Electronic music typically gets boiled down to a handful of qualities, even by fans: It’s euphoric, energetic, at times utopian. For the ambient heads, it’s calming, meditative, and spiritually centering. But part of the beauty of electronic music is just how wide the range of possibilities can be. Choose your weapon: In 2023, you could have opted for a blunt object (Yaeji’s With a Hammer) or a garden (Marina Herlop’s overgrown Nekkuja). You could have thrown down with an all-out “Rumble” with Skrillex, Fred again.., and Flowdan, or the kind of Gentle Confrontation that Loraine James sought on her profoundly personal album. Brazil’s DJ K reminded us about panic in the underground, Lisbon’s Danifox gave free rein to his anxiety, and Medellín party-starter Verraco mischievously stirred up an “Escándaloo.” The best electronic releases of 2023 were defined by their unique and individual perspectives. (Perspective: also the title of an excellent EP from Jlin this year.) But perhaps it was James Holden that summed it up most eloquently, with the title of his most questing album yet: Imagine This Is a High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities.
Sorted alphabetically, the following list represents the year’s best electronic albums and songs, with selections from our main list folded in alongside additional picks.
Listen to selections from this list on our Spotify playlist and Apple Music playlist.
Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2023 wrap-up coverage here.
(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)
3phaz: Ends Meet
Like his Cairo peers—ZULI, ABADIR, and the community of artists represented on the did you mean: irish compilation series—the anonymous musician known as 3Phaz creates tracks that skew club music’s traditional geographic center, displacing American and European reference points in favor of regional sounds like shaabi and its electronic variant, mahraganat. 3Phaz’s tactile timbres shapeshift between leathery drum hits, metallic drones, and piercing digital accents, while his rhythms twist peak-time pacing into elastic new configurations. His hybrid approach can make even classic sounds appear new: Just check “Shabber,” which injects the decades-old Dutch style known as gabber with a lightness of spirit its headbanging originators never would have imagined. –Philip Sherburne
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
.png)
Actress: “Push Power ( a 1 )”
Best known for sparse, heady, and sometimes beatless compositions, vaunted English electronic producer Actress incites the dancefloor with a musical tug-of-war on “Push Power ( a 1 ).” Insistent four-on-the-floor bass hits pull at a searching piano line, while repetitive ad-libs offer enigmatic color commentary on the action. The terse vocals are hypnotic, but also lucid, crisp, and ready for the club, befitting a song that captures a cerebral standard-bearer as he gets kinetic. –Daniel Felsenthal
Listen: Actress, “Push Power ( a 1 )”
Anthony Naples: Orbs
Anthony Naples built his reputation on bruising, distorted club tracks, but Orbs is the latest and most accomplished manifestation of the NYC musician’s drift toward placid atmospheric sounds. It distinguishes itself from the recent crop of ambient-adjacent music through its emphasis on twitchy rhythm—Naples hasn’t forgotten the lessons of the dancefloor—and its deft mixture of electric bass and guitar alongside the usual aqueous synth pads. The music’s resonances creep up on you: With repeated listens, tracks that at first may seem like background music reveal nuanced emotional arcs. –Andy Cush
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Aphex Twin: “Blackbox Life Recorder 21f”
Aphex Twin’s first song in five years hums with gentle nostalgia, blurring at the edges like a happy memory that’s fading away. Dedicated to his late parents, “Blackbox Life Recorder 21f” begins mellow and summery, with much of the warmth and comfort of 2014’s Syro, seen through a softer filter. The bob-and-weave drum programming counters pretty synth melodies that float like celestial bodies. More elements eventually get stacked on—punchy breakbeats, crash cymbals in clusters—but the sentimentality at its core can’t be obscured. –Dean Van Nguyen
Listen: Aphex Twin, “Blackbox Life Recorder 21f”
Avalon Emerson: “Dreamliner”
Avalon Emerson shifts away from club music and toward pop on her debut album, but she doesn’t entirely abandon the sound that has made her a celebrated DJ across the last six years or so. On “Dreamliner,” she bridges the transition across the course of the track: Thumping kicks and stiffly sequenced arpeggios evoke the mechanical techno of her back catalog, but the dance groove gradually subsides, making space for a playful synth melody that carries the song’s second half. Through it all, her cool, muted vocals do double duty as both pointillist tone color and hummable melody—a reminder that, for a musician with the requisite vision and skills, you can, in fact, have it both ways. –Rob Arcand
