The definition of electronic music has never been broader. It might mean hyperpop or drum’n’bass, Balearic or footwork, Colombian club or Brazilian funk, post-everything ambient or good old Chicago house. This year’s best electronic releases tick all those boxes and more, touching on Egyptian street styles, the Afro-Portuguese diaspora, and a 71-year-old former punk along the way. In alphabetical order, these are our 35 favorite electronic releases of the year.
Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2024 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.)
A. G. Cook: “Silver Thread Golden Needle”
Maybe A. G. Cook is crazy for testing the attention span of his chronically online audience with a 10-minute album intro. Or maybe “Silver Thread Golden Needle,” the bionic opener to Cook’s Britpop, is scintillating enough to stay fixated on. The song refracts like a prism at high noon, filled with stuttering blips that shapeshift at each turn. And the merry-go-round of yelps and vocal chops at its core gleam like Christmas morning. A. G. Cook’s electronic epic is everything popular music has become: digital, synthetic, amorphous—ultimately just a WAV file in some sticker-laden Macbook. Well, it’s everything but concise. But there’s no trouble sitting through this one. –Olivier Lafontant
Listen: A. G. Cook, “Silver Thread Golden Needle”
Actress: Statik
Each new Actress release invites a new way of thinking about the artist, as fans ponder what’s different this time about the way Darren Cunningham approaches his usual fare (cryptic pranks, nostalgia, nostalgic pranks). Statik is one of his simpler, and, thus, more beguiling, case studies: What if he turned the structural trickery down a notch, and turned up the ambience? You may be unsettled by how similar Statik can sound, at times, to any number of previous slow-burn atmospheric thinkers in electronic music—from the ’90s ambient-techno greats through to earlier Actress tunes to today. But the nagging uncertainty that makes Actress fun is still here, jockeying for position under layers of cozy, Actress-ian haze. Cunningham makes anxiety feel unusually comfortable. –H.D. Angel
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Burial: “Dreamfear”
Of the dozens and dozens of vocal samples Burial has used throughout his nearly two-decade career, the repeated squelch of the juvenile taunt “Back from the dead, fucked up in the head” on his track “Dreamfear” is probably the funniest. It includes some signature Burial sounds—the threatening synth stabs, the pitched-up vocals, the rainy crinkles for texture—but raises the intensity while lowering the introspection. Instead of feeling like a comment on rave music, “Dreamfear” is rave music, a hardcore take on the sounds Burial was so influenced by but which his productions ultimately inverted. Running a dozen minutes, the track operates like a mini-mix, with various movements taking their turn walloping you with amen breaks. It’s a real puttanesca of hardcore. “I am the lord of ecstasy,” goes one of the other lighthearted vocal samples. Maybe it’s about a drug dealer, maybe not. If Burial is talking about himself, it’s a well-deserved humblebrag. –Matthew Schnipper
Listen: Burial, “Dreamfear”
Carrier: In Spectra EP
Antwerp producer Carrier’s In Spectra plays like a bout of musical pins and needles. Pointed drum’n’bass and techno exercises, recalling everything from Monolake to Instra:mental, search for rhythmic relief through stressed, dubby static. Nothing quite resolves the unease. Unfamiliar drum surfaces press where they shouldn’t—or maybe where they should. The three tracks are exactly as functional as you believe they are. A pinched nerve can be a lesson: Listen to how Guy Brewer renders his influences as a cascade of throbbing, elemental pangs, and you’ll appreciate the weights and contours of sounds you may have taken for granted. –H.D. Angel
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
d.silvestre: “Taka Fogo em Kiksilver”
As a young teenager, Brazil’s Douglas Silvestre would hole up in his bedroom and record cozy, Alex G-inspired song sketches to his phone. That all changed when he attended his first bailes as a 16-year-old, realizing that the blown-out, DIY aggression of funk was “more rock than the rock [he] was making.” Since then, he’s developed a distinctly noisy, brutalist production style, exemplified by “Taka Fogo em Kiksilver.” The track’s instrumental consists of little more than kicks and congas, boosted, then layered until they form an infernal wall of sound. MC MTOODIO, MC LELE 011, and MC DENADAI match its energy, conjuring images of psychosexual anxiety and Quiksilver jackets set ablaze. –Jude Noel
