Originally published in January 2021.
50. Florian T M Zeisig – Coatcheck
49. Valesuchi – Tragicomic Remixes
48. MoMA Ready – Deep Technik
47. Rival Consoles – Articulation
46. Sex Swing – Type II
45. ASC – An Exact Science
44. Jeff Parker – Suite for Max Brown
43. Grimes – Miss Anthropocene
42. Idles – Ultra Mono
41. Fiona Apple – Fetch the Bolt Cutters
40. ASC & Sam KDC – A Restless Mind
39. Nicolas Jaar – Telas
38. various artists – Air Texture VII
37. 100 gecs – 1000 gecs and the Tree of Clues
36. A.G. Cook – 7G
35. Yves Tumor – Heaven to a Tortured Mind
34. various artists – New York Dance Music IV
33. Food House – Food House
32. Oneohtrix Point Never – Magic Oneohtrix Point Never
31. The Soft Pink Truth – Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase?
30. ASC – Isolated Systems
29. HEALTH – DISCO4 :: PART I
28. MXLX – Serpent
27. Freddie Gibbs & The Alchemist – Alfredo
26. Oranssi Pazuzu – Mestarin kynsi
25. Róisín Murphy – Róisín Machine
24. various artists – Outliers:1
23. Zora Jones – Ten Billion Angels
22. Kelly Lee Owens – Inner Song
21. Squarepusher – Be Up a Hello
20. various artists – Join the Future – UK Bleep & Bass 1988-91
The bleep & bass movement, as documented in Matt Anniss’s 2019 book Join the Future: Bleep Techno and the Birth of British Bass Music (which, as of time of writing, I am only a couple chapters into), was a forerunner to bass genres (like dubstep and garage) that would become more popular in the UK later in the 1990s and into the 2000s. The genre, which Anniss posits was largely born in Yorkshire in the late 1980s, borrowed the techno and electro sounds coming from the U.S. at the time and added a bass component to add to the music’s danceability. This compilation, Join the Future – UK Bleep & Bass 1988-91, is a partner release to Anniss’s book that highlights some lesser known tracks and artists from the cultural moment, though names like Unique 3 and Nightmares on Wax may be more familiar to some. The compilation contains 12 tracks that see these producers experimenting with new sounds and combinations, their generally simple, looping bleep melodies matched with an assortment of frenetic drum lines. An early highlight, Demonik’s “Labyrinthe,” sounds like the soundtrack to the robot rebellion—with dissonant computer bleeps forming an aggressively catchy melody over an electro bassline—and is also a perfect peak-hours dance track, its pulsating energy emanating from its disparate components. Later tracks like Alfanso’s “Dub Feels Nice (Version 4)” and Ital Rockers’ “Dreams” borrow a bit more from soul with swinging, crooning vocal samples, while others have far less recognizable musical touchpoints: Man Machine’s “Animal (DJ Martin & DJ Holmes Primordial Jungle Mix)” has a core consisting of a haunting vocal track, tribal drums, and animal shrieks. Despite covering a fairly broad musical swath, the songs on this compilation are all clearly very carefully constructed, their creators’ experimentation in merging these specific sounds with each other a driving force behind each, without losing any of their dancefloor-ready qualities; they are the kinds of songs that make you want to move closer to the speakers to catch every note. Bandcamp
Best Track: “Labyrinthe” (Demonik)
19. Cavern of Anti-Matter – In Fabric OST
Coming in at 113 minutes, the score for Peter Strickland’s 2018 film In Fabric (itself only 118 minutes) is one of the most expansive and innovative in recent memory. Even the best recent electronic scores—like Mica Levi’s for Under the Skin and Oneohtrix Point Never’s for Good Time—are requisitely heavy in repetition, the cinematic format typically necessitating some kind of leitmotif to focus the viewer’s auditory attention properly, but Cavern of Anti-Matter includes so much variation of the main theme throughout the 35 tracks that constitute In Fabric’s soundtrack that it could easily be mistaken for a studio album. Cavern of Anti-Matter is a trio composed of Stereloab founder Tim Gane, former Stereloab drummer Joe Dilworth, and synth player Holger Zapf, and much of the score indeed plays like a Stereolab chamber pop album (replete with harpsichord-esque sounds throughout) by way of Einstürzende Neubaten. Synth modulations abound, and a large number of tracks consist primarily of various loops running in parallel (or perpendicular) and tied together by a flowing, crashing wave of synth noise. But equally beautiful are the frequent digressions from this structure: two of the highlights are “Terminal Metric,” a post-rock symphony jam sesh, and “Speaks Machine,” an infectious dance track with aquatic squelches, electronic drums, and a simple but very catchy melody. In one of the album’s more interesting moments, “Taktron Decay,” an acid-heavy, minute-long track, cuts into “An Ambiguous Shopfloor Manoeuvre (Spanish),” which pairs a beautifully subdued guitar with ethereal synths to make for something that recalls some of Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks work. Though many scores exist outside of their respective films, In Fabric OST is a fascinatingly structured work in its own right, keeping the listener in tune with its core while constantly fiddling with the driving emotional forces at its edges. Bandcamp
