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

The dark destroyers: my interview with Black Sites

In the latest edition of Electronic Sound magazine, I interview Black Sites, a bold techno collaboration between Hamburg musicians Helena Hauff and F#X.

Their album R4 has variously been described as aggressive, rough, and enough to make a hamster spill its lapsang souchong. That last one was probably me: I have an overactive imagination.

The album stomps an enjoyable line between musicality and malice, between immediacy and sheer immolation. As Hauff says in the feature, "having fun can be dirty".

You'll find my feature in issue 128 of Electronic Sound magazine. Faithless are the cover stars, and there's stuff about Smokebelch II, the Telepathic Fish parties, and Chilean DJ Valesuchi, whose tunes I have, coincidentally, been pumping out this afternoon.

In my 128th monthly column, I vomit on about the Wall of Sound production technique. I mention carp, jumping down holes and beef dip.

Below, you can listen to Black Sites' bit-shredded Pacman orgy 707. Love a rusty hi-hat, me.

Shop for Electronic Sound magazines  |  Subscribers can read my interview online

More new electronic music for January 2015: Cain, AI, Black Sites

Let's fondle my record bag until it calls the music police.
 
From the snow-capped mountains of the highlands comes an India-flavoured EP from Cain (pictured). It has that same epic playfulness of Loop Guru (indeed the title track of the Savan EP could easily have been plucked from mid-90s Nation Records). More of that playfulness on the upcoming debut album, please.


Speaking of stuff that takes me back to the past, AI drop a debut Forgotten Truths EP for Metalheadz. You remember Metalheadz? Co-founded by the bloke with the shiny teeth that went on to waggle sticks at orchestras? Anyhoo, this is very much in the vein of classic 'headz and it's no worse off for it.


There's droning acid galore on Black Sites' Unit 2669: the track is over ten minutes long and I'd put money on its distorted nastiness destroying your head in a third of that time. One half of Black Sites, Helena Hauff, runs a club called Birds And Other Instruments. With that in mind, Unit 2669 is a twitching, stub-footed town pigeon with a loaded machine gun. Lovely.

Catch my previous new electronic music round-up here. Oh and psst, remember me banging on about Kiasmos? Grab a free Erased Tapes compilation here.