Listen: d.silvestre, “Taka Fogo em Kiksilver”
DJ Anderson do Paraiso: Queridão
Brazilian journalist GG Albuquerque invented the term “ambient space funk” to describe the woozy electronic style endemic to Belo Horizonte. Local producer DJ Anderson do Paraiso’s Queridão is spacey in the extreme; in fact, it feels predicated specifically upon the fact that the universe is expanding. The most grudging sort of minimalist, Anderson places most of his emphasis on the yawning void between skeletal drum hits and moody streaks of synth. Floating around his beats is a steady stream of gruff, monotone rapping, interspersed with looped vocal samples and abstracted grunts and coos—porous and shadowy, it feels like the dark matter binding together his bleakly sensuous galaxy. –Philip Sherburne
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
DJ Lycox: Guetto Star
DJ Lycox’s batida is defined by its inertia. No matter how many instrumental loops are knotted on top of each other, or how tuneful they act as a unit, each one moves with consistent, scraping effort. There’s a sly sense of disorientation that comes with using such weighty tools for agile dancefloor bangers; the drill-ish bass glides on opener “YAAAHH” almost feel slight compared to the real drums zooming around them. Clipped-out empty space on the jittery “Pedale Ku El” implies a peak of exertion that’s just out of reach. Even the album’s more sentimental moments, like the conversational music-box sway of “Guetto Love” or the drowsy plucked melodies of “Staring at the Moon,” are steeled by an inner resolve. –H.D. Angel
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Djrum: Meaning’s Edge EP
Djrum’s own music rarely reaches the batshit velocity of his DJing. When the Oxford artist is throwing records around his three-deck setup, he cuts wildly between beats and breakdowns, making tempo jumps that would make most DJs recoil in fear. But Meaning’s Edge almost captures that energy, following his muse down a hedge maze through genres—drum & bass, techno, downtempo—at breakneck speed. Always one for a little drama, Djrum embellishes these zig-zagging tracks with wind instruments from around the world, sounding jaunty at one moment (the 14-minute, two-part “Freakm” suite) and eerie and foreboding (“Codex,” which sounds like if Jon Hassell got into breakcore through TikTok). The best is the centerpiece "Crawl," assembled from tiny percussive sounds that range from wooden to metallic. It’s like a muscular microhouse at warp speed, cycling through styles until it ends up somewhere close to dub techno and then just ends, leaving you warm and fuzzy but also wondering what just happened. –Andrew Ryce
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Eris Drew: Raving Disco Breaks Vol. II
It’s hard to beat that feeling of walking onto a dancefloor and knowing right away: It is popping off in here. That’s the vibe Eris Drew brings in the rave and recreates so well on Raving Disco Breaks Vol. II. Her method goes something like this: Take a crate of bargain-bin gems—like, say, this one (1999, vinyl-only, $2.40 on Discogs) and mix them together with flawless technique and old-school tricks. The result is a god-tier party mix that makes the DJ seem like a musician, the rave a place of unhinged musical possibility, and Drew the perfect vessel for a cosmic energy she has long called the Motherbeat. –Will Lynch
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Floating Points: “Key103”
Sam Shepherd spent the past few years working with and celebrating the life of Pharoah Sanders. It’s both an honor and a burden to carry on the late jazz master’s legacy, and Shepherd has found solace through an old, reliable love: EDM. “Key103,” a highlight on his Floating Points album Cascade, is at once a celebration of dance and life. It begins with a bass drum that resembles a heartbeat. From there, the groove thickens, as does the atmosphere—dashing, dancing, jittering. Shepherd delights in stacking his arrangement with more and more elements—a pinging metallic riff, coin-operated arcade game sounds—before paring it all back, pulling his listener around like they’re on a string. “Key103” is equally suitable for a subterranean dancefloor or post-club comedown, as Shepherd knows that both are where life is often most sharply felt. –Dean Van Nguyen
