The last ten years saw seismic shifts in the way we hear electronic music, and music in general. Streaming services roared to prominence, the mix CD went obsolete (along with the CD itself), vinyl ceded more ground to mp3s, AIFFs and WAVs. Amid all this upheaval, though, the album held its own. For many artists, the long-player remains the best vessel for their music, especially the more nuanced, less clubby stuff, allowing the listener the fullest view of their musical world. Compilations play a similar role, in some cases showing us new sounds and micro-scenes with a level of depth and detail that wouldn't be possible on a single or an EP. This is born out in the list below, which presents a truly dizzying range of sounds—techno, electro, breakbeat, jungle, pop, ambient, soul, gqom, singeli, footwork, vaporwave, house (deep, outsider and knackered), post-dubstep, R&B, hip-hop—each undiluted by the needs of the dance floor or the time constraints of an EP. It's a testament to how rich and free-flowing electronic music has become, and bodes well for the next decade of electronic music.

Listen to highlights from the definitive albums of the 2010s on Spotify, Apple Music and Buy Music Club.

The Top 20:

- 2010
  Various Artists
  Shangaan Electro: New Wave Dance Music From South Africa / Shangaan Shake
  Honest Jon's Records
  
  Listen: Electro: Apple Music / Spotify Shake: Apple Music / Spotify
- Some of electronic music's key developments during the 2010s came from outside its established hubs. Often, these were the result of traditional genres and instruments being electronically re-spun using digital software. (Uganda's electro acholi and Tanzanian singeli are two good examples.) In 2010, London's Honest Jon's unleashed a collection of Shangaan electro, a fast-paced style of electronic music from South Africa, that set the tempo for a decade of increasingly globalised club music.
  
  Honest Jon's co-owner Mark Ainley was tipped off by the documentary filmmaker Wills Glasspiegel, who knew the key Shangaan producer, Richard Mthetwa (AKA Nozinja). Together with Basic Channel's Mark Ernestus, Ainley put together a compilation of Nozinja's productions. Shangaan Electro: New Wave Dance Music From South Africa sounded unlike anything else to hit record shelves in 2010. There was frenzied interest whenever the white labels were played at Ernestus' Hard Wax shop in Berlin, while Ainley stuck the record straight in the racks at Honest Jon's, with no introduction, publicity or marketing. "No one had a clue about it, including the people working there," he said. "You had to put the record on to find out."
  
  The compilation was followed by an extensive series of 12-inches, gathered together after two years as the album Shangaan Shake, an intercontinental remix package featuring the footwork duo DJ Rashad and DJ Spinn, UK innovators Actress and Peverelist, US heads Theo Parrish and Anthony "Shake" Shakir, and creative outliers like Ricardo Villalobos and Oni Ayhun, bringing Nozinja's music into even more homes and clubs.
  
  - Aaron Coultate
  
  Also on this list: Equiknoxx - Bird Sound Power / Errorsmith - Superlative Fatigue
- 2010
  Sandwell District
  Feed-Forward
  Sandwell District
  
  Listen: Apple Music / Spotify
- Sandwell District slipped out Feed-Forward, the decade's first techno masterpiece, three days before Christmas. It soon had the mystique of a collector's item. The closing chapter in Function, Regis, Silent Servant and Female's hugely influential project, Feed-Forward was techno at its most stunning, a glistening, artful collection of tracks with an appeal that went far beyond the dance floors it soundtracked. This was techno for your mind, the style's familiar four-on-the-floor chug laced with a cool, sculpted ambience that nudged you off toward some faraway place.
  
  But Feed-Forward was more than a psychedelic trip. Sometimes icy ("Immolare"), other times deeply emotional ("Falling The Same Way"), tthe album captured why many so of us submit to techno's endless loop: this music has potential to be truly transportive. Feed-Forward was the final transmission from a collective whose influence still colours music today, a rare, unfiltered look inside the minds of artists who helped shape the style's modern sound. Prohibitively expensive and never to be repressed, many fans will forever consider the vinyl version of Feed-Forward as the one that got away. Ten years later, it's like an artefact from a lost planet, and just as elusive.
  
  - Matt Unicomb
  
  Also on this list: Terrence Dixon - From The Far Future Pt. 2 / Anthony Naples - Fog FM
- 2010
  Actress
  Splazsh
  Honest Jon's Records
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
- In the decade since Splazsh, Darren Cunningham has released records inspired by the epic poetry of John Milton, FM radio interference, orchestral experimentation and "the feeling of being dead." But when the second Actress album landed in 2010, following 2008's low-profile Hazyville, it came without instructions, only a certain uncanny aura.
  
  Hewn from urban alienation, weed paranoia, night bus dozing and the fetid undergrowth of the city, Splazsh seemed to lurk in the footsteps of Burial while prefiguring other haunted artefacts of the 2010s by Lee Gamble, Zomby and Demdike Stare. But where the rave archaeologists dug down to a kind of gritty social realism, Splazsh beamed itself from deep space. Listening to "Hubble" felt like viewing techno through a backwards telescope: tiny fragments orbiting distant stars, the twisted wreckage of Model 500 lit by their frigid glow. The obvious and the familiar were permanently delayed in Cunningham's zero-gravity universe of crushed-out hi-hats and teleporting bass kicks ("Bubble Butts And Equations"), frozen-solid beats that cracked like joints in a draughty flat ("Supreme Cunnilingus"). On "Maze" he went darker still, conducting the funeral march for an intergalactic evil empire.
  
  It's not all bleak. There are tunes so stiff they're groovy: "Always Human," never more capably described than in Todd Burns' original RA review as "snap-crackle-pop-step," and the '80s flair of "Purrple Splazsh," a premonition of vaporwave through its drowsy funk loops. At the time, all of this felt sketchy and hard to grasp. Learning that Cunningham often produced inside the airlocked void of cheap earbuds lent the project a kind of agoraphobic terror. In the decade since, he's become a marginally more knowable figure. But while his aesthetic has hardened in our minds, there's still a kind of gnostic allure to Splazsh, like a cosmic mystery left unsolved.
  
  - Chal Ravens
  
  Also on this list: Flying Lotus - Cosmogramma / Kaytranada - 99.9%
- 2011
  Kuedo
  Severant
  Planet Mu
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- In the run-up to Severant, Jamie Teasdale was fretting about how his transition away from Vex'd would be perceived. In the mid-'00s, his project with Roly Porter had turned in some of the heaviest dubstep in existence, bringing a level of expectation to what the newly solo artist would do next. He needn't have worried: as Kuedo, Teasdale thrived in open space where once there was claustrophobia. It was a rebirth that stayed the course, having an outsized influence on a new generation of introverted producers.
  
