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

James from Hadouken! saved me from death by lawnmower

I have a habit of avoiding the Metro newspaper in the same way I have a habit of not smashing my face into the blades of a lawnmower before work every morning.

However, the stinky, freebie spawn of the Daily Mail got something right today. It recommended some good music. Or rather, James out of Hadouken! did in the newspaper's On My iPod feature.

The new-raver (oh come on, they are not in any way "grindie") implored Metro readers to pick up a copy of Hudson Mohawke's funk-infused Rising 5 and described it as "math-y, analogue space-funk with a sitar." I don't hear a sitar there, but I did discover this Boards Of Canada remix of the band sampled by HudMo for Rising 5.

Shuffling death track

James Hadouken! also recommended Flying Lotus' shuffling death track Time Vampires, reminding the dear Metro readers of a Lotus collaboration with the Gorillaz. Flying Lotus did drop a Gorillaz track on Gilles Peterson's radio show recently, and he's also been schmoozing with Thom Yorke - but no Gorillaz remix to report yet.

He went on to plug Inside Pikachu's Foo-Foo by Rustie, except you'd need to replace that euphamism for something a little stronger. It's a stupendous track - as is everything by Rustie at the moment. And he also bigged-up (I believe that is the modern parlance) Joker's Gully Brook Lane.

The Hadouken! chappie finished the Metro feature with Chase & Status' End Credits, a slab of drum and bass melancholia featuring the vocal talents of Plan B which worked brilliantly at the end of Harry Brown and provided Chase & Status with their UK chart breakthrough.

I sometimes get a bit evangelical about electronic music, so it's nice to see music I like amid the usual Metro bilge of kittens, health stories and knowing irony. For once, the lawnmower stayed safely in my garage: I just stapled my forehead instead.

Oh to be torn up by wolves and fed, bit by bit, through an old lawnmower

While I'm busy with radio things, there are a few gramophone releases you and I ought to catch up on.

AGF's fourth album Words Are Missing is a dizzying array of shattered sound and industrial ambience. The harmonies come from vocals torn up by wolves and fed through a lawnmower. The fragments that remain are alluring but ever-so-slightly unsettling.

Harmonic 313 is a side project from Mark Pritchard, better known as one half of Global Communication. His EP1 is a triumphal throwback to the early days of techno, when it was all about Detroit. So yes, it sounds all a bit Juan Atkins without the smoothness, but it works for me.

A whole manbag packed full of Thom Yorke remixes have been released in the last couple of months. Meddling with the lazy-eyed Oxford boy's music are Burial (unfairly labelled as a 2step Massive Attack), Four Tet, Christian Vogel and Newport Pagnell's DJ Surgeon.

The utterly ironic thing about electronica remixes of Radiohead's frontman is that, whatever you do, you just end up making it sound more like Radiohead. Which is a good thing, and you should sniff them down in record shops now.

Finally, Clark is breathing fire again on his new offering, Turning Dragon. He has put all niceties to one side, has walked into the Women's Institute (electronica sub-committee) meeting, and machine-gunned everyone to death with bad-tempered percussion and ADD-level techno.

Listening to his album is like trying to nail gun exploding fireworks inside the Crystal Maze dome. It's hyper, blunder-bus propeller-injected fun and is a real treat from start to finish. Have a listen to Volcan Veins from that very album.

DEEPER FRIED FAT: CLARK'S TED

Reqing out* to retina.IT gets the headnod over stalking Sven Väth and Andrew Weatherall in The Orbit

So what musics have been troubling me ears?

Let's begin with Cylob (pictured), who made his name in the 90s remixing the likes of Aphex Twin and Mike Flowers Pops, both of whom sport more hair than they deserve to. The 'lob span his first reel-to-reels in The Orbit club, Leeds, a venue which arguably spawned my Fat Roland career. I remember watching DJs Andrew Weatherall and Sven Väth with intense interest, hovering behind them like a stalker. As I left the club, I had a lucid moment when I decided, with a theatrical flourish, that yes the world needed my DJing skills. (It didn't, but I went into DJing anyway.)

Cylob's new track Rock The Trojan Fader isn't as immediate as his lovable classic Cut The Midrange Drop The Bass, but it has the same playfulness and eccentricity. Vocoded voices dance up and down analogue keyboards while everything else collapses into a heap of flurried beats.

It bodes well for new album Trojan Fader Style, which I haven't bothered to listen to yet because it's all one long track.

On to everyone's favourite aging relative, Unkle.

The moment Unkle persuaded arch-miserablist Thom Yorke to wail about rabbits and headlights, I was transfixed like a rabbit in some headlights. Yeah, neat simile, I know. Since that high point last decade, we haven't had much output from the band founded by James Lavelle and David Holmes-collaborator Tim Goldsworthy. So the new Unkle album War Stories should be a rare elixir.

It isn't. It is a decent rock album, and comparisons to Kasabian and Stone Roses are fair. The opening tune Chemistry reminds me of Puff Diddly's ridiculously entertaining Come With Me: that's not necessarily a good thing.

But the Fat Roland blog is about electronica, and when Unkle are collaborating with the likes of Josh Homme and The Cult's Ian Astbury, it just ain't gonna ring my bell.

Like former member DJ Shadow, they seem to have found a formula that works. Generally. Most of the time. Kind of. They just need to move on from trip-hop rock crossovers, which were vogue about 52 years ago.

Back to the good music. When I played retina.IT's infectious Tetsub at Manchester's TV21 bar recentlly, I was overwhelmed with a head-noddy Req moment. Anyone who's got into Req will understand me.

retina.IT have now released Semeion, a greatest hits of sorts, full of mid-tempo glitchy bleeps and distorted yet distant funk.

Their studio lies within erupting distance of Mount Vesuvius, and I wonder if they haven't got a satellite or two picking up the sinister clicks and scrapes sprinkled across this sparse, lunar album.

It's such a pleasing effort, lying somewhere between the coldness of Robin Rimbaud and the chunkiness of Clark, that I'm going to give this the head nod over Cylob and Unkle.

I'm careful about who I hyperlink to on this site. Thankfully, I got through this post without mentioning that Unkle used to record in Meatloaf's recording studio. Ah dammit, there's a link to Meatloaf. Oy, stop linking to Meatloaf. Aaw look, Blogger's gone and put a label down there too...

*yes, Reqing out. I just invented it.