Listen: Floating Points, “Key103”
Four Tet: “Loved”
Like homemade phở or a Mondrian painting, downtempo music sounds like one of those things that seems easy but requires time and touch to make it work. Kieran Hebden has both, and he takes a break from making club hits in 15 minutes lying on his bed and returns to his sampledelic Rounds days with a textured, threnodic song that’s less “these are the breaks” and more “them’s the breaks.” The beat is humble, groovy, and mysterious, and it’s elevated by a silvery melody played on Soma TERRA, a “highly conceptual” microtonal polyphonic synthesizer encased in wood. You could say that’s beside the point, but that’s literally the Four Tet touch. –Jeremy D. Larson
Listen: Four Tet, “Loved”
Heavee: Unleash
Heavee was already one of the most creative producers in footwork, a mad scientist holed up somewhere in Chicago adding bright lashings of color and bubbling concoctions of outside influences to the genre’s trademark juddering beats. But Unleash, his first album for avant-club juggernaut Hyperdub, is something else entirely. Accompanied by a whole video game, the LP takes inspiration from RPGs and Saturday morning cartoons; with garish pads, lush instrumentation, and bright hooks, it dresses up footwork’s rhythmic chassis into a regal sedan chair. Finished off with a hip-hop swagger—and streaks of pop and R&B, thanks to guests like BABii and HomeSick—the record squeezes several squares into one larger circle, yielding one of the most idiosyncratic footwork records ever. –Andrew Ryce
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
J. Albert: I want to be good so bad
Like shoegaze, dub techno is so capably imitated—enough, at least, that it sounds perfectly satisfying for a semi-distracted listen or three—that it can be a shock to hear something that ticks all the usual boxes while actually doing something different with the form. New York producer J. Albert’s stealthily excellent I want to be good so bad is like that. All the familiar hallmarks are here: the cavernous thump, the dead-channel static, the stone-faced facade betraying the merest suggestion of melancholy. But woven within those well-worn sounds are ephemeral textures and unexpected accents and, best of all, elusive melodic details that might simply be accidents of colliding frequencies, perceptual illusions caught on tape. Immersing yourself in the album is like wandering a district you know inside out and discovering a whole succession of hidden doors and alleyways that you’d swear were never there before. –Philip Sherburne
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Jane Paknia / Hagop Tchaparian: “Alice in Orchidverse”
Welcome to Club Orchid, trippiest of the flowers. Hagop Tchaparian and Jane Paknia roll the deep-dark psychedelic sea over Paknia’s original song “Orchid Underneath,” transforming it into a four-on-the-floor blacklight banger full of hothouse steam, swirling Pucci patterns, and mutant, exposed sensuality. “What does the future smell like?” Funk as in sex and obsession. –Anna Gaca
Listen: Jane Paknia / Hagop Tchaparian, “Alice in Orchidverse”
Jlin: Akoma
In the seven years between Jlin’s last proper album, Black Origami, and this year’s Akoma, the Indiana post-footwork producer vastly expanded the reach of her craft, earning a Pulitzer nod for her 2022 EP Perspective and winning famous fans like the Kronos Quartet and Philip Glass. Both of those luminaries appear on Akoma, along with a wisp of Björk’s voice salvaged from an unrealized collaboration. Akoma’s fusion of Midwestern club sounds and modern classical music is striking, but ultimately reinforces how sharp Jlin has always been, a great American composer with or without the validation of the classical-music cognoscenti. –Daniel Bromfield
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Joy Orbison: “Flight FM”
Inspiration can strike like lightning, especially when all it takes to make a track is a laptop and some headphones. Joy Orbison made “Flight FM”—a floaty UK garage beat and bassline that repeats deliriously, more deranged with each new pass—while waiting for a ride to Lost Village, and then he played it during his set. It was clearly designed for a festival, all audio pyrotechnics and gratuitous edging, and, honestly, it also sounds like it was made quickly—first thought, best thought. “Flight FM” doesn’t even have a drop, but it doesn’t need one. Here, the anticipation comes with waiting for the next pass of the roller coaster loop-de-loop, a pleasure that repeats infinitely. After making so many club anthems—“Ellpisis,” “Hyph Mngo”—Joy Orbison knows a thing or two about dance-music fundamentals, and “Flight FM” is nothing more than the bare bones of a banger. It’s so perfect in its simplicity that even big-tent stars can’t make it more massive. –Andrew Ryce