  A deft balance of elements helped keep Severant locked in rotation long after the buzz wore off for many of Teasdale's peers. He formed a unique alliance between warp-speed footwork rhythms (a scene still then in its international infancy), occasional depth plunges of Lex Luger-style trap bass, and grand flourishes of melodic synth-playing. It was finely poised, allowing an interpolation of Carly Simon's "Why" to glide over hi-hat rushes with balletic grace at one moment, and orange-alert dread to stalk the alleyways of an otherwise bright tune at another, without ever feeling like a vibe clash. Teasdale was at pains to note that Severant was not the future, but a "romantic futurism" borrowed from the past. This checked out. The long shadow cast by Blade Runner across the 2010s meant that Severant was roughly aligned with a neon-ish zeitgeist, no doubt helpful in making it a sleeper favourite with stoners, stargazers and sci-fi fantasists. Pincered somewhere between 1982 and 2049, the sheer range of Severant makes it an eternal pleasure.
  
  - Gabriel Szatan
  
  Also on this list: Machinedrum - Room(s) / Clams Casino - Instrumentals
- 2011
  The Caretaker
  An Empty Bliss Beyond This World
  History Always Favours The Winners
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Soundcloud
- James Leyland Kirby's work as The Caretaker had been puttering along since 1999, but it struck a fresh nerve in 2011, when temporal concerns were a hot-button issue and sadness was a valuable commodity. An Empty Bliss Beyond This World was released during a bubble in what you could call memory music, bracketed alongside other headsy fare by the likes of Oneohtrix Point Never and James Ferraro that prodded at our relationships to the past. On the surface, it might be tricky to explain how a collection of easy listening records from the 1920s stood out from the crowd, and trickier still to parse how it grew in stature to one of the most profound artistic statements of the 2010s. But Empty Bliss was all about the decay found below the surface, and therein lay its appeal. Where others were unlocking deep-held memories, Kirby explored what happens when you can no longer find the key.
  
  Applying a light treatment to Dixieland-era 78s of jazz and ballroom, Empty Bliss conveyed how it is to be fogged out of your routine. Muted cornets drift from song to song, the audio pans awkwardly, loops don't make it a full bar round and many tracks unexpectedly fade to black. Yet none of this is overtly disruptive. It's as if you know something's not quite right but you're powerless to pinpoint the problem, so you quietly go along with it. The album is a tragedy of suspended motion, waltzes spinning round to nowhere in particular.
  
  It got darker from there. By the point of "Place In The World Fades Away," the closer on The Caretaker's 2019 swansong, Everywhere At The End Of Time, the hiss that speckled Empty Bliss's source material had become a roar—all that's left. So file An Empty Bliss Beyond This World next to William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops in the annals of music that is at once comforting and disquieting, beautiful and kind of horrible; records cursed with terrible weight, transmitting the immutable feeling of sinking down, down, down into the abyss.
  
  - Gabriel Szatan
  
  Also on this list: Oneohtrix Point Never - Replica / Huerco S. - For Those Of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have)
- 2012
  Jam City
  Classical Curves
  Night Slugs
  
  Listen: Apple Music / Spotify
- Did any dance producer of the 2010s pull off such a dramatic U-turn as Jam City? By 2015, Londoner Jack Latham had dismissed the barbed, lustrous soundworld of his debut album as "redundant" and turned to dreamy bedroom pop. But Classical Curves retained its bionic grip on club music for the rest of the decade, consistently referenced by younger artists as a touchstone for their precision-tooled, neon-lit productions.
  
  The album emerged from the UK's post-post-dubstep landscape, when Latham's Night Slugs cohort were rebooting London's nightlife just as dubstep started its decline. Latham was combining the jackhammer rhythms of Jersey club with the stark, empty spaces of grime—an idea often copied but rarely bettered over the rest of the decade. Through its harsh light and cold surfaces the album seemed to reflect something dark, even inhuman, like empty glass towers rising above a megacity; pneumatic rhythms were punctuated with fruity organ stabs, like flickering neon signs in a soon-to-be-demolished vice alley. There were moments of levity too, like the way "Strawberries" dismantles an '80s house groove and awkwardly smashes it back together, helping lay the blueprint for an untold number of deconstructed club jams.
  
  The ambiguity of Classical Curves was captured best in the squeak of rubber that cut through "The Courts"—not any old sneaker soles, obviously, but the rubber of mass-produced, artificially scarce, worn-once Air Jordans, the capitalist fetish object par excellence. As much a wry examination of consumerist rituals as an experiment in cutting-edge club production, Classical Curves brought both brain and brawn to the table.
  
  - Chal Ravens
  
  Also on this list: Fatima Al Qadiri - Asiatisch / Ikonika - Contact, Love, Want, Have
- 2012
  Voices From the Lake
  Voices From the Lake
  Prologue
  
  Listen: YouTube
- After 30 minutes of ultra-deep techno, Voices From The Lake's mood shifts with the arrival of a major chord. On other music, the effect would be limited. Here, it was the equivalent of drawing the curtains back on a sunny morning, a burst of emotion that drew us even deeper into Neel and Donato Dozzy's world of sound. Built with just a few elements, Voices From The Lake told a story in a way only the most gifted producers can, weaving a subtle yet clear narrative using flecks of melody and atmosphere. Perhaps the greatest achievement from the Italian school of deep techno, a heady style driven by texture over anything else, Voices From The Lake's charm will endure as long we listen to dance music's four-on-the-floor chug.
  
  The album will be forever associated with Labyrinth festival, an annual celebration of ambient, deep techno and experimental music on a Japanese mountainside. Neel and Dozzy debuted the Voices From The Lake project at Labyrinth a few months before this album's release, playing one night's closing slot through a pristine soundsystem. You won't need a world-class soundsystem to get lost in Voices From The Lake, but good headphones and patience will help. This album speaks to the power of techno, where producers craft entrancing, emotional sounds without the signifiers—pianos, strings, melody—of conventional music, and abstract tones combine to create magic.
  