Listen: Avalon Emerson, “Dreamliner”
BAMBII: “WICKED GYAL” [ft. Lady Lykez]
Over the past decade, the Toronto DJ BAMBII has brought a boundaryless, utopian spirit to her Jerk raves, smoothly merging club music with the cultures of the Caribbean diaspora. “WICKED GYAL,” from her debut EP, Infinity Club, furthers this concept, as UK MC Lady Lykez spits Jamaican patois over wobbly synths and skittering beats. Providing fair warning for her unruly behavior, Lykez belches into the mic and cautions that, with one wrong move, her hands might end up around your throat. The dancefloor beckons, but when she gets twisted, “anything goes.” –Jesse Locke
Listen: BAMBII, “WICKED GYAL” [ft. Lady Lykez]
Blawan: Dismantled Into Juice EP
Spending time with Blawan’s Dismantled Into Juice EP feels like taking a ride on a malfunctioning ghost train. Scary noises leap out at you at random—degraded, rotten and lasting just that little bit longer than they should—while the rhythmic chassis that carries you along starts to splinter at your feet. If you’re looking for human comfort, you won’t find it in Monstera Black’s artfully deconstructed vocal lines, which eschew girded words and melodies in favor of Elizabeth Fraser-esque obfuscation. You can just about hear the connection to the industrial-strength techno that is Blawan’s daily bread. but Dismantled Into Juice is largely out on its own, a murkily inventive post-generic creep show. –Ben Cardew
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Call Super: Eulo Cramps
When Eden Samara sings, “These are the branches between the spaces,” on Call Super’s “Sapling,” she’s nearly describing the sound of the whole album—wooden snaps and leafy rustling proceed with unhurried grace, and spread like a climbing vine. JR Seaton’s fourth album integrates an ear for earthy, improvised-seeming sounds—drum fills, staccato strings, undulating woodwinds—with the pointillist precision of microhouse and ’90s braindance. Seaton has suggested that this is their most personal album yet, a framing that often implies the artist is trying to reach some sort of understanding with the listener. But if the anagram-like song titles don’t make it clear that Seaton doesn’t want to reveal the whole picture, the voluptuous strangeness of this music certainly will. –Daniel Bromfield
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Deena Abdelwahed: Jbal Rrsas جبل الرصاص
Tunisian producer Deena Abdelwahed—born and raised in Qatar, now based in France—describes her music as a “reappropriation” of Arabic music, taking popular urban forms and feeding them back into the globalized club scene. On Jbal Rrsas she worked with music researcher Khyam Allami to achieve electronic pitches that correspond to Arabic scales, which helps account for the uncommon timbral richness of these songs. The album, whose title translates as Mountain of Lead, is named for a limestone peak southeast of Tunis where lead was once mined; Abdelwahed says she chose the reference for its imposing beauty, but once you know the translation, it’s impossible not to detect traces of the metallic element in the music’s burnished gleam, malleable textures, and ominous, heavy weight. –Philip Sherburne
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
dj +1: Aromáticas
Colombian producer dj +1’s Aromáticas draws inspiration from the herbal teas his mother would make to survive the seasonal changes of his hometown of Bogotá. Despite the project’s herbaceous origins, dj +1 infuses each song with a celestial glow. “Menta” is iridescent, full of rolling bass and shimmery, cosmic-dust synths. The swirling contours of “Romero” resemble a spiral galaxy; astral pads and waves of reverb twirl into a collection of stars, interstellar gas, and dark matter bound together by gravity. For all its abstract shapes and oblique angles, Aromáticas is playful and curious. Listen to it while gazing up at the night sky, and be hypnotized by the gaseous nebulae sparkling more than 40 trillion kilometers away. –Isabelia Herrera
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify
DJ Danifox: Ansiedade
Like the rest of his cohort on the great Lisbon label Príncipe Discos, DJ Danifox makes batida, a creeping and skeletal club music shot through with African polyrhythms. His tracks may be best experienced in a smoke-filled room with a banging system, where the heaving bass applies full-body pressure and the spaces between their minimal elements start to feel like literal voids you could trace in the air around you. But Ansiedade, Danifox’s latest album, sounds great in headphones too, where you can more closely appreciate the elegant and sometimes disorienting accoutrements to his beats: minor-key piano chords, throaty synth effects, and snatches of muted vocals, giving the music a sense of melancholy and unease to go along with its slo-mo swagger. –Andy Cush
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
DJ K: PANICO NO SUBMUNDO