Listen: Joy Orbison, “Flight FM”
Kassie Krut: “Reckless”
Who said all the fun dies once you’re married? Recently betrothed couple Kasra Kurt and Eve Alpert, plus their friend Matt Anderegg, made one of the most thrilling, addictive, sugary, scary, seductive singles of the year in “Reckless,” a schoolyard chant that feels like M.I.A. getting in a cage fight with Sleigh Bells. While Alpert’s sweetly taunting vocals are what draw you in at first listen, it’s really Kassie Krut's ingenious clash of strange live percussion and digital noise that makes “Reckless” feel so vital—a match made in heaven (or, more likely, hell). –Shaad D’Souza
Listen: Kassie Krut, “Reckless”
Kim Gordon: The Collective
Like Kim Gordon’s 2019 album, No Home Record, The Collective is colossal and abrasive like a debris storm. Justin Raisen made a bunch of trap beats for Playboi Carti, then realized that what he just made weren’t “rage beats” but abrasive, seething, actual rage. Kim Gordon added her “abstract poetry shit,” improvised in her decades-long style. The result is a maelstrom of loops crashing into one another, lyrics shattered and left as shards, and of clutter: sonic, mental, and physical. “Bye Bye” is a song about packing stuff for a vacation that sounds like feeding a junkyard car crusher. That same deluge of stuff turns “Shelf Warmer”—a would-be intimate slow jam and relative reprieve from the noise—into trinket after trinket but never a touch.
Gordon, ambivalent about the idea of making music let alone “political music,” resists obvious polemic throughout. The man of “I’m a Man” is a Proud Boy astride a fuck-off monster truck of a beat, but also a pathetic schlub muttering petty fixations as that beat goes limp; a fake-earnest troll hitting all the “lost generation of men” talking points, but also just a person who wants to wear a dress. The record also resists simplistic takes: It’s not her TikTok album or her trap album. It sounds like spending days inside a Big Data server room, pummeled by the light and noise pollution that powers the machines, and excavating what it’s done to your mind. –Katherine St. Asaph
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Loidis: One Day
When he wants to be, Brian Leeds is one of electronic music’s great sentimentalists. He’s described his swooning ambient work as Huerco S. as a “celebration of love”; as Loidis, he makes what he has called “minimal emo tech”—presumably jokingly, though the project’s debut full-length One Day lives up to the descriptor. On one hand, One Day is truly minimal. Leeds draws on dub techno’s grayscale palette, and it’s rare that any of the record’s eight tracks consists of more than a few repeated, interlocking loops. But he manages to conjure pathos and humanity from these simple components. “Love’s Lineaments,” a 10-minute track at the record’s center, slowly morphs into a delicate drumless interlude. It’s as intimate and heartwarming as a conversation with a loved one in a corner far from the dancefloor amid a long night out. –Colin Joyce
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Mica Levi: “slob air”
Mica Levi is almost perversely unpredictable. Who would attribute the claustrophobic Zone of Interest soundtrack to the producer of Tirzah’s lovelorn R&B, or the avant-rock of Good Sad Happy Bad to the lo-fi stylist behind Ruff Dog? With “slob air,” Levi subverts any expectations we may still have harbored. A dream pop epic, their first single for Hyperdub glides like a skater on a long downhill slant, propelled only by an unchanging drum figure across its 12 minutes. Layers of strings hover and dive, and a chorus of voices chants just beyond the limits of intelligibility. That’s all there is to the track, yet slight variations make “slob air” endlessly, joyfully repeatable. This is a sound that Levi could coast on for as long as they want—until, inevitably, they decide to change lanes once again. –Matthew Blackwell
Listen: Mica Levi, “slob air”
Naemi: Dust Devil
