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

Bang-on electronic music releases in January 2023

Hello, you. You're looking wonderful today. I love that tartan eyeliner, and those designer galoshes really compliment your knee pads.

It's 2023, and if the progression of previous years is anything to go by, we'll be swallowed by burning lava or eaten by locusts within weeks. Still, there's lots of music to enjoy, and I am going to bang on about some of that music now.

All these January 2023 releases are proper bang-on.

The Black Dog: Music For Dead Airports (Dust Science, EP, pictured above)

These four tracks are atmospheric spatial electronics, at least in part recorded in Sheffield airports. The work is inspired by Sheffield's troubled history with airports, including the doomed Sheffield City Airport which had a runway too short for popular budget airlines. Also Sheffield's really hilly and planes hate hills. Music For Dead Airports is released alongside the band's 2010 field recordings album Music for Real Airports.

Rian Treanor & Ocen James: Saccades (Nyege Nyege Tapes)

A remarkable listen, this. Arising from a residency in Kampala, Rotheram's Rian Treanor produces folk techno with Acholi fiddle player Ocen James. Think super rhythmic Ugandan techno using real instruments. This follows 2020's Treanor album File Under UK Metaplasm, which I described previously as "a rave in the middle of Mike Teavee's fractal transfer in Charlie And The Chocolate Factory".

Oceanic: Choral Feeling (Nous'klaer Audio)

We've had an artist from Rotherham. Now let's have one from Rotterdam. For this debut album, Oceanic asked his friends to sing for him. Simple. The resulting vocal melee is mesmerising, with the rhythmic vocals sounding fully human yet so alien. The repetitive and blossoming Sunshine, Dear is a banger. Oceanic is not to be confused with the early-1990s rave act signed to Cheshire's Dead Dead Good Records.

Ryuichi Sakamoto: 12 (Milan Records)

No Bandcamp preview for this one. This is a selection of musical sketches to mark the revered composer's 71st birthday. He's approached it as a kind of diary, and it tracks a long battle with cancer in which he found himself "reaching for the synthesiser". The track titles are all numbers, and look like a Sudoku grid has glitched because Elon Musk sacked all the puzzle setters. There's a super minimal album teaser on YouTube, although it doesn't give much away. I'll bang on more about this album in Electronic Sound.

Eat Static: Abduction (Planet Dog) 

And finally, look out for this reissue of a 1993 ambient trance classic by the Ozric Tentacles offshoot. It's on double vinyl and comes with added John Peel session tracks. Psychedelic trance that is very druggy, very snappy, and very Planet Doggy.

Best electronic albums of 2020: welcome to my Special Mentions Block Party, whatever that is

Here are yet more special mentions, comprising albums I really liked but couldn't squeeze into my final top 25 despite purchasing several shoe horns.

This selection is themed along the lines of "albums I would play at a block party". 

I have no idea what a block party is. The only parties I've been to are children's, acid house, political and raiding. But let's imagine we're dropping some bangers and the people are going ham. Let's go.

People are arriving at the party: this DJ needs to press play on some tunes. Machinedrum's ninth album A View Of U (Ninja Tune) was one of his strongest, with slow jams and drum machine smashers galore. While the cloakroom cue is bopping to this, I've also popped on Hudson Mohawke's BBHE (Warp), a lively bag of unreleased works that serves as Machinedrum's wackier, dirtier cousin.

To add a unique party atmosphere, I'm now playing Arca's Kick i (XL Recordings), although in typical Arca fashion her work here is not so much bangers as scrapers and writhers and awkwardly diagonal wibblers. Maybe I can save the atmosphere with Tricky's Fall To Pieces (False Idols), his fourteenth album and a welcome return to form due in no small part to his brilliant vocalist Marta. Actually, probably a little dark for a party. Bad DJ choice, but good album.

The partiers are helping themselves to punch. Do they have punch at block parties? Anyway, I'm now spinning Two Fingers' Fight! Fight! Fight! (Nomark) with Amon Tobin in full corrugated-bass mode. Every track is a digitally-decayed dance-off: it's brilliant. Oh no. People are leaving. They want the new Steps album. How about Rian Treanor's second album File Under UK Metaplasm (Planet Mu), which sounds like a rave in the middle of Mike Teavee's fractal transfer in Charlie And The Chocolate Factory? No? Perhaps I can salvage things with upsammy's Zoom (Dekmantel) which takes a mirrorball to IDM and transforms it into an intricate alien sunrise.

No?

Sigh. Stupid imaginary block party.

 

Browse the rest of the Best Electronic Albums of 2020

Best electronic albums of 2019: attacking electronic equipment with stationery

My top 20 list of the best electronic music albums of 2019 is well underway. But let's have a quick fag break and consider some albums that didn't make the final cut: my continuing longlist of the best-of-the-rest.

The press blurb for Jodey Kendrick's EDM Vol.2 (Dub Recordings) suggests listening to this album is good for your brain development. All I know is I loved this squiggly Rephlexian IDM. Meanwhile, Antwood based the stonkingly spangly narrative album Delphi (Planet Mu) around a fictional lovelorn girl who comes complete with her own theme tune. And while we're on Planet Mu, Rian Treanor diced club music to pieces on the choppy ATAXIA (Planet Mu), and it sounded like someone attacking a computer with a hole-punch. In a good way.

Lisbon's Photonz added a queer Balearic flavour to house music in the strong debut album Nuit (Dark Entries). New York label owner Anthony Naples impressed with expensive house on Fog FM (ANS) while Bristol producer Shanti Celeste evoked the spirit of dub techno on Tangerine (Peach Discs): brisk house cuts meet blunted ambience.

Ooo, I must mention WH Lung whose wonderful and psychedelic Incidental Music (Melodic) evoked early Verve when Verve were just Verve without the "The". Aleksi Perala's Sunshine 3 (Dub Recordings) was so bright and cosmic, you could feel the stars twinkling in appreciation.

And two final mentions for this slightly genre-ambivalent section. The titanic techno twiddler Bogdan Raczynski returned to us with Rave 'Till You Cry (Disciples), which was as fun and as daft as I had hoped. And I hold a special place in my heart for the unique Lee "Scratch" Perry. Adrian Sherwood brought out the best in ole scratchy on Rainford (On-U Sound).





Scroll the full best-of-2019 list here.