Somewhere in Europe, a haughty audiophile still thinks minimal techno is the future of electronic music. Enter DJ K, the international ambassador of a new strain of Brazilian funk called bruxaria. The São Paulo-born producer’s album PANICO NO SUBMUNDO is a bloodcurdling collection of eldritch horrors, blending maniacal laughter, metallic kicks, and blaring horns into some of the most thrilling experimental music anywhere on the planet. DJ K made his name in the fluxos (or funk parties) of the Heliópolis favela and has said that PANICO NO SUBMUNDO’s nightmarish mood reflects the dismal realities of slum life. But there’s joy here too: The man is a maximalist composer who knows how to fry your brain and urge you into movement. “Erva Venenos” shreds up a Lil Uzi Vert sample, dial-up noises, and crackly vocals; “Isso Não é um Teste” begins with what seems like a broadcast from an emergency alert system, only to morph into a speaker-detonating blast of harsh bass and ringing phones. The tag that appears across the album says it all: “DJ K isn’t producing anymore; he’s doing witchcraft.” –Isabelia Herrera
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
DJ Koze: “Blissda”
DJ Koze is widely hailed for the flashy eclecticism of his studio albums, but he’s also an ace club DJ, and “Blissda” distills the empathic bliss of his dancefloor genius into six heavenly minutes. It’s a dreaming deep-house moonrise: The melody drips like mercury falling from a dropper as it coats a slanting contraption of knocks, claps, and cymbals. The bass is more of a presence than a proper line, burning in smudge pots somewhere nearby. The perfectly titled track turns catharsis into a container—a little eternity in a chilled bottle. –Brian Howe
Listen: DJ Koze, “Blissda”
Everything But the Girl: “Nothing Left to Lose”
While married couple Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt have had their hands full with creative projects over the past two decades, it was a welcome surprise when their beloved group Everything But the Girl released Fuse early this year. The album highlight “Nothing Left to Lose” picks up where 1999’s Temperamental left off. Watt’s icy, slinky, and carefully structured production hides outsized emotions beneath garage’s lithe profile. Thorn’s exquisite, melancholic alto sings of the unbreakable bond between love and pain. “Kiss me while the world decays,” she pleads with the kind of passion that explains the duo’s reputation as dance music’s dreamiest couple. –Cameron Cook
Listen: Everything But the Girl, “Nothing Left to Lose”
Four Tet: “Three Drums”
Four Tet just might be the most unlikely mainstream breakthrough star of the year. After spending the last two decades honing his luscious, humanistic take on dance music, he suddenly became a Coachella and Madison Square Garden headliner alongside buddies Fred Again.. and Skrillex, dishing out EDM euphoria to the masses. But “Three Drums,” released three days after the Coachella gig, has him back in classic mode. Stately and tranquil for its entire eight-minute run, it’s better suited for the ocean floor than the dancefloor. Turns out the same things that make him a fantastic party-starter—patient builds, detailed textures, pitch-perfect percussion—are also what make “Three Drums” so gripping on headphones. –Patrick Lyons
Listen: Four Tet, “Three Drums”
Honour: Àlááfíà
Assembled between Lagos, London, and New York, Honour’s debut album is both ancestral homage and Afrofuturist voyage. If the RZA’s Ghost Dog soundtrack had been steeped in goth and musique concrète, it might have sounded something like this: Sampled soul, found sounds, playground chants, and bursts of noise build up in a boom-bap palimpsest stitched together with references to bell hooks and Sun Ra. The mood is turbulent, the colors murky, the visibility almost nil. But despite the pervasive feeling of anxious mourning, occasional breaks in the clouds yield moments of almost piercingly ecstatic beauty. –Philip Sherburne
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Hudson Mohawke / Nikki Nair: “Set the Roof” [ft. Tayla Parx]
In a year when many DJs reached for edits of Y2K-era chart pop by the likes of Britney, Vengaboys, and t.A.T.u. whenever they needed to energize the dancefloor, Scottish vet Hudson Mohawke and Atlanta upstart Nikki Nair proved that an original banger could still take the club by storm. An irreverent continuation of dance music’s long-running transatlantic conversation, “Set the Roof” joyfully sits somewhere between UK garage and hip-house. But it’s the chipmunked vocals of Tayla Parx, whose sassy delivery recalls the days when Rye Rye was the hottest thing on the Hollerboard, that make the track such a sugary delight: Her maniacally looped phrasing can and will unlock the serotonin pathways of every raver in earshot. –Shawn Reynaldo
Listen: Hudson Mohawke / Nikki Nair, “Set the Roof” [ft. Tayla Parx]
James Holden: Imagine This Is a High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities
If we could do as veteran UK producer James Holden suggests and actually imagine a high-dimensional space of all possibilities, then we probably wouldn’t need the entrancing highs of this album. Our limitations, then, are also our gain. The Border Community head’s latest LP is a winding, grooving, electro-organic dream of a record that sees possibility on all shores. The album is situated in the deep, wild field between the tranced-out techno with which Holden made his name and the unbridled expression of a lysergic jam, where fripperies such as repetition, form, and convention are abandoned in favor of perpetual onward motion. Like a musical Mandelbrot set, you can zoom in or out to your heart’s content, micro and macro detail emerging at each turn. –Ben Cardew
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Jessy Lanza: Love Hallucination
Jessy Lanza has good reason to exude confidence on her fourth album. Not only has the Canadian artist moved to L.A., home to the world’s most self-assured people, but the world has also bent to her hybrids of R&B, UK garage, and house, thanks to 2023 releases from the likes of NewJeans, Jung Kook, et al. But where pop acts might feel inclined to rein in electronic music’s harsher tones, Lanza goes hard. The production on Love Hallucination is minimal and gutsy, from the martial drum-machine thump of opener “Don’t Leave Me Now” to the electro pop and breakbeat mixture of “Big Pink Rose,” and Lanza’s lyrics pull precisely no punches. “I Hate Myself” is viciously raw in its simplicity, while “Don’t Cry on My Pillow” is a kiss-off that brooks no response. –Ben Cardew
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Jlin: Perspective EP
Perspective is what happens if you leave Jlin with a whole room of percussive instruments to sample, courtesy of the Third Coast Percussion ensemble. It’s blissful for her, perhaps the best drum programmer in modern electronic music, and heaven for us: The one-time footwork producer constructs puzzle-like assemblages that are both intricate in their construction and incredibly weighty, like an anthill rendered in titanium. Not everything on this six-track EP derives from the sound of sticks hitting objects—“Paradigm” has an absolutely squalid electronic bass line, “Derivative” a tortured synth lead—but everything feels like it wants to be, making this the most brilliantly drum-heavy release of Jlin’s brilliantly drum-heavy career. –Ben Cardew
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Julio Bashmore: “Bubblin”
Bubbling, surging, rolling, funking—whatever you want to call it, Julio Bashmore’s comeback single had it in abundance, the bottom-of-the-stomach, blood-fizzing, somehow-can’t-not-dance club energy that makes electronic music irresistible. “Bubblin” sits somewhere between the fashionable low-end shuffle of 2-step and the equally modish filtered burble of the French house revival; that would seem like canny decision-making for the Bristol bass maestro if “Bubblin” sounded anything like a calculated move. It doesn’t, though: Instead “Bubblin” is the echo of pure, instinctive joy unleashed in the service of dancefloor havoc. –Ben Cardew
Listen: Julio Bashmore, “Bubblin”
Kieran Hebden / William Tyler: “Darkness, Darkness”
As Four Tet, Kieran Hebden has been blueprinting new possibilities for mixing beats and samples of acoustic instruments for more than two decades. Unsurprisingly, this union with William Tyler, the virtuoso finger-picking journeyman, is a perfect match. Centered on a thick chunk of “Darkness, Darkness,” a 1969 obscurity from soul-pop singer turned Days of Our Lives actress Gloria Loring, the song is a 10-plus-minute slow-burner that builds from psych-folk meditation to mid-’70s Miles Davis-style supernova, with Tyler channeling forefathers like Sonny Sharrock and Pete Cosey as Hebden shell-games the rhythms. The producer says a full album is on the way; it should be a mindbender. –Will Hermes
Listen: Kieran Hebden / William Tyler, “Darkness, Darkness”
Loraine James: Gentle Confrontation
On Loraine James’ latest album, Gentle Confrontation, the British producer steps into newly personal territory. With her own vocals placed front and center, she fills out her glitchy, clattering electronic music with autobiography. On the shivery highlight “2003,” titled after the year her father died, she teases a choral loop out into infinity, taking stock of the profound loss with wounding precision; the similarly spare, tender “Cards With the Grandparents” samples laughter and shuffling decks as a source of textural found sound. Elsewhere, James brings granular self-examination to genre-expanding exercises: The mercurial “I DM U” pairs soaring synth melodies with shadowy, melodic drumming from black midi’s Morgan Simpson, while the gentle “One Way Ticket to the Midwest (Emo)” recasts the ’90s rock genre’s complex, shimmering fretwork into a backdrop for a soothing meditation. Gentle Confrontation is as wide-ranging as it is warmly comforting, with endless innovative—and deeply lived-in—corners to peruse. –Eric Torres