Dust Devil, the debut album from the Kansas-born, Berlin-based electronic shape-shifter Naemi, doubles as a majestic survey of an international, terminally online underground music scene that prizes earnestness as much as irony. The double LP features an array of guests, like Erika de Casier, Perila, and power couple Shy and Ben Bondy, stretching its slacker-ambient aesthetic across a canvas that includes pillowy downtempo soundscapes, cheesecloth-textured shoegaze, and stoned indie -rock. Sometimes it moves with the focus of someone fully locked in at 3 a.m. in their bedroom, and other moments with the “I can feel everything” interconnectedness of that moment right after you said, “This edible ain’t shit.” Like the ’90s touchstones it references, Dust Devil is ambitious, emotive, and unabashedly sprawling, capturing the artist—and a community—at the inspired peak of their powers. –Andrew Ryce
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Nick León / Erika de Casier: “Bikini”
Listening to “Bikini” feels like sipping a frothy French 95 while taking in a gorgeous last-day-of-vacation sunset. The slinky collaboration between Miami dance producer Nick León and Danish R&B experimentalist Erika de Casier conjures up its sun-dappled scene through walloping bass, hyaline synth melodies, and a sprightly pace to match the song’s sunkissed lyrics, complete with a deliciously memorable invitation of a hook: “Meet me at the beach/It’s me in the bikini/The one I always wear/Find me daydreaming,” de Casier coos, just before León pitch-shifts her words down into a frantic, intoxicating demand. Who could possibly say no? –Eric Torres
Listen: Nick León / Erika de Casier, “Bikini”
Nídia & Valentina: Estradas
Though Estradas was ostensibly built for the dancefloor, it’s easy to get lost in the record’s lush sonic details. The breathy, flute-like arpeggio that loops throughout “Rapido”; the sizzling shakers that buzz around “Nasty” like flies; the globular marimbas that bounce off the title track’s synths as if they were lava lamp bubbles. But above all, there’s the rumble of the drums, intricately recorded by Italian British percussionist Valentina Magaletti and spun to kuduro heaven by Príncipe Discos all-star Nídia Borges. Together, their inversion of Afro-Portuguese rhythms fill the mind with images of sweltering deserts, humid forests, and of course, the vibrating walls of the club, morphing and expanding ever outward into something new. –Sam Goldner
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Objekt: “Ganzfeld (Djrum Remix)”
When Objekt created his 2014 track “Ganzfeld,” the Berlin-based producer flouted many of the era’s dancefloor conventions, from the song’s tempo (far faster than normal) to its structure (nominally linear but sneakily antic) to its bassline (squirrelly as hell). Ten years later, Djrum’s remix takes a similarly maverick spirit to even more unpredictable extremes. More than 10 minutes long, the remix flips Objekt’s idiosyncratic anthem into a miniature suite: It begins with a contemplative ambient sketch, moves into flickering atmospheric jungle, then slips backward into a half-speed electro stomp with industrial-dub leanings—and that’s all before so much as reaching the halfway mark. (Still to come: woozy jazz-funk, jittery techstep, Amen-smashing jungle; no two bars are alike.) For all the liberties Djrum takes, though, he keeps the original’s unforgettable bass riff intact, underscoring Objekt’s vision in making the whole thing possible. It’s a remarkable homage to a song that predicted club music’s iconoclastic future. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Objekt, “Ganzfeld (Djrum Remix)”
Olof Dreijer: “Coral”
Olof Dreijer’s signatures are unmistakable on “Coral.” The single takes Dreijer’s fascinations with roving melodies and Global South percussive textures and lets them drift toward a more ambient destination. A piano—left in Dreijer’s apartment by a previous tenant, then muted with felt and duct tape—provides the watercolor lead melody, which battles with a pitch-bending synth figure that surges overhead. Against this panoramic wash of sound, Dreijer’s needling, bric-a-brac beat, inspired by the playful lilt of Angolan kuduro, feels refreshingly affectionate: It’s a bit like someone coaxing you off the sand into the ocean, dunking you under the surf, and ruffling your hair. The track’s ebb-and-flow engages all your senses until you want to just float away. –H.D. Angel
Listen: Olof Dreijer, “Coral”
Peverelist: Pulse Echo EP