  - Matt Unicomb
  
  Also on this list: Petre Inspirescu - Vin Ploile / SW. - Untitled
- 2013
  DJ Rashad
  Double Cup
  Hyperdub
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
- When footwork emerged in Chicago, it resided primarily in the city's dance battlegrounds, skating rinks and underground clubs. At the start of the '10s, however, the genre was catapulted from the comforts of home into sets across Europe and the US, bringing fame to its originators. While there still remains little consensus on who actually invented this frenetic style, many attribute the sudden entrance of footwork into the worldwide mainstream to DJ Rashad's Double Cup. Landing on the UK label Hyperdub, the long-incubating, ghettotech-influenced sound finally had access to a wider audience. Its polished sound, boasting surgically precise percussion, piqued the interest of clubbers outside of the Windy City.
  
  Seven years after its release, Double Cup retains its propulsive energy. Passing from the honeyed emotional resonance of tracks like "Show You How," to the more indulgent sounds of songs like "She A Go," to the confrontational "I Don't Give A Fuck," the album showcased the diversity of footwork. It was music that could be soaring and reflective with harmonious chords, but also draw in writhing crowds with sample splices wedged between skittering percussion.
  
  When DJ Rashad died in 2014, Teklife artists like DJ Spinn and DJ Taye became the new champions of footwork, taking it into previously uncharted realms. As footwork evolves, and more controversially, distances itself from its dance origins, Rashad's enduring legacy can still be heard in the crisp hi-hats, the intricate structures and the seemingly endless drum pattern shifts that once drove footworkers into delirium.
  
  - Kiana Mickles
  
  Also on this list: Various Artists - Bangs & Works Vol. 1 / Rustie - Glass Swords
- 2013
  Jessy Lanza
  Pull My Hair Back
  Hyperdub
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
- Jessy Lanza was a star from the minute her debut album, Pull My Hair Back, landed out of nowhere on Hyperdub in 2013. Hers was a sound that came fully formed: throbbing hardware synths and vintage drum machine sounds, courtesy of co-production by Junior Boys' Jeremy Greenspan, paired with a voice that could induce goosebumps.
  
  Lanza's music brought together '80s synth pop, noughties dance music and classic R&B and soul. Those last two genres inform her songwriting, to the point that her wordless vocal runs and breathy coos are more likely to stick in your head than any actual lyrics. (She even makes reciting a phone number sound romantic.) In this way, Pull My Hair Back is a series of snapshots of textures and feelings. On tracks like "Kathy Lee," her voice appears and then fades away like warm breath on cold glass. Elsewhere it was embedded into the texture of the electronics, like the dazzlingly weird "Fuck Diamond." Then there were tracks like "Keep Moving," chunky disco anthems that could have been on the radio in an alternate universe where Jimmy Iovine had invested in Hyperdub.
  
  It was all underpinned by vintage electronics that highlighted every texture and hiccup of those old machines, which made the music warm and inviting. The only flaw was that it was too short—36 minutes and it's over. At the time, Lanza told us that Hyperdub removed a few songs from the LP's final running order. But maybe that was the clincher. From Lanza's elusive presence to the sumptuous electronics, Pull My Hair Back was addictive because its fleeting pleasures left you wanting more.
  
  - Andrew Ryce
  
  Also on this list: HTRK - Psychic 9-5 Club / Stellar OM Source - Joy One Mile
- 2014
  Andy Stott
  Faith In Strangers
  Modern Love
  
  Listen: Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- The one-man army known as Andy Stott used to work as a paint-sprayer for Mercedes-Benz in Oldham, near Manchester. Given that there are so many electronic music producers who work with, or find inspiration in, the mechanical chuggings of motor vehicles, Stott's case is particularly interesting. His sonic palette is far from the rigid patterning of techno—or, really, any genre in particular. Some of his albums feature guest work from opera singers. Six years ago, he had a track that sounds like a ship blaring its mournful, deep-sea horn on-and-off for upwards of six minutes.
  
  Stott is unusual in that he's not typically assessed against others who operate in a similarly gelatinous space between genres, but in that he's measured most often against himself. Nowhere was this sensation more concentrated than in Faith In Strangers, a piece that was really, finally, truly a crossover work in the grand sense, mixing elements of his past albums (and dance music's history)—dub stuff, slow-mo techno, post-punk patter, a rapid oscillation between love and dread—to a more refined DNA of purely Stotty proportions. It sounded so him, so reliably and ultimately part of his wheelhouse that it seemed as if, in order to listen to the album, one necessarily had to listen to his past work to properly assess its strengths and weaknesses.
  
  Stott's records can feel like a very apt template for the ideal trajectory of an electronic music producer in this decade. First, a requisite dabbling across standards of various genres like jungle and Chicago house ("For a long time," he said in an interview, "I was just getting that out of my system"), then onward to an honestly personal form that belongs only to the artist. In Stott's case, that's one of not deconstructed club music (which is, at this point, a punchline and a signal for macerated, frenzied, high-concept work), but re-constructed club music, taking the bit parts from a menu of genres and rejiggering them back to life. It's more alchemical than mechanical.
  
  - Mina Tavakoli
  
  Also on this list: Morphosis - What Have We Learned / Lee Gamble - Diversions 1994-1996
- 2014
  FKA twigs
  LP1
  Young Turks
  
  Listen: Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Best. Recommended. Fans and critics have awarded this distinction to FKA twigs for nearly every record she's put out. Since her very first EPs at the start of this decade, through to last year's MAGDALENE, which nabbed RA's Album Of The Year, the multi-talented English artist has consistently been one of the most hyped names in experimental pop. Why?
  
  Revisiting 2014's LP1, twigs' debut album for Young Turks, it's easy to see: her ideas have always been ahead of the curve. Today, artists have to do everything at once; twigs, a singer, dancer, producer and director, has done that since day one. In both pop and club music, UK sounds and unusual genre-hybrids are taking off. LP1, co-produced by Arca, Sampha, Clams Casino, Dev Hynes and others, contains some of the first hints at this stylistic shift, an unclassifiable mix of bassy low-end, choral-like reverb and skittering grooves. The album's best tunes—"Lights On," "Two Weeks," "Hours"—still sound hip in the shops and cafes where they're recycled, while twigs' soft and vulnerable singing will have loveforn listeners replaying them for life.
  
  - Steph Lee
  
  Also on this list: Tirzah - Devotion / Fatima - Yellow Memories
- 2014
  Objekt
  Flatland
  PAN
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- By the time his debut album arrived in 2014, TJ Hertz's place in the pantheon of the decade's elite was already secure. His preternaturally precise productions drew a line in the sand early in his career. The bar had now been raised to an impossible level, which helped cultivate a new standard for producers hell-bent on achieving a similar level of awe-inspiring perfection. The feeling was the same among audiences and critics, and an assumption emerged that Objekt could do no wrong. But translating the dazzling aesthetic experiences he'd mastered on 12-inch EPs to the subtler demands of the album format posed a new challenge.
  