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Marina Herlop: Nekkuja
Marina Herlop’s fourth album is loosely based around the idea of the garden; sure enough, if you scrape around the stems of her pretty musical flowers, the dirt emerges. Nekkuja has all the gorgeously textured vocal experimentation of the Catalan producer’s breakthrough album, Pripyat; but it comes caked in nurturing muck, be it the double-time jazz drums of “Cosset” or the wormlike bassline and take-no-prisoners piano of “Reina Mora.” After Pripyat’s fireworks, Herlop has come up with something wholly distinct: earthy, tough, yet tender. –Ben Cardew
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Nikki Nair: “Can’t Wait”
Atlanta’s Nikki Nair established himself as one of dance music’s most exciting new voices of the post-pandemic era without even releasing a full-length. Following his output as a producer so far has meant collecting breadcrumbs: from EPs, collaborations, and the occasional unreleased loosie dropped into the percussive madness of his DJ sets. In the absence of a single definitive statement, each of these has presented its own angle on his identity as an artist—party-starting populist; no, virtuosic breakbeat scientist. “Can’t Wait” offers the most surprising addition to that list yet: deadpan synth-pop singer-songwriter. Over jazzy chord changes and through a robotic vocoder effect, Nair croons like a Randy Newman for our age of perpetual burnout, delivering a character study from the perspective of a working stiff who’s trying to reconcile his appetite for hedonism with his apparently sincere desire to help his company grow. Is it a lark? A sign of things to come? With Nair, you never know. –Andy Cush
Listen: Nikki Nair, “Can’t Wait”
Octo Octa: “Late Night Love”
For the chronically anxious, thumping beats and writhing bodies can present an obstacle to transcendence, not a path to it. But for Octo Octa, who has been open about her own anxiety, the dancefloor is a balm. Her greatest skill as a producer is welcoming clubgoers of all dispositions into its communal space, and “Late Night Love” perfects her inviting style of house. A throbbing bass lures everyone onto the floor and a pounding kick drum keeps them there for the 12-minute ride, until celestial synths reveal their destination: not forward to the end of a sweaty night, but upward to an ecstatic climax. Octo Octa clears the way—all that’s left to do is ascend. –Matthew Blackwell
Listen: Octo Octa, “Late Night Love”
Olof Dreijer: Rosa Rugosa EP
The Knife were never known for their easily approachable warmth, which is why Olof Dreijer’s first solo project in nearly a decade is so refreshing. Knife watchers will find elements here to remind them of Dreijer’s former band, notably the witchy, pitch-bent melodies on the title track. But the bulk of the EP feels like summer breaking out over Sweden’s icy shore, from the kuduro-indebted beat of “Rosa Rugosa” to the flamenco-esque handclaps of “Cassia” and the bizarrely jaunty jazz swing of “Camelia.” An unexpectedly happy return from an artist better known for keeping fans feeling unsettled. –Ben Cardew
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Overmono: “Good Lies”
On the title track of their debut album as Overmono, dance producers (and brothers) Tom and Ed Russell dissect and rearrange Smerz’ hallucinatory “No harm” like plastic surgeons for hire, facelifting the Norwegian duo’s murky R&B into an ecstatic festival anthem. Every inch of enigmatic unease lurking around the original vocals is shaved off, resulting in something like the soundtrack to meeting the love of your life while walking across the Williamsburg Bridge at golden hour. A clever stroke of emotional alchemy, “Good Lies” flips its source material’s defensive crouch into an airbrushed head-rush of sweet possibility. –Kieran Press-Reynolds
Listen: Overmono, “Good Lies”
Pangaea: “Installation”
A decade and change since the electronic producer Pangaea pulped UK clubland’s collective brain with the diced syllables and drunken percussion of “Hex,” he repeated the feat—but sweeter, sexier this time—with “Installation.” The tongue-juggling vocal chops are still front-and-center, but where “Hex” swirled around drum hits that seemed to disintegrate just as they reached your ears, “Installation” pumps a full-blooded Jersey house bounce through bubblegum-pop framing and demands a singalong—even if you’ve got no idea what the words are. I’m going with “eso es,” or Spanish for, “That’s it!” –Will Pritchard
Listen: Pangaea, “Installation”
Pépe: Reclaim