Best Track: “Speaks Machine”
18. Blóm – Flower Violence
An album as rage-fueled and urgent as Flower Violence is could hardly sound more fun. Over its five tracks, the debut album from Newcastle-based punk band Blóm, described on their Bandcamp as “three cute punx,” sees the band operating in a familiar register for punk and riot grrrl fans but with playful musical elements that make this tougher to categorize than it might appear on the surface. Consider the skronky guitar lines in “Audrey” and the 8-bit dissonance in “Meat”: this is a band willing and able to evade genre classification for their exploration of “queerness, feminism, gender identity,” and a host of other thematic touchpoints mentioned on the album’s page. When the bold, assertive melodies that open “God” degenerate and become more abstract in the song’s second half, we understand that this is a statement of rebellion against the norm; when the lyrics in the last minute of the track turn into some kind of angry singalong, we understand that this is meant to be a rallying cry, a welcome into the resistance. Even “Ubermensch,” which opens with a wall of feedback and has some of the more haunting vocals on the album, eventually settles into a catchy swing by its end without sacrificing any of the anger that drives Blóm’s music. The closer, “Be Kind,” is a celebratory coda and final screw-you to the punk establishment. Blóm is going to rage against the machine in any way they want, and you are welcome to come along. Bandcamp
Best Track: “Meat”
17. Helena Deland – Someone New
Helena Deland’s last project was 2018’s From the Series of Songs “Altogether Unaccompanied” Vol. I – IV, a mysterious nine-track release that covered a range of genres from indie rock to dream pop to techno, spread across two EPs released half a year apart. Her follow-up, Someone New, is almost shockingly straightforward: not only is it a traditional studio album, but its 13 indie rock tracks also generally hew closer to convention. This is no criticism, as Deland’s beautiful voice and lyricism create a moving tour de force, and the electronic elements, though less foregrounded than in her prior work, complement the guitar chord progressions well and control tone masterfully. Much of the album evokes unrequited love, or perhaps the similarly woebegone feeling of a perfect relationship ending due to happenstance. Consider “Dog” or “Pale,” two bass-heavy tracks that Deland makes consonant through her gorgeous crooning: this is an album that understands both the precariousness and the tenderness associated with an amicable breakup. “The Walk Home,” an instrumental interlude, uses nervous strings and a lowing woodwind to create the feeling of loneliness, while “Mid Practice,” one of the album’s more upbeat songs, has a constant dampened drum clacking that might remind some of the feeling of not being able to forget someone who is out of your life. The album ends with a perfect summation of its driving forces and mission statement in the final lyrics of “Fill the Rooms”: “The last thing you hear is me screaming, ‘Come back! Fill the empty rooms with music.’” Bandcamp
Best Track: “The Walk Home”
16. various artists – Studiolo: The ‘90s Afro/Cosmic Era
Composed of eight tracks recorded in the 1990s by Western European producers, Studiolo: The ‘90s Afro/Cosmic Era sounds like something of an alien broadcast, its heavy use of wind instruments and African drums clashing astonishingly well with each track’s uniquely bizarre synth melodies. Resultingly, each track has an almost tactile disconnect between the organic and the synthetic, with an additional layer of incongruity from the merging of the blossoming Western electronic dance scene with folk sounds from Africa and South America. In “Indien Summer,” for example, sounds that may fit well in the score of an ‘80s adventure film are met with a droning, ominous synth, while “Tantawina” merges a Tangerine Dream-inspired soundscape with a simple acid bass melody and distant rolling synths in the higher tones. “Zymotic” takes this a step further by matching whining, modulating synths with an easily danceable drum rhythm that itself has some alien breaks. Across the compilation, these pounding drum patterns merge with a perhaps requisite headiness to create an amalgam unlike much that is being made today, and even in the more conventional tracks, like “Sonar,” a rich web of luscious melodies combines to make something more than the sum of its parts. Bandcamp