  Flatland answered by strategically weaving recurring themes and devices throughout to signpost the album's narrative development. There was the expected abundance of wow moments, but what really made Flatland work was Objekt's due diligence to the bread and butter considerations that define the end-user experience: careful pacing, effective contrasts and memorable motifs, all rendered in a style that changed what people believed possible in modern dance music production.
  
  - Mark Smith
  
  Also on this list: Autechre - NTS Sessions 1-4 / Barker - Utility
- 2015
  Jlin
  Dark Energy
  Planet Mu
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Based in Gary, Indiana, 30 miles from footwork's epicentre, Jerilynn Patton was hardly unknown in the scene when she released Dark Energy in 2015; the former steelworker had been mentored by the godfather of footwork, RP Boo. But with her debut album, Jlin offered a her own vision of electronic music as an abstract force, jettisoning the hip-hop and soul samples that characterised footwork and instead limiting herself to self-made sounds and the occasional horror movie sample.
  
  Macabre, ferocious, yet clear as a fork on crystal, the resulting tracks weren't so much dance floor material as feel-bad anthems, bringing forth an anger that dwelled "in the belly of the beast," as she said at the time. "Black Ballet" pitted battle dance against Aronofskian body horror, crushing spines and rattling ribcages. Samples of possessed Hollywood children brought on cold sweats on "Guantanamo." Rhythms accelerated then shattered on impact. '"Black Diamond" conjured a Fourth World fantasy where ritual dances collided with dialtone funk, distant soundworlds brought together down a telephone line.
  
  Patton has since graduated to the seated venues of the experimental arts circuit, scoring a ballet for Wayne McGregor, collaborating with William Basinski and soundtracking Rick Owens' runway show. But the grand vision was within her from the beginning.
  
  - Chal Ravens
  
  Also on this list: 33EMYBW - Arthropods / Nídia - Nídia é Má, Nídia é Fudida
- 2016
  Various
  Gqom Oh! The Sound of Durban Vol.1
  GQOM OH
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- In 2015, the sound of Durban was a burgeoning microgenre, a local scene germinating in the bedrooms and back pockets of South African teenagers. Producers were uploading new tracks to a music platform called Kasimp3, listeners shared their finds through Facebook and WhatsApp, and kids used camera phones to shoot dance videos in school uniform. From these homespun beginnings, gqom has developed into a global phenomenon, its menacing drones infiltrating DJ sets from Nairobi to New York. The ball really got rolling midway through the decade with releases on UK label Goon Club Allstars and, soon after, a foundational compilation on Gqom Oh!, the label set up by Rome-based DJ Nan Kolè specifically to import this dark, droning spin on South African house.
  
  Gqom Oh! The Sound Of Durban Vol. 1 landed like a space-borne monolith: an entire new genre, fully functioning, ready to deploy. Gqom was presented at its hardest and heaviest, often offering little more than clusterbombs of percussion exploding through foggy bass drones, and topped off by occasional vocal shrieks or creepy melodic phrases. Emo Kid & DJ Bradolz took the template and added a nagging two-note melody. Forgotten Souls threw a 1990s trance riff into the mix. Julz Da Deejay flipped the usual structure, pairing a higher-pitched drone with a chunky bass rhythm. With their streamlined structures, battle-cry immediacy and techno-cruiser tempo, these tracks were obvious DJ weapons. The likes of Kode9 and Scratcha DVA caught on quick.
  
  The legacy of The Sound Of Durban isn't just the popularity of these tracks or the later success of characters like DJ Lag (who didn't even appear on this collection). It's also that any one of these tracks would still tear the room apart in a contemporary club set. Even as it's been absorbed into the global bass universe, adapted by producers in London, LA and Shanghai, gqom has lost precisely none of its impact.
  
  - Chal Ravens
  
  Also on this list: Nkisi - 7 Directions / DJ Python - Dulce Compañia
- 2016
  BBF Hosted By DJ Escrow
  Babyfather
  Hyperdub
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
- How, exactly, do we look back on an album as cunning and multi-dimensional as BBF Hosted By DJ Escrow? Hmmmm. We could start with its humour, the way DJ Escrow played a hapless pirate radio host in the vein of People Just Do Nothing. This was one of the things people were talking about most back in 2016 when this project, a collaboration between Dean Blunt, DJ Escrow and Gassman D, hit the streets. But that doesn't feel right. This isn't an album built for LOLs (even though Blunt, as he often does, leaves you wondering). It's also poignant, sad and pissed off.
  
  Taking it on a purely sonic level won't really cut it either. Sure, these are comfortably some of the best hip-hop, R&B and dub tracks Blunt has written. The bass-driven "Shook" is immense. "Meditation," featuring Arca, is one of the dopest beats Timbaland never wrote, while the strings on "The Realness" represent the record's tender emotional centre. But simply head-nodding along to it sidelines the tangled social and political commentary, delivered through Blunt's lyrics and Escrow's chat, the album seems to be making. There's no doubt a message even in the album's shrieks of white noise, and we haven't even talked about the line repeated ad nauseam that ties the thing together: "This makes me proud to be British." Basically there isn't a tidy way of remembering BBF, except to say there'll never be another album like it.
  
  - Ryan Keeling
  
  Also on this list: The Bug - Angels & Devils / Dean Blunt & Inga Copeland - Black Is Beautiful
- 2017
  Fever Ray
  Plunge
  Rabid Records
  
  Listen: Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- In this day and age, the line "I want to run my fingers up your pussy," taken from "To The Moon And Back" off Fever Ray's second album, Plunge, shouldn't be such a big deal. After all, it was more than 20 years ago that Nine Inch Nails made an MTV hit singing "I wanna fuck you like an animal." Sure enough, though, a Swedish newspaper's review of Plunge "questioned the legitimacy of a 42-year-old woman from the Stockholm suburbs expressing her sexual desires." Beyond the breathtaking sexism of that response, it's hard to imagine hearing Plunge and being so unmoved. Dreijer's second album as Fever Ray was an electrifying account of self-discovery, charting a sexual awakening and railing against the structures trying to hold it back. Where Fever Ray's debut was cryptic and minimalist, this one was wild and ecstatic, its rabble-rousing lyrics backdropped by thrashing, neon-tinted productions made together with Peder Mannerfelt. Building on the sounds and themes of Shaking The Habitual, Dreijer's final album with her brother Olof as The Knife, Plunge showed one of this century's best pop and electronic artists hitting new heights.
  