Bristol bass-music pacesetter Peverelist broke a five-year hiatus with last year’s Pulse EP, and over the next 13 months dropped two more EPs rendering classic UK club styles in exquisitely detailed fashion—bleepy, brittle, heads down in mood but also sneakily playful. Then, this November, what looked like a trilogy spawned yet another installment, and arguably the best of the bunch. Spanning darkside garage, insouciant grime, and multiple shades of stargazing techno, Pulse Echo is just the latest reminder that as much as Peverelist’s Livity Sound label may have formalized a particular strain of UK club music, he seems determined to stretch his own elastic style with every release. –Philip Sherburne
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Seefeel: Everything Squared
There’s always been something eerie about Seefeel’s music, in which dub and ambient flit like furtive ghosts. On Everything Squared, the uncanniness becomes exponential: The British group’s first new material in 14 years sounds like it could have originated from the same mid-’90s sessions that produced its greatest work. The lurching drums, Windex-streak guitars, and despondent sighs all extend directly from 1995’s Succour and 1996’s (Ch-Vox), albums that reimagined what was possible in electronica’s airless outer limits. Yet none of the new material feels the least bit retro. Quite the opposite: Mark Clifford and Sarah Peacock’s crumbling soundscapes seem so thoroughly freed from any kind of historical progression, you begin to wonder if all the band’s albums are really time capsules deposited in our timeline from the band’s own parallel dimension. –Philip Sherburne
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Skee Mask: Resort
Skee Mask is so consistently brilliant you might make the mistake of taking him for granted (a quality he shares with his label, Ilian Tape). He’s churned out seven more albums and over a dozen EPs since Shred, his debut LP, dropped in 2016. Defying the laws of creative longevity, all have been more or less excellent. Resort is yet another case of the German artist continuing to meet his own lofty standards. All feathery breakbeats, soothing chords, and the occasional 4/4 thump, it is elegantly fluid and warmly soothing, rooted in rave but suited to cozy solitude. Still, right time, right place—like, say, 7 a.m. at the kind of event this tracklist cheekily calls “the rodeo”—most of these tunes crush a dance floor. Or, more likely, mesmerize one. –Will Lynch
Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Tidal
Syclops: Black Eye
Under an impish welter of aliases—Eddie & the Eggs, Sticky People, Ladyvipb, Boof—Maurice Fulton has spent the past three-plus decades making the most uncompromisingly funky, unabashedly weird house music ever to make a dancefloor buckle. (See: Exhibit A.) Black Eye broke a six-year hiatus for Syclops, the alias that’s long been home to some of his most muscular productions. Fulton’s grooves are squirrelly as ever, a haywire riot of laser zaps and giggling güiros, ’60s funk and samba schools, bumblebee Moogs and tumbling congas. The energy is uniformly banging, but there’s a wry sense of humor encoded into every errant squelch. Plenty of producers can do one or the other, but no one brings them together more audaciously. –Philip Sherburne
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Total Blue: Total Blue
It’s 1983. You take your martini from the sofa to the window of your oceanside penthouse to gaze upon swaying palms and surf crashing the dark. Or maybe it’s 2024, and you’re looking out the rain-soaked window of a night bus with something on your mind. Either way—retro daydream or real-world introspection—Total Blue’s self-titled debut album suits the mood just right. Mallet rhythms burble and sway. Saxophones, synths, and fretless bass drift in weightless formation. Delicate, immersive, and as smooth as it is bittersweet, this is modern new age at its best, performed by three L.A. musicians who, after a decade of playing together, hit new heights with an engrossing LP. –Will Lynch
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Two Shell: “Round” [ft. Sugababes]
