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

Best electronic music albums of 2025: some actual tip-top, clubbing jam fair

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

As a house music hit once said, "house, house, ha-ha-ha-house". Probably. Here is a summary of some of the notable house music albums of 2025. And as usual, that definition is very loose. Some of them might be outhouse music. Or shed music. Or lean-to music if you're old fashioned. House-ish.

DJ Koze – Music Can Hear Us (Pampa)

Despite the scientific inaccuracy of its title, this is a likeable collection of folky house music. A flute tooting over paddy drums, dreamy vocals over wide glittering chords, a bit of drum 'n' bass, and Damon Albarn singing about a reconciled love over an amapiano shiffle. Koze did a DJ Kicks album once, and this feels very much in that vein.

Charles Webster & The South African Connection – From The Hill (Stay True Sounds South Africa)

From a sizzling Cape Town comes a collection of sunny deep house tunes, with oodles of jazz asides and downtempo loungings. All very pleasant. There are tonnes of collaborators, including Daev Martian, Atmos Blaq and FKA Mash, who I assume is FKA Twigs' gloopier cousin. Here's a fact: it was recorded in Nelson Mandela's former prison.

K-Lone – sorry i thought you were someone else (Incienso)

I'm still playing K-Lone's 2020 album Cape Circa. This is an equally exotic offering, spilling over with warm club tunes. The attention to detail is fascinating: the sprightly beat on Fauna, for example, is so crystalline. Loss and grief underpin its themes, and the title reminds me of the time I waved at someone in a car park by mistake then felt hot embarrassment for a week.

Kaytranada – Ain't No Damn Way! (RCA)

This Canadian producer says his album is "strictly for workouts, dancing and studying" so excuse my while I get my spandex disco pants and/or spandex mortarboard. I love this album. Head-nodding house beats dominate, but there are nods to rave, disco and 1990s Euro-techno. Sampled acts include J Dilla, Tangerine Dream and TLC. Boy, these pants are chafing.

Lindstrøm – Sirius Syntoms (Feedelity Recordings)

This trickily-titled album is a perfect introduction to one of the most positive producers on the planet. Cheerful doesn't even cut it. He makes Roger Hargreaves' Mr Happy look like Strong Sad from Homestar Runner. Sparky disco, acidic house, cheery bass grooves. Plus the best track title of this entire blog series: Sharing An Orange (With Omar S On The Train From Minehead To London).

Ploy – It's Later Than You Think (Dekmantel)

Now we're talking. To exactly quote Tyres from Spaced, this is "tip-top, clubbing jam fair. It was a sandwich of fun on ecstasy bread, wrapped up in a big bag like disco fudge." It's banging and breathless; exactly what should be pouring out of the dancefloor speakers at 2am. Another brilliant Dekmantel release.

Real Lies – We Will Annihilate Our Enemies (Tonal)

Real Lies do Real Lies better than anyone else, and that's no lie. Where would we be without Kevin Lee Kharas' likeable wafflings, and the emotive nostalgia of their expansive club production. At its heart, it's a love album. As he says on the Bicep-ish Towards Horses, "If all people were the same, I’d have no-one else to play with." Aaaaw, lads.

See all of my Best electronic music albums of 2025

Best electronic music albums of 2025: new bowels, my uncle's moustache, something about Berghain

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

Blawan – SickElixir (XL Recordings)

I have seen Blawan live a few times, and on each occassion, I had to contact the NHS and order new bowels. SickElixir has rightly been lauded for its distortion and bass badness. It's powerful beyond belief. It's like one of them grime acts have done a big dump not only over your home speakers, but over reality itself. I suspect it's going to be much copied.

Daniel Avery – Tremor (Domino Recording Co)

When my Uncle Augustus grew a moustache, I hardly recognised him. With a gang of vocalists leading the charge, including Alison Mosshart from The Kills and Walter Schreifels from Rival Schools, this is almost unidentifiable as an Avery album. I'm not entirely convinced, although it's very well done, and my fictional Uncle Augustus loves it.