  - Will Lynch
  
  Also on this list: Björk - Vulnicura / Yves Tumor - Serpent Music
- 2017
  Tzusing
  東方不敗
   L.I.E.S
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- The steely drums and sinuous melodies of Tzusing's first EP on L.I.E.S. immediately stood out from the other music Ron Morelli's label released in 2014. That record, part of a trilogy later collected on an album called A Name Out Of Place, wasn't the last time that Tzusing would surprise us. The album documented the Chinese artist's evolution as a techno producer. The beats got funkier, the production richer and the melodies nervier and more militaristic. Then his debut album, 東方不敗, hit in 2017 and caught us off guard yet again—a bolt from the blue that defined Tzusing as a producer in a class all his own.
  
  "Chinese kids really shaped the way I DJ," Tzusing told us in 2017. It was playing to audiences in Shanghai and Taipei (the two cities where he split his time) where he discovered he could play more than just techno. His DJ sets started to include trap, hip-hop, even stuff that bordered on EDM. Those influences came to the fore on 東方不敗, an album of elastic rhythms and traditional instrumentation, incorporating Chinese melodies and ideas without sounding the least bit forced. Named after a wuxia character who castrates himself to better learn martial arts, Tzusing's album presented techno as something lithe, athletic and unpredictable. It's no surprise that it helped inspire a wave of thrilling new Chinese club music as the decade reached its end.
  
  - Andrew Ryce
  
  Also on this list: Gesloten Cirkel - Submit X / Silent Servant - Negative Fascination
- 2017
  Arca
  Arca
  XL Recordings
  
  Listen: Apple Music / Spotify
- Before Arca released one of the most memorable albums of the decade, she was behind a few of its other ones: Kanye West's Yeezus, Frank Ocean's Endless, Björk's Vulnicura, FKA twigs' LP1. In the mainstream music industry, these production credits established the Venezuelan-born artist as a force to be reckoned with. Meanwhile, at the helm of her own experimental records, 2014's Xen and 2015's Mutant, Alejandra Ghersi showed us the full extent of her underground visions. The albums were chaotic bricolages of rhythm and futuristic sound design, characterized most distinctly by their tortuous emotional quality. Both will stand out in electronic music history, marking a time when ideas around genre, style and identity were fracturing and being reformed.
  
  Then, just when you thought Ghersi couldn't get more provocative, along came 2017's self-titled Arca. An intimate, despairing and mesmerizing album, it stands apart from its predecessors thanks to the introduction of Ghersi's singing. She sang lugubriously in Spanish, with lyrics that, for example, implored someone to take off her skin. The dark sensuality of her words matched perfectly with the surreal feel of her production. Recreated onstage with equal parts frailty and fearlessness, it transformed Arca into one of the decade's most iconic performers.
  
  - Steph Lee
  
  Also on this list: Klein - Lifetime / Laurel Halo - Quarantine
- 2018
  Skee Mask
  Compro
  Ilian Tape
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- In March 2013, the UK artist Tessela released "Hackney Parrot," the defining track of a musical trend that saw jungle's amen break recontextualised for modern dance floors. This opened the floodgates. Within a few years, breakbeats were everywhere, breathing fresh life into house and techno. One early proponent, with key EPs on the breakbeat techno label of the decade, Ilian Tape, was Bryan Müller, AKA Skee Mask. His fantastic debut album, Shred, released via the Munich outlet in 2016, was awash with bewitching textures and beautifully sculpted rhythms. Techno had a new star.
  
  But there was more to come from Müller. In 2018, instead of sticking with the winning formula, he put out Compro, an album that redefined his talents. This time, broken bombs sat alongside IDM jams and jungle heaters. Cuts like "Vli" and "Cerroverb" showed that, done right, ambient pieces could be highlights, rather than afterthoughts, on techno LPs. The range of rhythms and atmospheres, rough yet always radiating soul, was breathtaking. So many sounds, such as the springy melody on "Rev8617" or the snarling synth on "Dial 274," sounded like nothing else. For years, maybe decades, to come, budding producers will listen to Compro and take from it two vital lessons: hone your craft with zeal and never be afraid to experiment.
  
  - Carlos Hawthorn
  
  Also on this list: ASC - Nothing Is Certain / Convextion - 2845
- 2018
  SOPHIE
  Oil Of Every Pearl's Un-Insides
  Transgressive Records
  
  Listen: Apple Music / Spotify / Apple Music
- I hated PC Music when it first came out. In the first half of the 2010s, I remember feeling truly shocked and offended by its plastic sheen and sugary cuteness. Now, revisiting some of its earliest hits—"Nothing More To Say," "Bipp," "Lemonade," all produced by Glasgow-born, LA-based artist SOPHIE—they make me feel happy and normal. Ideas that haunt us often speak to something deeper. PC Music, whether anyone knew it or not, would be one of the biggest storms to hit electronic music in the 2010s.
  
  Though it came out through Transgressive Records, SOPHIE's 2018 debut album, OIL OF EVERY PEARL's UN-INSIDES, showed just how far the PC Music style could soar. The album sounded cutting-edge but familiar, combining the sensibilities of avant-garde electronic music with the serotonin-rush of commercial pop. At times it also went thrillingly hard, yet tucked into its club beats were silly and inventive lyrics addressing gender identity. Looking back, I forget that SOPHIE had never directly used her face in her art until OIL OF EVERY PEARL's UN-INSIDES' release. That's because today it would be impossible to imagine a world without her.
  
  - Steph Lee
  
  Also on this list: Fever Ray - Plunge / Holly Herndon - Proto

The wider 100

Here's 80 more electronic music albums that defined the 2010s.

- 2010
- Flying Lotus
  Cosmogramma
  Warp Records
  
  In the run-up to Cosmogramma, Flying Lotus was selling his new album as a space opera, a map of the universe, a window into how it feels to be on DMT, and the musical representation of an out-of-body experience—and you have to admit, he succeeded on all fronts.
  