Best Track: “Funky Nephos” (Claudio Diva)
15. The Exaltics & Heinrich Mueller – Dimensional Shifting
With the death of James Stinson in 2002 came the end of Drexciya, a short-lived duo specializing in electro and Detroit techno and perhaps my favorite act in the history of electronic music. I am not too familiar with what Gerald Donald (aka Heinrich Mueller), the surviving member of Drexciya, has been up to over the last couple decades, so I was shocked to hear in Dimensional Shifting the closest thing to Drexciya’s at once aquatic and interstellar sound this side of Stinson’s passing. Much of the album sounds like an alien transmission, abounding in beeps and arpeggios that are difficult to fully parse against droning space-age synths, but it is the Drexciyan squelches that brought a tear to my eye as reminiscences of the four-volume Journey of the Deep Sea Dweller compilation and the simple electro beats that seem to have become passé, or at least outré, in recent years. The frenetic 808 flickering across the album makes it difficult to choose a single track as the MVP, but I might lean toward “Time Aperture,” which merges droning synths, electro claps, and a pleasant acid bounce to make for a ‘90s song using modern electronic instruments. The whole album evokes an ominousness related to communication with the unknown, which is why Paris the Black Fu’s singalong vocals in “Dimensional Shift” come as such a shock: if we could decode and translate messages received from other galaxies, how bizarre it would be to hear, “Dimensional shift / Rift in the matrix / DNA tampering / Biological interference.” Bandcamp
Best Track: “Time Aperture”
14. various artists – New York Dance Music
Few musicians had a better, more prolific year than the Towhead Recordings and HAUS of ALTR artists, and with New York Dance Music, the first of seven major compilations put out between the two Big Apple-based labels in 2020, this group of young producers defined the ethos of their collective project while remaining impossible to truly pin down. The album starts with “In the Spot,” a track by AceMo and Color Plus that alternates between heavy juke and a mysterious, expectant synth melody that evokes something akin to hesitance, before throwing itself onto the dance floor with MoMA Ready’s “Booty Ass-O-Matic,” a vulgar, grimy juke track overlaid with a rhythmic heavy breathing and lyrics that refer to sliding into girls’ DMs for links to their OnlyFans accounts and offering to Venmo money in exchange for nudes. Over the course of its 17 songs, the album stays generally in the juke camp while heavily incorporating elements from a wide range of dance genres, including jungle, electro, Jersey club, Detroit techno, drum & bass, and British bass music. One of the many beauties of this album is the alchemical manner in which these artists blend genres so seamlessly to create something wholly new: Kanyon’s “Taste” is a lovely aquatic track that’s still more of a stuttering decomposition of juke than a Drexciyan techno song, AceMoMA and Kanyon’s “Untitled” starts with a wub-heavy techno melody that eventually gives way to commanding drum claps, and Color Plus’s “Pum Plate” merges an introspective piano melody, muted kicks, and the aggressive refrain “Pussy – I’ma eat it.” Despite 11 different producers contributing to the album, there is a surprisingly clean flow through its course, ending with DJ SWISHA and Kanyon’s “Pop n Shake,” an exhilarating blend of all of the forces going into the album as a whole. The three New York Dance Music sequels that would be released later in 2020 are all excellent in their own right, but the exciting, unexpected nature of this first entry is impossible to match. Bandcamp
Best Track: “Pop n Shake” (DJ SWISHA x Kanyon)
13. Phillip Sollmann – Monophonie
Composed by Phillip Sollmann for an orchestra made up of rare historical instruments researched by Hermann von Helmholtz in the 19th century, microtonal instruments designed by Harry Partch, and metal sound sculptures created by Harry Bertoia, Monophonie premiered as a performance at the Volksbühne in Berlin in 2017 before being released as an album in May 2020. As may be easy to guess from that description, this eletroacoustic album is unlike anything I have heard, its mysterious timbres creating cacophonies altogether foreign and yet gloriously textured. The soundscapes gradually become richer as the album progresses, consistently adding new instruments (largely percussive) and engaging in a surprising range of