In the music of the Spanish producer Pépe, human development and nature are locked in an uneasy truce and Reclaim, his debut album, challenges the listener to decide which is more beautiful. Though it’s inspiring to hear the dystopian robo-voice of “Optical: Activate” gradually get swallowed by a loamy wall of string synths, Reclaim is often at its most captivating when it conjures artificial paradises and Y2K utopian aesthetics. The album is like a tour of the last 40 years of retrofuturism, from John Carpenter and Vangelis’ synth scores to the optimism of ’90s rave to the bubbly pop art of Frutiger Aero. Underlying the music, however, is the ominous suggestion that the present world might have to be destroyed to make room for a better one. –Daniel Bromfield
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Peverelist: Pulse Modulation EP
Like many club producers, Livity Sound boss Peverelist appears allergic to the album format. It’s been six years since his last full-length, and he had everything he needed to follow it up this year with a concise yet varied set of lean, live-wire techno. Instead, he split the eight cuts—simply titled “Pulse I” through “Pulse VIII”—into two EPs released with little fanfare. October’s Pulse Modulation EP is the more exciting of the two records, by a hair: “Pulse V” channels classic Detroit, “Pulse VII” plays rude bass off ambient pads, and the jungle throwback “Pulse VIII” balances stone-faced fury with weightless bliss. (“Pulse VI,” meanwhile, will be manna to heads who believe that minimal techno peaked with DBX’s 1994 classic “Losing Control.”) Put together, the two EPs might have made for one of the year’s landmark club albums. But hey, coulda, woulda, shoulda—whether individually or as a complete set, all eight tracks bang. –Philip Sherburne
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Purelink: Signs
Purelink have never cared much for drama. Even when the Chicago trio flirted with the dancefloor, they favored stillness over momentum, peace over chaos. One early single felt like a statement of intent: “Maintain the Bliss.” Since then they’ve continued peeling off layers and slowing the pace of their foggy melodies and shuddering rhythms, a process that ultimately resulted in this elusive ambient album. Signs’ six tracks are deceptively dynamic, continually shifting from new-age gasps to the sorts of minimal glitches that scuffed up albums on Mille Plateaux in the early 2000s. Subtlety is the order of the day; it can be easy to miss their slight variations, like when a plush synth pad enters the mix. But gently insistent repetition makes each idea linger, like an image burned into an LCD screen. –Colin Joyce
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Rrose: Please Touch
The secret to Rrose’s second album is right there in the title. Their extremely tactile electronic frequencies constitute an invitation to make contact. After that, who knows—to ignite? Dissolve? Become one with the London-based producer’s undulating sine waves? Fusion, after all, is the name of the game: Minimalist techno and ambient drone come to seem like opposite sides of a Moebius strip. They morph back and forth in an endless loop, a scale model of infinity beneath your fingertips. –Philip Sherburne
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Skrillex / Fred again.. / Flowdan: “Rumble”
Skrillex is back; Skrillex never really left. Instead, he simply morphed along with each mutation of sweaty, bro-beloved electronic music—after cementing his stamp on dubstep, he pumped out tingling, EDM-infected Top 40 hits, and now he pops up at Coachella as a mediating force between Four Tet’s airy thumps and Fred again..’s sentimental bangers. After a quiet few years, Skrillex came through with two albums this year, and “Rumble” is a pyrotechnic highlight from those records—an enthusiastic return to ruckus. Veteran grime rapper Flowdan snarls between strobing bass hits. Fred again.. helps slam home effect after effect: lion roars, water plops. The beat whirrs and whirls, sounding like wind buffeting through a helicopter’s rotors. No one ever accused Skrillex of subtlety, and this is prime in-your-face fun. –Dani Blum
Listen: Skrillex / Fred again.. / Flowdan, “Rumble”
.jpg)
Sofia Kourtesis: Madres
A song called “How Music Makes You Feel Better” could go wrong in so many ways, but on Sofia Kourtesis’ life-giving debut album, it’s clear that the Peruvian artist innately understands the healing properties of vibrating waveforms. Like all her work to date, Madres is built around house music’s celebratory thump, but the dancefloor is just the starting point for an expansive set of collages that fold in field recordings of Afro-Peruvian drumming, protests from across Latin America, and snippets of conversation with friends and family gathered on her travels around the world. If there’s a mournful undercurrent, it’s surely related to caring for her mother, who was being treated for cancer—and eventually recovered—while Kourtesis was recording the album. But that openness to pain is what makes Madres feel so emotionally cleansing: It’s a bittersweet dose of our deepest fears, a homeopathic remedy administered via sound. –Philip Sherburne
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Tirzah: trip9love...???