  Listen: Apple Music / Spotify

- 2010
- Various Artists
  Bangs & Works Vol. 1
  Planet Mu
  
  This landmark compilation introduced most of the world outside Chicago to one of the most dynamic dance music genres of the 2010s—and to names like DJ Rashad, RP Boo and DJ Spinn.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2010
- Four Tet
  There Is Love in You
  Domino
  
  This lovely record, which includes "Love Cry, "Angel Echoes" and a tribute to everyone's favourite London club, set Kieran Hebden on the path to stardom.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2010
- ASC
  Nothing Is Certain
  NonPlus+
  
  The zenith of autonomic drum & bass perfectly showcased the style's emotional depth and dedication to song craft.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2010
- Ikonika
  Contact, Love, Want, Have
  Hyperdub
  
  The middle ground between a neon-streaked Akihabara arcade and a smoked-out Croydon basement, Ikonika's playful synergy of chiptune squarewaves and dubstep rumble still feels fresh today.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2011
- Clams Casino
  Instrumentals
  Type Records
  
  A marvel of disembodied voices and degraded fidelity, the newcomer from New Jersey's gift was juicing hidden depth out of his samples and parlaying them into woozy rap beats so lyrical and emotive, they work best without verses on top.
  
  Listen: Apple Music / Spotify

- 2011
- Machinedrum
  Room(s)
  Planet Mu
  
  Travis Stewart's best album infused the itchy rhythms of footwork with silky R&B melodies for one of the post-dubstep era's defining records.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2011
- Morphosis
  What Have We Learned
  Delsin
  
  Rabih Beaini ended the 2010s as a towering figure in experimental music, but he started the decade with this LP of elegant techno.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2011
- Nicolas Jaar
  Space Is Only Noise
  Circus Company
  
  The Chilean-American's exquisite debut album showed the world that he wasn't just a nifty house producer; he was a musical alchemist.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2011
- Grouper
  A I A: Alien Observer
  Yellow Electric
  
  No one balances wrenching grief and heart-in-mouth beauty as spectacularly as Liz Harris.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2011
- Oneohtrix Point Never
  Replica
  Software
  
  Daniel Lopatin's fifth album was the first that sounded truly, shockingly new, stretching and tearing apart sounds from '80s-era TV commercials with uncanny results.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2011
- Rustie
  Glass Swords
  Warp Records
  
  The Glasgow producer's debut album is where progressive rock meets Saturday morning cartoons meets aquacrunk—a dazzling world of guitar solos, hyperactive beats and pop hooks that has never been equalled.
  
  Listen: Apple Music / Spotify

- 2011
- Surgeon
  Breaking the Frame
  Dynamic Tension
  
  Breaking The Frame melded Surgeon's influences, from drone to dubstep, peaking with the ingenious "Radiance," a kick-less techno track that floods dance floors like a tsunami.
  
  Listen: Apple Music / Spotify

- 2012
- Silent Servant
  Negative Fascination
  Hospital Productions
  
  In the 2010s, '80s post-punk and EBM seeped into blackened techno palettes. LA producer Juan Mendez did it best, crafting dance floor tracks steeped in minimal synth melancholia.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2012
- Grimes
  Visions
  Arbutus Records
  
  A DIY synth pop masterpiece where Claire Boucher sings about sexual assault and drug use, among other topics, her fairy-like voice rising above the warm sounds of a half-broken Roland keyboard.
  
  Listen: Apple Music / Spotify

- 2012
- Dean Blunt & Inga Copeland
  Black Is Beautiful
  Hyperdub
  
  The height of Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland's musical partnership was the best Hype Williams album in all but name: 40 minutes of warped grooves, sultry R&B and raucous free jazz, all buried under hiss and decay.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2012
- Daphni
  Jiaolong
  Jiaolong
  
  As if one festival-conquering alias wasn't enough, Dan Snaith swapped the blissed-out jams of Caribou for Daphni with these wonderfully quirky bangers.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2012
- John Talabot
  ƒin
  Permanent Vacation
  
  Melodic and heartfelt, the first album from a would-be house superstar had us enthralled.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2012
- Terrence Dixon
  From the Far Future Vol.2
  Tresor
  
  Terrence Dixon is a singular force in Detroit, and this album for Tresor contained some of his most striking productions, not least the gorgeous "Fountain Of Life."
  
  Listen: Apple Music / Spotify

- 2012
- Laurel Halo
  Quarantine
  Hyperdub
  
  Not quite pop, not quite ambient, this artfully unsettling debut album solidified Laurel Halo as one of the decade's most forward-thinking and important artists.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2012
- Raime
  Quarter Turns Over a Living Line
  Blackest Ever Black
  
  A masterclass in negative space and slow-moving dread whose powerful sense of isolation turned it into an unlikely hit.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2012
- Lee Gamble
  Diversions 1994-1996
  PAN
  
  A deconstructed club ur-text that built ambient worlds out of breakdowns from golden-era jungle tracks.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2013
- Stellar OM Source
  Joy One Mile
  Rvng Intl.
  
  A powerful collection of bombastic drum programming, impassioned singing and curdled 303 leads, that until recently looked like it would never be followed up.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2013
- Felix K
  Flowers of Destruction
  Hidden Hawaii LTD
  
  Fusing Basic Channel-school ambiance with ultra-minimal drum & bass, Flowers Of Destruction quietly influenced the next decade of techno-drum & bass mutations.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2013
- Kelela
  CUT 4 ME
  Fade to Mind
  
  A star-making mixtape of smoky downtempo and club-ready R&B that showed off Kelela's many strengths.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2013
- Jon Hopkins
  Immunity
  Domino
  
  Nine months in the making, Jon Hopkins poured his heart and soul into this stunning album—and it shows.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2013
- Kyle Hall
  The Boat Party
  Wild Oats
  
  Lo-fi house? Fourth wave Detroit? Nah, it's just KMFH. On The Boat Party, Hall shrugged off the pressure of his hometown's legacy, zeroing in on a soulful, percussive sound all his own.
  
  Listen: Apple Music / Spotify

- 2013
- Special Request
  Soul Music
  Houndstooth
  
  A major force in bringing jungle and hardcore crashing back into vogue, Paul Woolford's first album as Special Request is wall-to-wall belters.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2013
- Donato Dozzy
  Plays Bee Mask
  Spectrum Spools
  
  From the moment that opening melody glitters through the rain to the final, soaring notes of "Vaporwave 7," Donato Dozzy's reinterpretations of Bee Mask's 2012 track (itself an overlooked ambient classic) is pure transcendence through and through.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2014
- Moodymann
  Moodymann
  KDJ
  
  On which the elusive legend fully inhabited the frontman position and invited us into his psyche and his city while delivering some of his best songs to date.
  
  Listen: Apple Music / Spotify

- 2014
- Fatima
  Yellow Memories
  Eglo
  
  A triumphant debut for an extraordinary singer and a modern-day demonstration of the power of "scenius"—Fatima, the Eglo family (Floating Points, Alexander Nut) and heavy hitters like Theo Parrish and Knxwledge came together to make an album that will stand the test of time.
  