genres given the specific set of sounds it uses. A couple early tracks, “Rara” and “Micro,” might even recall techno and microhouse structures (Sollmann is better known by many as minimal techno DJ and producer Efdemin), though the next two, “Motor” and “Stutter,” feel more classical in nature. The penultimate track, “U / O,” might fit well in your typical film score were more traditional instruments used, and the closer, “Mono,” has a pounding conclusion with a post-rock structure that might recall some of Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s work. Largely due to the ringing metal percussion of one of the instruments used most throughout the album and the echoes generously picked up in the recording, even Monophonie’s more upbeat tracks have a haunting nature to them, though less so in “Plain,” my favorite song on the album, whose playful syncopations reminded me of Tom Waits. Bandcamp
Best Track: “Plain”
12. various artists – Physically Sick 3
Where many of the year’s best “various artists” compilations have some unifying theme—be it a certain genre and moment or a label’s mission statement—Physically Sick 3 has a more utilitarian reason to exist, as it was released about a month and a half after the murder of George Floyd, and all proceeds went to Equality for Flatbush, an organization focused on police accountability, affordable housing, and anti-gentrification. The album’s 27 tracks by 27 different artists form a rather disjoint mixtape, as you won’t find the same clear start-to-finish song progression of Towhead Recordings’ New York Dance Music or Samurai Music’s Outliers:1, but the broad swath of electronic music that the album covers highlights a range of genres that were borne from and evolved in black communities. The first three tracks alone might be a helpful illustration of the album’s disparate pleasures: Anz’s “Body + Mind” opens the album with the familiar sample from C’hantal’s “The Realm,” though never heard quite like this, with a sparse, filthy, snare-heavy bounce. This is followed by SHYBOI’s “Eat That,” a song that evokes Jersey club music in its sampling but with a more direct four-on-the-floor pounding, and then MoMA Ready’s “Portal Step,” a breakstep masterpiece that fluidly integrates a wubby melody seemingly inspired by the sounds of mid-2010s brostep and future bass. Physically Sick 3’s merits lie not in cohesion but in curation, working with some of the hottest producers of today (in addition to those already mentioned, there are tracks by Dreamcrusher, AceMo, Savile, KMRU, Low Jack, Special Request, DJ SWISHA, and DJ Python) as well as legends like Surgeon and Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe. For a groovy techno track that seems oddly reminiscent of both punk rock and Phil Collins, see “Pig” by Physical Therapy (also co-curator of the album); for subdued deep house, look no further than AYA’s “a fflash gun for a ffiver.” There is at least something for all electronic music fans on this album, and there is a lot to love for those seeking to celebrate the genre in its various forms. Bandcamp
Best Track: “I Feel Like Dying (Phenomenon Mix)” (AceMo)
11. Nathan Fake – Blizzards
To listen to Blizzards is to encounter your own smallness in the face of nature’s grandeur, and to welcome it. Its title invokes a wintry environment, but even if the clean techno notes do fit more in a club heated by dancers’ movement than they would at a pool party, the warmth of the melodies that Nathan Fake creates and the synths that he uses makes these soundscapes anything but frigid. The album’s simple loops and chord progressions are made garish and grandiose by the fullness of the electronic instruments that execute them, and the synth-forward melodies are matched by equally unrelenting drum patterns that enhance their would-be powers on a dancefloor (the album came out in early April, so we just barely missed the chance to know for sure). The majority of the songs on Blizzards are structured as a single “primary” loop, progressing through increasing stages of excitement and intensity, with frequent asides or variations on the theme occurring for a few bars before returning to a home base; by focusing on one augmenting melody and breaking from the core almost haphazardly, the songs get their unexpected fortification. Each song seems to soundtrack the discovery of a new kingdom, with all the energy and nervous excitement that that might entail, or perhaps facing a new storm as the title may suggest. This builds toward “Eris & Dysnomia,” one of the most blissfully anxious songs of the year, and the ambient release in “Vitesse,” the album’s final track and the only respite from Blizzards’ overwhelming intensity. Dance music in 2020 saw no dearth of nervous energy—see the breakthrough success of Nyege Nyege Tapes as Exhibit A—but no album managed to make this restlessness quite as happy as Blizzards. Bandcamp