On first listen, Tirzah’s latest album seems like a feint. Utilizing the same scratched-up beat and waterlogged piano tone for nearly every track, trip9love…??? doesn’t offer easy inroads to its cyclical universe. The spartan approach recalibrates the UK producer’s sound with regular co-producer Mica Levi, shifting the emphasis from songwriting to granular repetition. Muffled hi-hats, blown-out 808s, and mantra-like lyrics about love and loss swing back and forth like a hypnotist’s watch. The thrumming “No Limit” boils with unresolved rage, while the shoegazing “2 D I C U V” takes a sharp left turn, placing Tirzah’s gentle vocals against a downburst of feedback-loaded electric guitar, yielding one of her most affecting ballads yet. No matter how queasy and confined, trip9love…??? finds endless invention and striking beauty within its eerie, multilayered incantations. –Eric Torres
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Toumba: Janoob EP
There’s a seismic intensity to Toumba’s beats, as though he were tracing the fault lines where tectonic plates rub together. Where styles like house, techno, and jungle rely on a long-established set of cadences and tempo ranges, the Amman-based producer looks to rhythms from his native Jordan, fleshing out a palette steeped in drum’n’bass and grime with loping triplets and intricate syncopations. The result, on the six-track Janoob EP—titled in reference to the southern Jordanian region that inspired its drumming—is a dizzyingly destabilizing approach to bass music that throws off sparks when mixed with more conventional club styles. –Philip Sherburne
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Verraco: “Escándaloo”
Verraco’s moniker means “boar” in Spanish, but it could also be a reference to the Colombian slang term for someone who’s a hard-working motherfucker. “Escándaloo,” the lead single from the Medellín producer’s eponymous EP on Blawan and Pariah’s Voam imprint, reflects both readings. A galloping bassline charges forward atop a loping drum groove, animalistic in its persistence. Thick swirls of robotic whirring resemble a spaceship’s warp drive booting up; bellowing airhorns and stone-cold kick drums draw the tune’s orbit back toward Earth. Along with friends DJ Lomalinda and Nyksan, Verraco heads up TraTraTrax. While European and U.S. producers may garner much of the credit for integrating Latin American rhythms into the international electronic landscape, the label reminds listeners that these styles are first and foremost from the Global South. “Escándaloo” is a pressure cooker of a track, but it’s also a demand to put any colonial assumptions about what counts as avant-garde to rest. –Isabelia Herrera
Listen: Verraco, “Escándaloo”
Yaeji: With a Hammer
On With a Hammer, Yaeji forgoes the usual metaphors for change—the inexorable marches and slow evolutions—to explore her own vision of enlightenment: a total teardown where we finally get to build the future right. Balancing heart-racing garage rhythms and buzzing vintage indie rock with themes of social responsibility and creative transformation, the singer-producer’s full-length debut is whimsical like its synth-flute overture and totally serious, too. Her colorful, blobby style brings a hopeful glow to eternal human projects like processing anger and fostering community—and she begins by granting broad latitude to like-minded contemporaries including Loraine James and Nourished by Time. Like a great big tap on the shoulder, Yaeji’s smiling sledgehammer arcs across languages and generations to say: time to get to work. –Anna Gaca
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
