90 best electronic music albums of 2021: The Bug, Calibre, Clark, Fatima Al Qadiri & Floating Points

Fat Roland's Best Electronic Music Albums of 2021 presents five more brilliant albums:

The Bug – Fire (Ninja Tune) 

The Bug is back! Not an actual bug. I get loads of them all the time, trying to climb on my knees and stuff. No, Kevin Martin has returned and he's angry. "You'd better run from me," go the vocals amid teeth-gnashing bass and barometer-blowing heated atmospherics. The speaker-wobbling badboy loops brilliantly match the sheer ferocity of the ragga and dancehall vocals – take a bow, MC Irah. As good an expression of our pressure cooker society as anything else on this list, and rightly already topping other people's best-of-2021s. 

Calibre – Feeling Normal (Signature Recordings) 

Despite the chirpy dubstep and sassy half-step rhythms, this is Calibre in a mood. He's drum ‘n’ bass royalty, but this 16th album (!) is among his slowest, the BPMs reigned in to produce one his more introspective works. As I wrote in Electronic Sound magazine: "Dominick Martin delivers an umpteenth album of coffee-table drum and bass that’s a smooth as a buttered puppy.... ever-decreasing circles of frowning, thoughtful electronica." Not what I expected at all, in a good way.

Clark – Playground In A Lake (Detusche Grammophon) 

It has been fascinating watching the career of this Warp alumnus, er, warp into something totally new, moving from his barnacled techno beats into something much more neoclassical. This is a "concept" album, whatever that means these days, and is his first appearance on classical label Deutsche Grammophon. Clark's 12th album isn't just classical, though: it's folk and weird horror, with vocals from Clark himself, Afrodeutsche and a choir boy. As atmospheric as heck and very much following on from his Daniel Isn’t Real original soundtrack.

Fatima Al Qadiri – Medieval Femme (Hyperdub)

You can always expect something special from this Californian Kuwaiti. On Medieval Femme, we find ourselves somewhere between ancient Arabian history and some far-flung future chill-out night. Sung vocals hang lazily amid heavy reverb, an elegiac organ melts against misty half-beats, harps hang in the air quivering with anticipation. The Middle Ages meets the Middle East. This is possibly Al Qadiri's most accessible album to date, so consider it an excellent starting point. 

Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra – Promises (Luaka Bop)

This is a biggie. Sweep everything else off the table, cancel the milk, hang up on grandma. Floaty, as I like to call him, has always been classical adjacent, his shuffling house beats always feeling grand. He's got his own electronic "ensemble", for goodness sake. Here, he teams up with the LSO and jazz saxophonist Sanders for what might be his grandest project to date. It's slow and bluesy and a little too jazzy for my tastes, but still, its a landmark release whatever you think of stupid saxophones.

This is part of a series of the Best Electronic Music Albums of 2021. Read it all here.

Best electronic albums of 2019: sixteen

16 – Floating Points – Crush (Ninja Tune)

Apparently this new album by Mr Points (as his friends like to call him) arose from his improvisational sessions on tour with The Xx, armed only with a Buchla synthesizer, a Korg drum machine and a potted plant called Kenneth. On second thoughts, I may have dreamt the potted plant thing.

Crush is a corking album packed with micro-shuffles and the kind of yearning synths you'd want at your bedside in the darkest moments of your life. Listen to the filtered electronic cries of Anasickmodular before the whole thing descends into fractured chaos. Lovely.

The track Environments is a great example of Floaty (as his friends like to call him) at his best. It sounds so dang scratchy, your ears are likely to come out in boils. But he somehow pulls things back and launches into the bizarrest mini-siren rave crescendo.

This is only his second album, and it's a tough call to follow-up such an acclaimed debut in the shape of 2015's Elaenia. But Flo-Pee (as his friends like to call him) has done good: a skitterish triumph. Look at little Kenneth's leaves shaking — he loves it too. Bless.



Scroll the full best-of-2019 list here.

Best electronic albums of 2015: seven

7 – Floating Points – Elaenia (Pluto / Luaka Bop)

If you want the standard FP brown-nosing, then hoover up the endless column inches elsewhere. In fact, I’m going to flip it and start with the negative because I'm a contrary Mary...

Floaty “did a James Blake” and left his strongest previous work off his debut: no CMYK on Blake’s album and no Nuits Sonores here. And why be so excited by Pointy (yeah, I’ve got loads of nicknames for him) when we can get that same groovesome rhythm from Four Tet?

Sigh. I'm such a plonkface. Those would be valid criticisms if FloPo hadn’t spewed out such a strong piece of work. Elaenia could have been a Greatest Hits So Far, but what he’s given us is a complete album full of live percussion and enough space to explore all the darkness and light of his sound.

You can hear everything here, from Eno to Unkle to, thanks to the jazz influence, Flying Lotus. Elaenia is simply great: the long wait paid off. Good old Floppy.

-----> Best electronic albums of 2015 <-----

New electronic music for January 2015: Ghost Culture, Floating Points and Hodge

I started something like this last year and it lasted merely days. Let's see, huh? Here are some fresh(ish) bleeps to pour into your ear-vats.


