Best electronic music albums of 2025:cyborging friendships with a bunch of techno tunes

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

Here is another Best 2025 Albums summary, grouped under the general heading of techno. I'm not sure it's the done things these days, what with colour TV and air fryers, but you really should be swinging your pants to every one of these albums.

Charlotte de Witte – Charlotte de Witte (KNTXT)

In 2025, Berghain DJ de Witte reached the peak of her powers. Lashings of critical acclaim and finally a debut album of floor-fracturing room-rattling bangers. Thudding acid techno, aerodynamic power mantras, colossal build-ups, tribal take-downs. And that constant slamming bass rhythm. I'm already regretting not including this in my final 20 albums.

DJ Bone – DJ Bone XXXV: The End of Never (Further)

Detroit comes on strong in this no-nonsense funky techno jams arising from his Further club night. Play They Flew Away. That beat is off the chain, that boss drum insistently nutting you in the face. It's full of soul too, and his work has been bigged up my Laurent Garnier and Carl Cox. Another chapter and another success for Detroit.

Hieroglyphic Being – Dance Music 4 Bad People (Smalltown Supersound)

Jamal Moss has two albums in my end-of-year list, in two different subgenres. This collection, which sees him joining the Smalltown Supersound label, is inspired by disappointment with the dancefloor. Good job, because there are few straight lines in this splashy, broken techno. An inventive and entertaining addition to his catalogue.

Paul St. Hilaire – w/ The Producers (Kynant Records)

The dude also known as Tikiman brings us a dubwise selection of foggy sound system techno. He's used a different producer on each track, including Timedance label boss Batu. He really is w/ the producers. St. Hilaire's voice echoes and ricochets throughout, adding to the whole nocturnal flavour of things. One to play as the daylight fades.

Sandwell District – End Beginnings (Point Of Departure)

After many years away, Regis and Female reform Sandwell District for a more human take on their usually severe techno. Amid those clockwork drum loops are screes of mechanical harmony. It's a cracking listen, and surprisingly listenable for a new audience. Spacey final track The Silent Servant is dedicated to their bandmate John Juan Mendez.

Slikback – Attrition (Planet Mu)

I think Slikback is my favourite music artist named after a hairstyle. His arrival on Planet Mu is noisy, wonky, playful and sometimes terrifying. Staccato rhythm onslaughts, strobing drum meltdowns, malfunctioning robot clankery, and hyper-footworkery that nearly made my trousers fall of. Not. A. Dull. Moment.

Valesuchi – Futuro Cercano (Discos Nutabe)

That last record was from Poland via Nigeria. Now we jet to Brazil, Chile and Portugal for the very international DJ Valesuchi. Her second album was made by "cyborging my friendship with the machine", which is a clever way of saying: a bunch of squiggly computer music, busy and bobbling beats, and cheeky melodic circuitary. It's like LFO gone YOLO. Ace.

See all of my Best electronic music albums of 2025

Best electronic albums of 2018: getting into the top 20 is a fragile path

Hold on to your monocle: this is going to be a longer-than-usual summary of albums that didn't quite make the final best-of-2018 list. They're all house music, or influenced by house music, or have once been in a house with some house music.

A choir from Hackney added a whole new direction for Simian Mobile Disco on Murmurations (Wichita) which led me to produce an alarmingly introspective review for Electronic Sound magazine ("Life is a fragile path that sometimes leads us to thin places we’d rather avoid"). There was solid house action on Specter’s Built To Last (Sound Signature): extra points for the insistent piano riff on Not New To This. I enjoyed the clean house stylings of Invisibility (Sushitech) from Romanian duo SIT – minimalism with sheen.

Essaie Pas's ominous New Path (DFA Records) was "enough to make you gleefully afraid of your own shadow" (Electronic Sound again). There was a masterclass in shrink-wrapped drum programming on Konduku’s Kıran (Nous'klaer Audio). Russian artist Evgenii Fadeev sounded restless on Litie (Gost Zvuk), turning up those bpms for his AEM Rhythm Cascade persona. And on my notes for Beta Librae's Sanguine Bond (Incienso), I've just got the word "hypnotic". So it must have been hypnotic. Ahem.

I liked rapper’s Galcher Lustwerk’s inconsequential chatter amid the smooth house of 200% Galcher (Lustwerk Music). RAMZi’s Phobiza Vol. 3: Amor Fati (FATi Records) was a heady mix of hazy house music. There was a dark urgency to Neville Watson's house breaks album The Midnight Orchard (Don't Be Afraid). Phew. Is this section over yet? It's going on a bit.

Shinichi Atobe sounded perkier than usual on Heat (DDS), not least in part because of his perfectly ratcheted snares. Underground favourite DJ Bone spilled a load of bright Detroit bangers this year on A Piece Of Beyond (Subject Detroit) – expect the trilogy to complete in 2019. And finally I utterly overlooked SCNTST's Scenes And Sketches From The Lab (Boysnoize Records) despite a previous album of his being in my 2013 top ten. I only just spotted it now. Blast. Maybe I should have been listening to that instead of writing this. Scandal. *drops monocle*





Scroll all of the best 2018 electronic albums by clicking here.