Best electronic music albums of 2025: saw waves, queer life, and a steamy greenhouse

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

Here are some experimental highlights of 2025, and you can tell these albums are experimental because their titles contain words like "vortex" and "tranquilizer". This next bit will only make sense after you've read the text below. Altogether now: Bring our your dead! Bring out your dead!...

Aleksi Perälä – Vortex 1–4 + Cycles 0 (AP Musik)

If you ask Google how many albums Aleksi Perälä released in 2025, Google will explode. Fact. On New Year's Day, he released the understated Cycles 0. Then in the second half of the year, he released 15 albums all called Grace. The series mapped an electronic geography, from simple saw waves to Indian percussion. The whole thing was enchanting and you need Perälä in your life.

Dale Cornish – Altruism (The Death of Rave)

"Bring our yer dead! BRING OUT YER DEAD!" This disconcerting drawl is an uncomfortable start, which is good, because this is not a comfortable listen. Cornish gives us an album that is DIY in production and intention. The nihilism of its broken and rusty half-rave music is bravely undercut by his lysergic vocals full of truth about queer life.

Hieroglyphic Being – The Sound Of Something Ending (Mathematics)

In anyone else's hands, this would have been a deep house album. The Chigaco producer quickly sends things sideways with electro-jazz, horn-laden microhouse and psychedelic EBM. It feels like he's commandeered a studio, planked over the doors and windows, then poured boiling oil on anyone else who dare approach its boundary. Entertaingly original.

Holden & Zimpel – The Universe Will Take Care Of You (Border Community)

Border Community's James Holden is always up to something, like a disobedient child or a naughty poodle. He goes all kosmiche on this partnership with folk musician Waclaw Zimpel. This builds on their Long Weekend EP from a few years ago, and it's jazzy, loose, carnivalistic and earthy. What will he get up to next? Someone keep an eye on him.

Los Thuthanaka – Los Thuthanaka (self-released)

What did I just listen to? Bolivian-American brothers reimagine music of the Andes. The result is uncategorisable: it's scratchy and shuffling, but also epic and hysterical. Someone called it a trance album, but that's true only in so far as its exuberant clattering and deceptively subtle dynamism will induce a kind of psychosis.

Oneohtrix Point Never – Tranquilizer (Warp Records)

Mr Never is back doing his thing, this time plumbing sounds pulled from ancient sample CDs and CD-ROMs featured on the Internet Archive. Tranquilizer drags us into a steamy greenhouse of organic sounds, bursting with heady colours and with frequencies sprouting all over the place. It's all so precise, though, and intoxicating throughout.

rRoxymore – Juggling Dualities (!K7 Recordings)

This latest selection of 2025 albums have defied categorisation, and rRoxymore's third album is no exception. Opener Am I Human? could have been lifted from Global Communication's 76:14, while elsewhere it feels like motorik Detroit techno, library music, or jazzy coffee table electronica. She never takes an eye of melody.  

See all of my Best electronic music albums of 2025

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: nineteen

19 – Hieroglyphic Being – The Red Notes (Soul Jazz Records)

Meet Jamal Moss, a former gigolo sex-pot who now reserves his tweaking fingers for Linn drum machines and Hammond organs. Hur hur. Organs. Sorry.

Moss is hugely prolific. In the time it has taken you to get to this sentence, he has probably released 92 albums. With such a generous issue, er, um, try that again… With such a generous output, how can anything, ahem, rise to the surface? Oh crumbs.

The answer is: like this. The Red Notes takes Chicago house as its base and spins off into a hypnotic odyssey that is as much techno as it is jazz. Examples: the alternating bass drum of The Seduction Syndrome; the strangled synth solo of The Emotional Listener.

This is wild and free and, yes, sexy. A suitable entry, arf, into Chicago house music for techno virgins. I am so, so sorry.



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