Their record label signed them because they sounded like a cross between The Strokes and Delia Derbyshire. I can also hear Factory Floor and that kind of pulsing LCD indie disco thing. Ghost Culture's slightly 80s vocals may prove divisive, but I like it spiralling into something quite different - their debut album may well be worth a look in.


Floating Points' Nuits Sonores was recorded on a plane. It has a Positive Education-energy about it (surely a sample?), perhaps Four Tet too, and its probably the most epic track you'll ever hear from a professional neuroscientist.


Every frequency is pushed until your ears become all crunchsome and gooey on Hodge's electrohouse banger You Better Lie Down, released in December on this EP here. The best thing to come out of Bristol since, um, (googles) Ribena and/or Tarmac.

House music and really big eskimo hoods: some recent singles

Pantha Du Prince's dreamlike house haze on his spanking new album Black Noise has got me in the mood for some four-to-the-floor action. Never mind all that cut-and-paste broken beat crap. This week, I want my beats fixed up and looking sharp. Here are some recent house singles.

Raffertie

Raffertie (pictured) is Planet Mu's top drawer dance guru, beloved of grungy club types as well as the glossy hacks of Mixmag magazine. Recently, he's been getting some big-time snogs from Huw Stephens, Rob Da Bank and Dame Mary Anne Hobbs. Which is nice.

7th Dimension is Raffertie's newest single, and while the title is not as classic as last year's Wobble Horror!, there is ample to restrain your thumbs from twiddling. It's a whooping high-energy flare of rave house, convulsing from snare stab attacks and swirling, persistent vocals.

The b-side, String Theory, sounds like a melancholic Way Out West experimenting with a wobble-board for a bassline. 7th Dimension is the better cut, and reminds me a little of Hospital Records' more zealous moments - without the junglism.

Floating Points

His bubbly 2-stepper J+W Beat enjoyed more than a play or three on my phone last year, so unfurl the bunting because electronic polymath* Floating Points has dropped a brand new track called People's Potential.

He's not just torn a leaf from Luke Vibert's book: he's photocopied way beyond the legal limit to produce a thumping, nagging acid work-out with wailing synths and both hush puppies planted solidly on the dance floor.

Track it down if you can, but I warn you, it's a limited edition one-sided white label. And they're harder to find than Lil Wayne's self-respect.

The XX

I've saved the best for last: a superb cacophony of remixes of one of the best indie bands of the past 12 months. There are several remixes of The XX track, Islands. And they're all fab.

Untold culled the coldness of The XX, secreted it in an igloo somewhere north of Alaska, hurled it into Heston Blumenthal's deep freezer, and fashioned a dubstep remix so startlingly chilly, your ears will ice over at the mere notion of listening to it. Pardon? Exactly. It's tribal, like Zulu, but in eskimo hoods, really big eskimo hoods.

The Blue Nile's version of Islands shimmers and ripples, simple piano and electric guitar adding a nagging theme to the sparse vocals, while Nosaj Thing interprets the track as astral ambience. Delorean flings us back to the warm world of 90s intelligent techno, and, finally, Falty DL makes it sound like Tricky's record player's broken.

Okay, I veered away from house music at the end, there, but I don't like my beats too neat: if it ain't unfixed, I'm gonna broke it. You can quote me on that. (Please don't.)

* I only call him this because he can play the piano too.

Top of the bleeps: what's hot and banging bad-style right now

Topping the downloads list on electronic music's answer to the Arndale Centre, Bleep dot com, is Clark's Totems Flare album. I've got it cranked to the gills as I type; it's a brilliant analogue wig out designed as much for the tootsies as for the cranial glue.

The second most downloaded album is a debut LP from Bibio. Ambivalence Avenue has been covered here before: click the Bibio link at the bottom of this article. Bleep says it's like a lost 70s folk record.

Here is the rest of the top ten on Bleep:

3. Clark - Growls Garden (track). Marvin The Paranoid Android malfunctions at an 80's disco.

4. Tim Exile - Listening Tree. Another debut album and probably Warp Records' only gabba opus.

5. The Black Dog - Further Vexation. I'm pimping their previous album Radio Scarecrow a lot right now, but this record is darker, frownier and more techno.

6. Battles - Mirrored. An old one but a classic, described by Pitchfork with this trio of scintillating sentences: "Marc Bolan is dead. But Battles can rebuild him. They have the technology."

7. Diamond Watch Wrists - Ice Capped At Both Ends. This is Prefuse 73 stretching out his legs and playing footsie with a percussionist. 

8. Floating Points - J & W Beat. Best described as bubbly 2-step. Yes. Bubbly.

9. Bizzy B - Retrospective. A look back at the best of the master of the Amen break. No Bizzy B, no Venetian Snares.

10. Moritz Von Oswald Trio (pictured, photo from Stink Finger) - Vertical Ascent. I don't know too much about this, although I think it's got something to do with AGF.

Damn, this Clark album I'm listening to is good. It's like old Aphex Twin a million years into the future. Meanwhile, the top ten on Bleep has already changed while I've been typing this. Please scrub out this post. You'll find a permanent marker pen under your chair.