  Listen: Apple Music / Spotify

- 2014
- HTRK
  Psychic 9-5 Club
  Ghostly International
  
  Smoky and sensual, Psychic 9-5 Club marked a bold new chapter for the Australian duo following the death of founding member Sean Stewart.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2014
- Fatima Al Qadiri
  Asiatisch
  Hyperdub
  
  The Kuwaiti multimedia artist took one of UK dance music's most peculiar sub-subgenres—"sinogrime"—and made a concept album about cultural appropriation, counterfeit goods and Orientalism that still bangs.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2014
- The Bug
  Angels & Devils
  Ninja Tune
  
  Alternately steamrolling and caressing the listener, Kevin Martin's fourth album as The Bug managed to balance militant grime-dancehall detonators with moments of existential resignation.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2014
- Mica Levi
  Under the Skin OST
  Rough Trade
  
  As Kelly Lee Owens pointed out to us, the fact a mere 1-2 percent of film soundtracks come from female composers is grimly lopsided—so when Mica Levi's dark and disquieting score for alien flick Under The Skin began hoovering up industry awards, it felt like a step in the right direction.
  
  Listen: Apple Music / Spotify

- 2014
- Gesloten Cirkel
  Submit X
  Murder Capital
  
  Before electro was massive again, a little-known Russian artist quietly released the genre's defining LP of the decade.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Spotify

- 2015
- user18081971 (Aphex Twin)
  Soundcloud Uploads
  
  In true RDJ form, even flying a branded blimp over London to tease comeback album Syro couldn't match the thrill of when 17 hours and 27 minutes of vintage Aphex began trickling onto an unmarked Soundcloud account one morning in January 2015.
  
  Listen: YouTube 1 / YouTube 2

- 2015
- Petre Inspirescu
  Vin Ploile
  Mule Musiq
  
  Applying [a:rpia:r]'s logic of graceful restraint to jazz, soundscapes and pastoral clicks 'n cuts across numerous tracks titled "Delir" (the Romanian word for madness), Petre Inspirescu turned in the most strange and satisfying record of his career.
  
  Listen: Apple Music / Spotify

- 2015
- Björk
  Vulnicura
  One Little Indian
  
  Björk staged a triumphant comeback by presenting herself at her most vulnerable and defeated, with harrowing lyrics, career-best vocal performances and stunning orchestral arrangements (and some help from Arca).
  
  Listen: Björk / Spotify

- 2015
- DJ Sotofett
  Drippin' For A Tripp (Tripp-A-Dubb-Mix)
  Honest Jon's Records
  
  The Norwegian iconoclast worked with a host of talented friends (Lauer, Maimouna Haugen and Gilb'r, to name a few) on a debut album as messy, brilliant and genre agnostic as the byzantine Sex Tags catalogue.
  
  Listen: YouTube

- 2015
- Aleksi Perälä
  The Colundi Sequence Level 10
  AP Musik
  
  An introduction to the tuning system that dominated techno in the second half of the decade.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2015
- Lnrdcroy
  Much Less Normal
  Firecracker Recordings
  
  First a cassette, then a sought-after vinyl release, these low-key house tracks from the Canadian coast wonderfully channeled the overcast, maritime setting that inspired them.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2015
- Domenique Dumont
  Comme Ça
  Antinote
  
  The Balearic duo's debut album was so ebullient, playful and faintly trippy, it could double up as an alternate soundtrack for Animal Crossing.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2015
- Helena Hauff
  Discreet Desires
  Werkdiscs
  
  No one did more for electro this decade than Helena Hauff, and as a producer this was her crowning achievement.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2015
- Nmesh / Telepath
  ロストエデンへのパス (The Path To Lost Eden)
  Dream Catalogue
  
  This split album was the apotheosis of sample-based vaporwave, where slowed-down loops of Muzak, clips from Apocalypse Now and tender instrumentation combined for a work of staggering beauty that crowned Dream Catalogue as the genre's most important label.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2015
- Julia Holter
  Have You In My Wilderness
  Domino
  
  Julia Holter is one of the most critical avant-garde composers and artists of her generation, and while her other albums exist in the mistier realm of pop experimentalism, this one is a special, bright moment in her catalogue—a crisp burst of light filled with life and longing.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2015
- Elysia Crampton
  American Drift
  Blueberry Records
  
  An otherworldly sample collage that interrogates the history of Virginia, Andean traditional music and self-identity, American Drift positioned Elysia Crampton as one of the USA's most visionary new electronic artists in just four songs.
  
  Listen: Spotify / Soundcloud

- 2016
- Marie Davidson
  Adieux Au Dancefloor
  Cititrax
  
  Davidson's music builds tension with a bracing mix of cold wave, jacking drums and experimental soundscapes, but what sets these anxious anthems apart is her commanding, antagonistic vocals.
  
  Listen: Apple Music / Spotify

- 2016
- Equiknoxx
  Bird Sound Power
  DDS
  
  Jamaican group Equiknoxx emerged fully formed on their out-of-nowhere 2016 debut, making dancehall sound bright, psychedelic and quirky with their dayglo aesthetic and impish sense of humour.
  
  Listen: Apple Music / Soundcloud

- 2016
- Convextion
  2845
  a.r.t.less
  
  For his first album in a decade, Dallas's respected electronic veteran Gerard Hanson turned away from darkness to dish out squelchy, spacey and surprisingly funky machine music of the highest calibre.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Soundcloud

- 2016
- Huerco S.
  For Those Of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have)
  Proibito
  
  A sublime exercise in texture and melody that marked Huerco S, best known at the time for his leftfield house productions, as an essential ambient artist.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2016
- Yves Tumor
  Serpent Music
  PAN
  
  Serpent Music laid the blueprint for one of the strangest pop personalities of the last few years, though here the pop vocals and indie rock melodies were still buried under layers of samples and subaquatic funk.
  
  Listen: Soundcloud / YouTube

- 2016
- Various
  Chromophore
  Slow Life
  
  The sixth release on the label that helped make deep house cool again was a slick introduction to its spacey, late-hour sound.
  
  Listen: Soundcloud

- 2016
- Kaytranada
  99.9%
  XL Recordings
  
  Following Kaytranada's shot to fame with his viral remix of Janet Jackson's "If," this mature debut brought vintage funk, disco and house into a contemporary context, and also established the Canada artist's authority as a producer.
  
  Listen: Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud

- 2016
- SW.
  Untitled
  Sued Records
  
  Dazzling rhythms in moonlit atmospheres touched with streaks of melancholy, this beautiful LP revealed new depths to the sound of Germany's excellent SUED label and its mysterious cofounder, SW.
  