Best Track: “Eris & Dysnomia”
10. Jason Crumer – Jason Crumer
From its opening track, Jason Crumer’s self-titled album is the sonic equivalent of a horror film. Though this isn’t exactly rare for noise and drone artists—fear of the unknown and the unknowable could be described as the genres’ driving emotional force—Crumer’s combination of familiar sounds with the less intelligible gives much of the album its effectiveness, and his rhythmic and repetitive use of both add to its unsettling eeriness. To set the scene, “Vent,” the opening track, has a rusty door open and close repetitively, a totally placeable sound but one that takes on a bit of a life of its own when repeated incessantly with such a constant cadence. This later cuts to a clearly guided whirlpool of static, evoking a markedly non-benevolent force, with genuinely gorgeous droning in the background. The droning and static both intensify on “Motorcycle Ride,” which adds a motorcycle’s roar to add some unexpected consonance through the merging of these unique industrial forces, and become even more violent on “RSS,” which adds a crackling synth, metal clanks, and potentially faint human voices in the album’s early climax. Over the next seven tracks, Crumer generally operates in a tamer register, though it is here that he breaks from the aggressive noise music mold and begins to explore specific emotional concepts: “Lord Insecure” uses a soft, high-pitched beep and various nervous, frenetic sounds around it to form the same anxiety one might get from hearing a gnat right behind the head, and “Mr. Paranoia,” another highlight of the album, is a nightmarish multiplication of the opening track’s titular vent to give the sense of twin sinister forces, just as unrelenting as before. Crumer’s vision of a hopeless dream and all the anxiety that comes with it is fully realized on “Sagacity,” the last track, which is perhaps the most explosive of the whole album. In the end, there is no release and no denouement; there is only violence. Bandcamp
Best Track: “Motorcycle Ride”
9. Four Tet – Parallel
On Christmas Eve, Kieran Hebden announced in an Instagram post that at midnight that night, Greenwich Mean Time, he’d be releasing two surprise albums. I freely admit that I teared up when I read those words; there is little that excites me more than new Four Tet music, and getting nearly two and a half hours of it with basically no advanced notice is the kind of event I think I will be telling my children about. Parallel, technically the second of the two Christmas releases (by a couple minutes), is composed largely of original tracks, with some previously released under his ⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ moniker; coming in the wake of Sixteen Oceans, his poppiest album to date, this ambient house masterpiece is a bit of a return to form. It opens with “Parallel 1,” a nearly 27-minute song that ranks among the very best music Hebden has ever made, a throbbing, pulsating set of operatic loops that dance around each other with equal parts grace and whimsy before ending with glorious, unintelligible vocals (one of the key takeaways from Four Tet’s 2020 output is that his voice sampling and mixing is perhaps the most interesting of any current artist). Over the following nine tracks, aptly titled “Parallel 2” through “Parallel 10,” he bounces from the dancefloor to the smoking area, from There Is Love in You to Morning / Evening, from drums to synths to bells to chimes to his now trademark birdsong. It is a summation of those impulses that guided Hebden’s music over the last decade, and nearly all of its melodies, many of which dance around each other on the same track, reach the sublime. The album ends with a three-minute piano solo that, despite its expert, impeccable execution, echoes the lightness and sense of improvisation that penetrates so much of Parallel. Four Tet’s music has become synonymous with microhouse for its clever transformation of field recordings into dance beats, and to end his album with an instrumental performance that matches that same energy is both brilliant and something of a wry joke. Bandcamp
Best Track: “Parallel 1”
8. Josey Rebelle – Josey in Space
