And not for the last time in this top 20 (expect this to become a theme), it's not the club stormer you'd expect.

On Utility, the drums are hardly noticeable, and instead it's down to Barker's exacting synthesis to prove the rhythms. This is a slow album. It's not so much music you dance to, rather it's the echo of the music still ringing in your ears as you leave the dancefloor to go for a widdle.

Stop a moment and let the descending shakes of Paradise Engineering cover you, or succumb to the growing Global Communication-esque fuzzy patches of Models Of Wellbeing. All in all, this is an enchanting work, and a bold step for someone who could have just laid out some fat drums and let his Leisure System reputation do the talking.



Scroll the full best-of-2019 list here.