Djrum – Under Tangled Silence (Houndstooth)

I wasn't expecting this. Djrum's third album leads with flowing piano, melodic ambience and a generous splatter of sinuous drum programming. I mean, he's plonked the piano before, but this is giving Kiasmos-levels of classical music energy. He's still got the grimy bass and acidic techno, but this is pushing the piano up the staircase more than before.

FKA Twigs – EUSEXUA (Young)

Here comes the new album from FKA Twigs or,  to give her her full name, Felicia Kenneth Alabaster Twigs. It's a reliably entertaining mix of airy electronica and pop vibes. She gains electronic music points because the influence of producer Koreless is evident – in fact, Koreless did the production on Drums of Death while flying to Berghain. Hardcore.

Nazar – Demilitarize (Hyperdub)

It's over to Angola for a truly unsettling album inspired by pandemic illness. No, wait, it's better than it sounds. This is a singular sound comprising what I assumed had been confident r'n'b tunes before they were smothered in a gauze of audio unease. The muttering. The scuzz. The broken production. It's like a glitzy dancefloor covered in insects... in a good way.

Polygonia – Dream Horizons (Dekmantel)

Going out of the house naked, flying naked through the air, fighting naked ninjas while naked – we've all had vivid dreams. On this latest album, Polygonia lays out a series of dream sequences with playful and pin-sharp techno. The staccato percussion tickles, and at one point a clipped vocal loop looks set to hypnotise you into unconsciousness. 

Surgeon – Shell~Wave (Tresor Records)

YES. Finally. An album with a tilde in the title. Do you know how long I have been waiting for this? Praying to Santa every morning for a tilde album. Never mind the mathematical symbols, Sheeran, what about the chuffing tilde? Anyhoo. This is Surgeon being brilliant Surgeon. Rowdy bangers, razor-sharp machinery. Even the ambient Dying feels like it's going to tear your face off. Delicious.

See all of my Best electronic music albums of 2025

Best electronic music albums of 2025: deeply dubby about Neapolitan ice cream

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

My 2025 highlights continue. Here are bunch of albums I have categorised under "experimental", which is a cop-out way of saying "assorted genres but let's not get too hung up on labels, yeah?". Despite my laziness, it is still an excellent summary, and you should get these albums down your ears.

Adrian Sherwood – The Collapse Of Everything (On-U Sound)

Despite its apocalyptic title, Sherwood's first solo album since 2012's Survival & Resistance is an uplifting affair. It's got lashings of deeply dubby delights, more than a few jazzy soiree moments, and Brian Eno pops up on production duties for one track. The most fun moment is Spaghetti Best Western, which I guess is better than a Brown Rice Britannia.

Barker – Stochastic Drift (Smalltown Supersound)

It's nice to have Barker back for a second album. His music is sometimes called "post-club", which means chilled dance music rather than an enthusiast organisation dedicated to the Royal Mail. He keeps thinks clean and minimal, shifting and shiny, and thoroughly emotional throughout. The very definition of a headphone listen.

In Transit: In Transit (Felt)

Oh hello there. Dave Huismans appeared in two previous end-of-year blog posts: as his alias A Made Up Sound in 2016, and as 2562 way back in 2019. Nice to have him back. This album has only just come out, and develops his ex_libris work into an even deeper, duskier ambience. You'll get lost in the smokiness and the speckles of it all.

Josef Tumari – Dubovaya (DSL System)

All the way from Tashkent comes a killer collection of ambient dub, slamming house and spiritual breaks. Sublimation Collective's Josef Tumari gives us a real pick 'n' mix here, but that's part of the charm:. Once a groove lock in, it's truly transportive: his sounds and vocal use is never less than hypnotic. I'm off to check some Uzbek playlists.

Lyra Pramuk – Hymnal (7K!)

Techno, folk and classical music collide in a tasty Neapolitan ice cream mix for Pramuk's second album. The building blocks for this album are wild: a German classical music quartet, the poet Nadia Marcus, the I Ching, the artist Jenna Sutela, slime moulds, and some nifty CDJ work. Yes, I said slime moulds. Yet again, her vocal work is on point.