Fresh off the heels of her 2019 Essential Mix of the Year win, Josey Rebelle released mix album Josey in Space in conjunction with Beats in Space. The mix is a testament to Rebelle’s wizardry on the dancefloor; though the many genre shifts are so smooth as to be nearly unnoticeable as they play out, the range of musical impulses she follows results in 70 minutes of perfectly controlled energy. Opening with a feedback-heavy, nigh experimental DJ Marcelle track called “Dub (Dub)”—an apt touchpoint given DJ Marcelle’s flagrant rejection of genre distinctions in her own mixes—Rebelle follows it with a rRoxymore track that also, in its slow, spacy cadence, weighs heavily with the air of expectation associated with hearing the headliner DJ first take the sticks on a Friday night. Bridging this introduction to the dance party is a jazz poetry track by Tenesha the WordSmith featuring Daniel B. Summerhill, with lyrics that echo the ongoing civil rights movement (“Now my dreams look like Martin Luther King crip walking on cloud nine”) and airy synth and drum beats that up the energy levels before Rebelle gives a full release on Afrodeutsche’s “Phase Two,” a dubby, groovy deep house track. As the mix continues, we hear distorted acid, wonky soul, wondrously dancy funk, jazz (if more in spirit than in construction), moody drum & bass, and a wide range of intensities as Rebelle takes us through her celebration of the dance music genre. Though she features a couple artists that I was familiar with, like Detroit techno veteran Titonton Duvanté and up-and-comer Loraine James, the majority of Rebelle’s tracklist is composed of less recognizable names spanning the last couple decades. For those less interested in a history lesson, it is easy to get lost in the grooves: this is the kind of mix that makes you stop noticing the passing of time. Bandcamp
Best Track: “Avenues” (Titonton Duvanté)
7. DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ – Charmed
For as effortless as Charmed sounds—its funky disco house might be the most purely joyful music of 2020—DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ’s craft is anything but simple, wearing a bizarrely robust range of influences on her sleeve while seamlessly including dozens of disparate vocal samples throughout its 3 hours. The album opens with “Next to Me,” a virtuosic house track with heavy jazz elements that is also reminiscent of the educational video games I played in the early 2000s (imagine if ClueFinders were scored by Daft Punk). The track drips with groovy vibes, and it might be easy to forget that there is nothing else like this that has come out in the last few years. After two relatively brief songs (DJ Sabrina’s track transitions, even including the few interludes and minute-long tracks, make the album a continuous mix), we get the title track, which features a pure, serotonin-fueled beat and a range of vocal samples so diverse (singing, rapping, and speaking) that it is nothing short of alchemy that it works at all. That proves to be rather foreshadowing for the rest of the album, which includes a host of vocal samples with the same intonations as late ‘90s sitcoms (like the one that inspired DJ Sabrina’s moniker) as well as an instrumental “Sweet Home Alabama” sample, and on the album’s best song, “New Year’s Resolution,” a refrain from a 2013 song of the same name by Glaswegian pop band Camera Obscura. DJ Sabrina’s 2017 debut, Makin’ Magick, reminded me of experimental rapper Lil Ugly Mane in the way she let the chinks in her production show through, but Charmed retains the innovative energy while providing a sleeker listening experience. Few artists would be so bold as to include “Forever,” the kind of “pull all the stops” song that might be the final track on most electronic albums, at the midway point of the tracklist, but she follows this with so many victory laps and celebratory tunes that in the context of Charmed, it feels like its natural place. Bandcamp
Best Track: “New Year’s Resolution”
6. Four Tet – Sixteen Oceans
With Four Tet’s early 2019 hit “Teenage Birdsong,” he hinted at the beginning of a poppier stretch of his career, the lovely outsider house (composed, as the title suggests, of birdsong) surely more radio-friendly than his IDM and ambient of yore. With “Baby,” this premonition was confirmed by the presence of popstar Ellie Goulding’s voice, even if in a fascinatingly chopped-up state (it is one of my favorite uses of the human voice in any dance song, full stop) and transformed into a house beat as well. So when Sixteen Oceans was released, the relatively simplistic melodies that cover much of the album were no surprise, but if anything, this slight pivot in Kieran Hebden’s output is a further testament to the man’s skill, artistry, and raw emotional force. The opening track, “School,” begins with clicking, rattling sounds that bristle with potential energy, and when the melody first hits, the consummation of this first minute of expectation is cathartic, with one of the catchiest tunes Four Tet has ever recorded. He gets “Baby” and “Teenage Birdsong” out of the way by the fourth