Best electronic music albums of 2025: the Chuckle Brothers, hotdogs and ketchup

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

I have this summary of 2025 albums filed under "assorted beats". I really should sack my filing clerk. It goes to show that labels are ultimately meaningless and should be avoided wherever possible, especially for a queer ENFP WASP like me. Oh. Wait...

The Bug vs Ghost Dubs – Implosion (Pressure)

This is a to-me / to-you alternating album, which is as far as the Chuckle Brothers comparison can go. The Bug is in a right huff, all grimacing bass synths and gasping ambience. Stuttgart's Ghost Dubs sounds even more subterranean: his contribution is so dubby and minimal, it's hardly there. Recommended as a headphone listen, preferably while carrying a piano up a staircase.

DJ Babatr – Root Echoes (Hakuna Kulala)

Welcome to raptor house, a genre of music composed by dinosaurs. Oh wait. That doesn't sound right. These frenetic club cuts, collated over the past couple of decades, are the sound of the Venezuela's club scene with massive chunks of UK rave and Eurodance thrown in for joyous measure. Sirens and screams and celebratory drums abound.

Ikonika – SAD (Hyperdub)

It's fifteen years since I first wrote about Ikonika ("more pow than Batman"), but I think this is the first time I've heard a vocal-led album. The beats are as smoky as ever, skipping through sub-genres like a boss, but the addition of her voice has led things in a - dare I say - poppier direction. A thing of beauty that, if released earlier in the year, may have ended up higher on my list.

Low End Activist – Airdrop II (Peak Oil)

The strangled rave calls that open this album sum things up. This is hardcore, but it's throttled to within an inch of its life. A bouncy laser bass drift aimlessly amid spacious ambience, junglist rhythms struggle to lift off amid ghostly synths, a fuzz bass is left on its own to slowly die. This is the dancefloor, but underneath the floorboards where there's dampness and cobwebs and all of rave's darkest secrets.

Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke – Tall Tales (Warp Records)

From my Electronic Sound review: "Mark Pritchard of Global Communication fame doesn’t just illuminate as Yorke’s foil: he throws fireballs of blinding light. His analogue electronics stutter and spark, with ambience flowing like lava. Yorke appears as an addled narrator dragged, squinting and startled, into Pritchard’s midday sun."

Rian Treanor & Cara Tolmie – Body Lapse (Planet Mu Records Ltd)

I saw this performed live last year, and it was as fascinating as it was uncomfortable. Tolmie chatters and vocalises and yanks sounds from every inch of her body. Treanor accompanies this with machine-gun percussion and squirls of manic electronics. Incongruous Diva sounds like Bjork's Army Of Me on the other side of an apocalypse. 

Verses GT – Verses GT (LuckyMe)

I love a collaboration. Orbital and Kneecap; Leftfield and Lydon, hotdogs and ketchup. This meeting by Jacques Greene and Nosaj Thing is proper supergroup territory. Greene brings the melody, Thing brings the darkness, and somewhere in this middle is this pleasing, melancholic creation. Vocals from the likes of George Riley and Tyson add an r'n'b sheen.

See all of my Best electronic music albums of 2025

Listen: Nosaj Thing's N R 2

I'll let Nosaj Thing himself explain his new EP No Reality.

"Most of these songs are new and were written within the last two months. I wrote one of the songs all on my iPad, and arranged and mixed three of the songs the morning it was due [for]mastering."

In other words, he just flapped his hand over some buttons and made this. Without thinking. Dammit. Shimmery synths, paddy bossdrum, disco bassline, total win.

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.

Gonja Sufi's a smokin' nomad in sound and soul: plus Friends Of Friends and Babe Rainbow

Gonja Sufi

Time for some single reviews. The haunting voice of Gonja Sufi will leave an indelible mark on 2010, especially with his second 7" single Kowboys And Indians. He's so unique, a nomad in sound and soul, that he hardly needs the production genius of eclectic LA beatcruncher The Gaslamp Killer. But it works like nothing you've heard before.

The track opens with a buzzing that will have you packing your speakers off to the repair shop. What follows is a stunning blend of eastern mysticism, slacker guitar, psychedelic rhythm and a vocal that swings loosely between Bollywood theme music and Method Man aged 95.

Gonja Sufi, that sinister, genre-smoking spirit of an electronic Hendrix, has produced the essential new sound of this year. The rats are already fleeing town in preparation of his all-conquering debut album A Sufi And A Killer (featured in the March section of my 2010 electronica preview).

Daedelus

Where do I start with the first volume of a split-single series from the Friends Of Friends label? They've given Ninja Tune's Daedelus and debuting double-act Jogger three tracks each on the Friends Of Friends Vol 1 EP, but then they've gone and drowned it all with no less than seven remixes. Flippin' heck!

Daedelus slaps down some disco house (C'est Super works nicely), then gets the guitars out and strums to a Smashing Pumpkins sample. Jogger concentrates on pumping house (Litre O' Colais is especially manly, grrr) and then goes and spoils it all with vague electric guitar noodling, demonic growling and speed techno silliness.

On the remix side, Prefuse 73 protégée Eliot Lipp puts Kraftwerk through an 80s disco mincer, while for his remix of Nice Tights, Nosaj Thing does a wonderful job creating a leftfield soundtrack full of guitar whimsy and minor-key boogie. A mixed affair - it could have been prettier without all the remix bling, as they'd no doubt say on Stockport's Next Top Model.

Babe Rainbow

I promised I would waffle about Babe Rainbow when the time came for his long-awaited Warp debut, the Shaved EP. It's time, so let's get the clippers out and inspect the scalp of Canada's premier dubstepper.

Sorry. I mentioned the d-word. The thing is, Cameron 'Babe Rainbow' Reed is kinda dubstep, but only in a slow-motion, life-slowly-melting-before-your-eyes way. His noise is so deep and deliberate, he makes Massive Attack look like Scooter (the hardcore German funsters, not the weedy muppet).

And so we have seven tracks of metallic, ringing percussion with vocals swamped with claustrophobic drizzle and an all-too-familiar whoomp bass. With the exception of sixth EP track Celebrate, I'm yet to fall in love with Babe Rainbow. Then again, I haven't used his music to get so stoned out of my face, my brain is melting on a toxic beach somewhere north of Jupiter.