Powell – We Do Recover (Diagonal Records)

We do indeed recover. This album was collated over an eight-year period, finally achieving form after Powell lost a friend to suicide. This tragic loss forms one of the themes here, and it feels like an experimental producer working things out in real time. There are moments of contemplation, of grief, of darkness, of wonky piano and broken circuits.

See all of my Best electronic music albums of 2025

Best electronic music albums of 2025: one drummer leaping and a dubby Welsh ambienteer

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

Here are some picks with an ambient vibe, or thereabouts. Light up a doobie, set fire to your beanbag, and let the fumes send you to a blissful nirvana. (Don't actually do that. It's dangerous.)

Cosey Fanni Tutti – 2t2 (Conspiracy International)

There's something super-epic about Cosey Fanni Tutti's third solo album. The ritualistic choir in the opening track, those pulsing drones moving everything forward, the distended mourning of Stolen Time. When things slip into organic ambience in the second half, you can still feel the thrum of the drones. A big album with big music even when it's bring small.

Jeremy Hyman – Low Air (JH Recordings)

A drummer leapfrogs his drum kit for a debut solo album. Although it's not as drummy as you'd expect. This occasional Animal Collective collaborator has dialled down his, er, dials. The rhythms ripple rather than pulse, and sparkling washes of rich ambience provide the energy. There's a track called Clear Chords, which sums things up nicely.

Mark Van Hoen – The Eternal Present (Dell'Orso Records)

Locust was one of the first electronic music acts I saw live, and I was not ready for it. It hurt my brain (I was naïve and very wrong). This latest work from a post-Locust Van Hoen, taken from many years of archive recordings, meanders from swelling ambience to buzzy four-to-the-floor techno. There's even a Slowdive cover. And a detuned ambient track called Xmas (take THAT, Kylie).

Purelink: Faith (Peak Oil)

Note to be confused with Addicted to Bass writers Puretone. In fact, this is diametrically different. I shouldn't have mentioned it. Sorry. Faith is a big old gaseous ball of cosy ambience, with Basic Channel instincts, bursting with sunshine and beauty. Even cameo vocalist Loraine James sounds chilled. Lovely beyond all loveliness. Not to be confused with PureGyms.

Shed – Towards East (The Final Experiment)

Here comes album full of ambience, but this one is very different. Yes, there's lilting on Shed's sixth album. The lilting is locked in, don't you worry. There are also junglist loops that scribble into your brain, the obligatory dub techno scowls, and chords so portentous, you'll be looking up "portentous" in a dictionary.

Voice Actor & Squu – Lust (1) (Stroom)

Voice Actor's debut album Sent From My Telephone was 108 tracks long. Their collaboration with dubby Welsh ambienteer Squu is a sensible length, and best of all is it's dubby and rhythmic. Clever use of wonky vocals add so much here, and even spooked me out on the haunting nekk. The darkness is really quite beautiful, putting the "aaaaah" into ASMR.

See all of my Best electronic music albums of 2025

Best electronic music albums of 2025: an introduction

I have no doubt that your favourite moment of 2025 was busting the 6-7 move with the new Pope while on a Jet-2 holiday (£200 for a conclave of four). However, my best moment was all of the excellent electronic music that was released throughout the year.

It's time for my annual best-of list. All the bleepy music highlights of 2025. I've been doing this list annually since 2009, with the exception of my stroke year of 2023 when my brain was all wonky. Let's set out some ground rules using bullet points because I am a grown-up and that's what grown-ups do.

• The list is not definitive. If I rewrote it next month, it would no doubt change. I will have missed something good off. If I have, leave a comment.

• I am no longer doing an overall Best Album. This has felt increasingly trite in recent years. There will be two tiers: a Best Album Summary featuring a few dozen albums, then a Top 20 Bangers with all of the top dogs, the boss cats, the first-place ferrets.