track, and over the course of the remaining 12 “oceans,” he plunges into chiller, often more introspective beauty, without leaving the dancefloor behind. On “Romantics,” a gorgeous lilting harp plays alongside a wonky birdsong melody, while on “Love Salad,” he combines a delicate bell-like synth melody, a muted drum pattern, and an energizing techno loop: this is dance music at its most tender, and the melding of these emotions reaches pure bliss. Four Tet tweeted around the time of release that the split between field recordings and computer-generated sounds was roughly 50/50; this staggering focus on Hebden’s world, present in the sound of birds, bubbles, a clicking insect, and his own mother reading words in Sanskrit, makes this album feel all the more personal. Sixteen Oceans is at once dense with emotion and light as a feather, and its endless relisten value made me cherish its subtleties all the more over the course of the year. Bandcamp
Best Track: “Baby”
5. Lucki – Almost There
Lucki mumbles his way through Almost There and still packs more bite and angst in a single bar than many rappers could generate on a whole mixtape. The EP doesn’t have many hooks or choruses, with the man mostly content to sprawl walls of verse over the surreal trap beats that populate the project, and rather than sounding unstructured, it comes off as the calculated ruminations of someone convincing himself he’s better off doing things his way. He says so explicitly in the first lyric—“Only one credit at the end cause I did this shit by myself”—and reaffirms it constantly over the course of the album, whether he’s rapping about “unlimited cheat codes” or bragging about his ex being proud of him. But these aren’t the confident boasts of someone happy to have it all; the anguish that comes through is so prominent as to become more text than subtext. His braggadocio isn’t convincing, and on some songs, it almost sounds like he is crying, even as he raps about the expensive cars or clothing his career has afforded him, or desperately racing against the instrumental to try to get a word in edgewise. The cadre of producers he works with do well to focus more on space-age synths, wonky melodies, or unconventional instruments (the squeaking recorder in “Runnin With” is one of the best rap beats I’ve heard in years) than on more typical components of modern trap, even if there is a familiar 808 sound present on much of the project as well, as a way to echo the existential crises Lucki seems to be facing. In a way, it’s all in the title: this is a man who acknowledges his success, still feels there’s something lacking, and is trying to figure out what exactly that is. Soundcloud
Best Track: “Runnin With”
4. The Orb – Abolition of the Royal Familia
Many of my favorite albums of 2020 jump from genre to genre, often within the same track, and combine impulses to create something altogether original. But none perhaps do so quite as surprisingly as The Orb’s Abolition of the Royal Familia, in that its leaps from funk to house to ambient to reggae and back again are not so much the congealing of different forces, but rather the subjugation of these sounds into dance music at once energizing and mollifying. Dub is only literally present on a couple tracks near the center of the album, but the spirit of dub is present throughout, from its slightly off-kilter approach to genre tendencies (consider the way jungle gives way to a sinister Tangerine Dream-inspired melody on “House of Narcotics – Opium Wars Mix”) to its loosely structured tracklist, expressing not so much the arc of a live performance but the free-flowing nature of an electronic jam sesh. “The Queen of Hearts – Princess of Clubs Mix” might be a drum & bass song, but its break is almost imperceptible for the first half, and when it finally kicks in around the song’s midpoint, a frenetic vocal sample keeps an upward-looking human element in there. Similarly, “Hawk Kings – Oseberg Buddhas Buttonhole” pairs provoking strings with an energetic house bassline as a way to confuse the song’s emotional drive and create a unique type of groove. At once relaxed and urgent, Abolition of the Royal Familia is a masterwork from a group that has spent the last three decades perfecting the art of weaving complex webs of vibes. Bandcamp
Best Track: “Shape Shifters (in two parts) – Coffee & Ghost Train Mix”
3. Nicolas Jaar – Cenizas