  Listen: YouTube

- 2016
- Beatrice Dillon & Rupert Clervaux
  Two Changes
  Paralaxe Editions
  
  Loop-finding experimental music that sits in a rarified middle-ground between Miles' wide-open '70s period and the bleeding-edge electroacoustic experiments of Moritz von Oswald, Villalobos, Brinkmann et al.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Soundcloud

- 2016
- Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith
  EARS
  Western Vinyl
  
  Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith is a force with the Buchla, though her music feels free of any weight while she "combines modular texture, deft orchestration and alien vocals into one tidy package," as Matt McDermott previously described her breakout album—"an impressive feat by any standard."
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud

- 2017
- Various
  Mono No Aware
  PAN
  
  This impeccabe ambient compilation did more than showcase a softer side to artists known for their hard-hitting club music: it invited us to imagine a different state of being, opening the door to a magical inner world.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud

- 2017
- Nidia
  Nídia é Má, Nídia é Fudida
  Príncipe
  
  Nídia's debut album captured the always-in-flux, multi-faceted Lisbon sound at its most bracing yet emotional, with paeans to her neighbourhood and old friends that sound like tarraxo love songs.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2017
- Karen Gwyer
  Rembo
  Don’t Be Afraid
  
  The cheeky call-and-response track titles on Karen Gwyer's best album are almost as entertaining as the canny techno fusions within, brewing something unique from familiar ingredients like vintage Detroit, EBM and outsider house.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud

- 2017
- Errorsmith
  Superlative Fatigue
  PAN
  
  Precision-tooled to be as mathematically bonkers as possible without inducing migraines, Errorsmith threw romping rhythms, springy SFX and helium'd vocals into a particle collider and walked away with solid gold.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud

- 2017
- Caterina Barbieri
  Patterns Of Consciousness
  Imporant Records
  
  Caterina Barbieri's second album captivated listeners with her compositional mastery, rich analog textures and mathematical melodies, which transformed minimal arrangements into dazzling holographic shapes.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud

- 2017
- Varg
  Nordic Flora Series Pt. 3: Gore-Tex City
  Northern Electronics
  
  Gore-Tex City caught Varg smack in the middle of the crossroads that made him a techno star—dead serious dance music one minute, and slam poetry about Red Bull the next—with gorgeous production that belied the always-on-the-go, lonely travel lifestyle that inspired it.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2017
- DJ Python
  Dulce Compañia
  Incienso
  
  You may think "deep reggaeton" sounds like a joke, until suddenly you realize you've listened to this album 15 times. Music for staring, dancing, loving, living.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2017
- Octo Octa
  Where Are We Going?
  HNYTRX
  
  On Where Are We Going?, Maya Bouldry-Morrison revealed her new, true self to the world: full of love, soaring melodies and beats made to trigger tears of joy on the dance floor.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud

- 2017
- Pan Daijing
  Lack 惊蛰
   PAN
  
  Unsettling, intimate and utterly captivating, Lack 惊蛰 cemented Pan Daijing's place as one of this decade's most fearless and distinctive avant-garde artists.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud

- 2017
- Various
  Sounds Of Sisso
  Nyege Nyege Tapes
  
  This roundup of furious interlocking rhythms and slick MCs from the neighborhoods of Dar Es Salaam put singeli on the map.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud

- 2018
- Deena Abdelwahed
  Khonnar
  InFine Music
  
  Deena Abdelwahed sang in protest of societal control, the migrant crisis and other pressing social justice issues in this 2018 album, taking elements of Tunisian music and experimental club to compose an otherworldly whole that was compellingly reflective of the year's political climate.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2018
- Tirzah
  Devotion
  Domino
  
  Inspired pop songs with lo-fi production make for a low-key album overflowing with ideas, from intimate gospel-tinged tracks to seductive R&B.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud

- 2018
- Autechre
  NTS Sessions 1-4
  Warp Records
  
  Simultaneously the longest, most accessible and most advanced Autechre record of all.
  
  Listen: Apple Music / Spotify

- 2018
- Various
  Kulør 001
  Kulør
  
  A flag in the ground for a riveting new strand of fast trance-techno, Courtesy's label gave the world a collated look at what IBON, Sugar, Schacke and more were pumping out in Copenhagen.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud

- 2019
- Nkisi
  7 Directions
  UIQ
  
  Informed by her research of psychoacoustics, Nkisi merged Afro-diasporic rhythms and gabber-like drums, producing a futuristic club style that reached far beyond genre constraints.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2019
- Anthony Naples
  Fog FM
  ANS
  
  Anthony Naples' consistent strike rate makes picking the best of his work tricky—but on Fog FM, the robust house, grainy techno and lysergic swirl of ambient he has dabbled in across various records fused together wonderfully on a single package.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2019
- Holly Herndon
  Proto
  4AD
  
  Herndon's best album created a lot of buzz thanks to the "AI baby" she raised as part of its production, but Proto's biggest triumph is creating an affecting album out of technical and academic processes and ideas.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud

- 2019
- Klein
  Lifetime
  ijn inc.
  
  Klein's knack for storytelling gleams in her debut album, a shadowy soundscape drawing from 18th-century tonalities, Spencer Williams film snippets and elegant sampling to convey the turmoils of her religious upbringing.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2019
- Barker
  Utility
  Ostgut Ton
  
  A spellbinding record with a singular vision: kick drums are so passé.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2019
- Moor Mother
  Analog Fluids Of Sonic Black Holes
  Don Giovanni
  
  Moor Mother expanded her theory of Black Quantum Futurism with charged spoken word, negro spiritual samples and buzzing synths, offering poignant stories of black resilience that transcended space and time.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2019
- Karenn
  Grapefruit Regret
  Voam
  
  Dance music embraced modular synthesis this decade, but no techno artists did it better than Karenn, who captured their era-defining sound on this explosive album.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

- 2019
- 33EMYBW
  Arthropods
  SVBKVLT
  
  Inspired by the "mechanical beauty" of Arthropods, 33EMYBW spools odd rhythms, warped vocals and obliterating bass squalls into weirdo club beats that felt as fresh as anything that came out in the 2010s.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Listen to highlights from the definitive albums of the 2010s on Spotify, Apple Music and Buy Music Club.
  
  Stay tuned for more lists rounding up the best tracks, mixes and reissues of the 2010s. We'll also be publishing a series of features that unpack some of the seismic shifts in dance music's sounds, scenes and politics over the past ten years.