Two Shell pushed it this year—to some extent in their music, but more so with their antics. One moment, they were making AI-generated deepfakes; the next, they were selling “boring rocks” containing hidden USBs with corrupted music files. For many fans outside of their die-hard base, their constant trolling got old, and people were leaving the proverbial chat. Enter: “Round.” With a beat as serious as its makers are not, “Round” finds the duo chopping up British girl group Sugababes’ 2002 hit “Round Round,” reworking it into a UK garage club banger with hyperpop inflections. Unlike its past unofficial versions, the official release scales back the hi-hats, juices up the bass, and features re-recorded vocals from the original Sugababes. The track goes—and so do we, ’round and ’round, on Two Shell’s carousel of hijinks and hits. –Minna Zhou
Listen: Two Shell, “Round” [ft. Sugababes]
upsammy: Strange Meridians
We’re in a golden age of ambient music. The genre has never been more popular, more accessible, or more varied. But with success comes familiarity; it’s harder than ever to make something that sounds genuinely new. On the surface, upsammy’s Strange Meridians, the Dutch musician’s first real foray outside the world of beats, may not appear all that novel: The chimes, the pads, the hints of rushing water and chirping birds—all are perfectly conventional sounds, however exquisitely she’s rendered them. But something in the way she’s put it all together feels unusual. Empty space threatens to overwhelm her lattice of pinpricks and sparkles; her granular timbres often seem on the verge of dissolving into nothingness. It can seem like you’re hearing only a fraction of a completed album, as though she’d muted half the channels before sending the file off for mastering. But that very absence, paired with the squiggly contours of the sounds she does include, turns out to have almost psychedelic properties. Instead of feeling lacking, Strange Meridians overflows with open-ended possibility. –Philip Sherburne
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Verraco: “Godspeed >”
Verraco’s “Escándaloo” bored a hole through 2023’s club landscape, fueled by a powerhouse bassline that ranked among the year’s most electrifyingly audacious sounds. The Medellín producer extended his iconoclastic run with this year’s aggressively unconventional Breathe... Godspeed EP. In the record’s peak-time centerpiece, “Godspeed >,” a lurching dembow groove pocks the ground while cowbells clatter, spectral voices cackle, and midrange synths are smeared willy-nilly across the stereo field. A bit like Alien’s corrosive xenomorph mouth goo, the noxious bass patch from “Escándaloo” is back and still burning through steel. Yet rather than suggesting that he’s repeating himself, the return of that all-devouring bassline sounds like he’s driving his point home. Every one of his releases is part of a master plan: to develop tools that lay waste to every last hoary shred of club convention. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Verraco, “Godspeed >”
Yaeji: “booboo”
Much is said of dancefloor liberation, but less is said of dancefloor introspection. “Booboo” captures the rare moment when the two coalesce. Where Yaeji’s debut full-length With a Hammer confronted years of suppressed rage, and “easy breezy” was its meditative epilogue, “booboo” feels like the turn-up to a new beginning. After an extended break from clubbing, Yaeji is back outside with her boos, pogo-sticking under strobe lights. On the track, as in the club, past mingles with present, and she duets with her younger self, interpolating snippets from her 2017 breakthrough, “raingurl.” The truth starts in her body before it reaches her head: Against all odds, here she is, happy. –Minna Zhou
Listen: Yaeji, “booboo”
ZULI: Lambda
It might be Cairo-born, Berlin-based producer ZULI’s calmest album, but Lambda was born of frustration—frustration from all his unreleased music being stolen, and especially frustration from being pigeonholed and exoticized by a global audience and music press. Where 2021’s blinding All Caps EP sounded like catharsis, Lambda is meditation, at least on the surface. It starts out with roiling breakbeats that eventually dissipate into a choking smog, as vocalists fade in and out of focus—pained laments from Abdullah Miniawy, pointed questions and resignation from MICHAELBRAILEY—until the silt settles and the album fades out with a calmer, reversed version of its opening tempest. ZULI has put out some of the finest high-octane club music from any country in the past decade, but Lambda shows he’s just as captivating when he steps on the brakes, too. –Andrew Ryce
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Listen to the Best Electronic Music of 2024 on our Spotify and Apple Music playlists.