A crooning, haunting elegy of an album, Cenizas, one of three LPs released by Nicolas Jaar in 2020, is at face value one of Jaar’s more solemn works, especially shocking after two consecutive club-friendly releases under his Against All Logic moniker. But Jaar’s disaffected vocals and instrumental melodies are less mournful than they are caressing, their harmonizing echoes creating a sense of comfort from the pain of loss rather than an evocation of loss itself. His dirges become lullabies; his meditations become catharses; his shrieks in the night become battle cries to all those lone soldiers raging quietly against the darkness. When his ambient drones take a backseat to a squeaking saxophone, a slow woodwind, or rapid piano glissandos, they breathe additional acoustic realism into an otherwise ethereal project, while also contributing additional measures of mystery and excitement. The various melodies across the album’s 13 tracks contain everything from complacency to blistering rage, and yet all is subsumed under a wise, pacifying blanket of sympathy and acceptance. When the last track of the album (and my favorite song of 2020), “Faith Made of Silk,” commences, its upbeat, progressive energy stands in sharp contrast to the rest of the album, a coda that comments on everything that came before it as some kind of impartial spectator: “Look around, not ahead.” Bandcamp
Best Track: “Faith Made of Silk”
2. Four Tet – 871
In addition to Parallel, the other of Four Tet’s two Christmas releases was 871, an archival work composed of IDM music Kieran Hebden created between August 1995 and January 1997, prior to his first solo release. It might be easy to look at 871 as a collection of ephemera—on Spotify, it is tagged to the artist 00110100 01010100, one of Hebden’s many pseudonyms and the one he last used for 0181, another archival release—especially since the rudimentary nature of many of its tracks appear experimental in the most literal sense, in that we bear witness to Hebden exploring the unique combinations of sounds in an explorative manner, and the songs tend to lack a coherent structure (at least traditionally so). But to write this off as a test run for future projects, or as a set of curios interesting only in a biographical sense, would be to ignore the fact that even at such an early stage in Hebden’s career, his acute awareness of the palpable textures his sounds create in harmony with each other is practically unmatched. The crackles, the scrapes, the feedback, and even the piano, the harp, and the omnipresent guitar create strange melodies and harmonies that loop in parallel, warble over each other, and call and respond. Syncopated bass kicks give way to computer malfunctions, chimes ring in solitude, and Hebden strums his guitar over a wall of static that somehow sounds optimistic. Sounds clash, and then echo, and then the echoes harmonize with each other. Even on the more melodic or traditionally instrumental tracks, the combination of unique urges makes for interesting soundscapes: on “0000 871 0020,” the album’s closer, a gorgeous piano melody provides the song’s focus while strings enlighten it, a vocal sample fills it with a pregnant sense of potential energy, and a drum pattern undergirds it all. This may be the compendium of a student’s sketches, but Hebden was somehow already a master. Bandcamp
Best Track: “0000 871 0013”
1. Daniel Avery – Love + Light
The rave is a social space: a place to wordlessly connect with strangers on the dancefloor, to order a drink next to another excited listener, to chat with local musicians after the show, to allow your body’s movements to be shaped by a DJ’s unique voice. But the rave is also an introspective place: some of my more cherished moments in clubs or DIY venues are after I have been separated from my friends, or perhaps when I arrived solo, and felt the exhilarating rush from the confluence of sounds I have never heard before, pulsating lights piercing a sea of darkness, and the feeling that I am at once invisible and the only visible person in the room. Daniel Avery knows that feeling, and in Love + Light, he crafts an entire album around the experience of isolation in the plain sight of a dancefloor’s spotlights. The timing couldn’t be more apt—the album is conducive to pandemic-era bedroom dance parties for one—but the sounds are timeless, from the ambient “London Island” that might evoke the feeling of arriving at a port city on a foggy night, lanterns softly twinkling through the haze, to the fast acid techno of “Searing Light, Forward Motion,” awash in a sea of synth waves. Avery does not discriminate between aggression, relaxation, romance, and the myriad other emotions present almost haphazardly throughout the album; warm, soothing melodies merge with industrial cools to make a brackish vibe of which no living artist but Avery would be capable. Though it’s a masterpiece of isolation, Love + Light is at its heart a hopeful work, one that acknowledges in its concluding track that the sun will come up once again, and all will be at peace. Bandcamp
Best Track: “A Story in E5”