• I have excluded rereleases and compilations, although albums comprised of archive material are okay.

• My definition of "electronic music" steers towards IDM, braindance, home listening and experimental, so you're unlikely to see Deadmau5, Vengaboys, David Guetta or, erm, Bombalurina with Timmy Mallett. Although, you never know...

That's the ground rules, and if you don't like them, you can shove a Labubu up your nose. Whatever a Labubu is. I seriously have no idea.

There will be THIRTY blog posts – yes, thirty, count 'em – over the next few days, taking you through the Best Album Summaries then moving into the Top 20 Bangers.

What's the timeline? It's 30th December today. Instead of cramming all of my blog posts into the 30th and 31st, as I have done in previous years, I will take my time. I expect to finish on Saturday 3rd January 2026. Spilling into next year irritates my inner perfectionist, but I'd rather take my time. And people will still have their Christmas trees up on the 3rd, so whatevs.

Get ready. Have a notepad on hand. No, not a Silvine one. A fancy one, with coloured edges and a clasp.

Here goes...

See all of my Best electronic music albums of 2025

Blistering barnacles, here comes Bjork in 2026

It's okay, everyone. The world might be going to hell in a handbasket, but here comes Björk to make everything okay again.

Reykjavik Arts Festival takes place in May 2026, presumably in Reykjavik and not, like, Bognor Regis or something. The festival announced a fancy new installation from Björk as part of their line-up, and along with that there will be a new Björk album.

The exhibition will be called Echolalia, which is the name for when someone involuntarily repeats words. Children do it a lot, as do some people with autism and Tourettes, as did my old neighbour Lovely Philomena who would always repeat the last three words of anything you ever said.

"I've just been to the shop to buy milk, feta cheese and some mouldy old doughnuts."

"Mouldy old doughnuts."

She (Björk not Philomena) created the exhibition with Gloucestrian-turned-Icelander James Merry, who also worked on the visual presentation – and funky masks – for her Cornucopia tour. Some of those masks were wild: they looked like birds and beasts and barnacles.

The new album is “currently in development”. In my world, this means I have thought about it but haven't actually started any of the work. My epic fantasy novel set on Uranus is in development. My conceptual triple-album about bionic snails is in development. This blog post is in development.

The world feels more heavenly: it's always exciting to have more Björk in our lives.

"In our lives."

Thanks, Philomena.

Further Fats: Blade Runner 2049, Jóhann Jóhannsson and an origami cow (2017)

Further Fats: Best electronic music albums of 1995 – Autechre versus Bjork (2020)

Bruise Blood cuts deep in Electronic Sound magazine

In the current edition of Electronic Sound magazine, I have a good old waffle blab with Bruise Blood, the solo project name of Mike Bourne from psychedelic rockers Teeth Of The Sea.

In the interview, we chat about the sonic dirtiness of his debut solo album, having the confidence to go solo, buying old gear from Cash Converters, and his love of Autechre.

His album, called You Run Through the World Like An Open Razor, came out a few days ago on Rocket Recordings. My notes for the album contain phrases like "so very very dirty" and "the scuzz is mesmerising", and "gaaaawjeous" which may or may not be a word.

This edition also contains my 130th column, this month themed on brains. "What's inside a brain?" I ask. "What are brains made of? Do they taste of cauliflower?" I pontificate, before going on to answer precisely none of those questions. I do, incidentally, briefly talk about my stroke (see blog posts passim).

The cover star of this edition is Gary Numan and his guitar-drenched 1980 album Telekon. The album contains humdingers of track titles, such as Remember I Was Vapour and I Dream of Wires. However, none of them can hold a candle to Bruise Blood's And They Burned a Hole Through the Earth All the Way to Hell and Oh But You Can, Oh But You Will. Absolutely sublime.

Read my Bruise Blood feature here. Read my column here. Both of those links need a subscription.

Further Fats: My own personal braindance (2023)

Further Fats: The dark destroyers – my interview with Black Sites (2025)