Dancing remains a collective enterprise, but the most exciting developments in electronic music this year tended to arise from deeply original and idiosyncratic visions. Ambient went globe-trotting, electro-pop turned liberationist, and footwork got completely retooled. Even reggaeton and dancehall proved fodder for slyly experimental treatments, while house and techno, those old standbys, were most exciting when they seemed closest to morphing into other, less recognizable sounds. It was a year in which there seemed to be little consensus about the way forward—but in spite of that, or maybe because of it, the margins were alive with creativity.
Listen to selections from this list on our Spotify and Apple Music playlists.
Actress: AZD
Actress’ first album in three years is quiet, understated, and characteristically cryptic. Reportedly inspired by the properties of chrome, it nevertheless hides considerable warmth within its quicksilver curves (at least compared with his usually chilly outlook). The lo-fi smudges of his previous records have largely been wiped clean, as if with hot breath and moleskin, replaced with digital synths that twinkle like LEDs. As ever, though, the UK producer’s signature mix of wistfulness and optimism remains constant.
Listen: Actress, “X22RME”
Nídia: Nídia É Má, Nídia É Fudida
Not only did the 20-year-old producer Nídia have a hand in “IDK About You,” one of the most electrifying songs on Fever Ray’s Plunge; the Portuguese-born, Bordeaux-based electronic musician helped push the Afro-Lusophone sound of batida forward with a debut album brimming with syncopated rhythms and unusually tactile percussive tones. Nídia É Má, Nídia É Fudida—a title that loosely translates as Nídia Is a Fucking Badass—confirms that she’s not riding anybody’s coattails.
Listen: Nídia, “Puro Tarraxo”
UMFANG: Symbolic Use of Light
Unlike the full-on barrage of some of her DJ sets, UMFANG’s second album carries techno out toward its ambient outer limits. The tougher tracks here brush a thin varnish of synthesizer over skeletal drum-machine grooves; the dreamier sketches do without drums altogether, favoring diffuse keys and runny tone colors. All these tracks were either recorded in one take or made to sound like it, pared down to the point where every twist of a knob makes its impact deeply felt.
Listen: UMFANG, “Weight”
Davy Kehoe: Short Passing Game
This vinyl-only gem didn’t come entirely out of nowhere, but close. The label behind it, Dublin’s fledgling Wah Wah Wino, has quickly become a cult fave among left-field diggers, but Davy Kehoe remains pretty much a mystery. But who needs a biography when there’s this much to unlock in the music itself: Head-over-heels krautrock tumble, drum-and-clarinet dub, motorik harmonica jams. At once pulse-raising and totally meditative, it’s as puzzling as it is viscerally gratifying.
Listen: Davy Kehoe, “Storm Desmond”
Sophia Kennedy: Sophia Kennedy
As an American musician who lives in Hamburg and works in theater, Sophia Kennedy has an atypical profile for the electronic-music scene. Her day job rubs off on her debut album, a collection of winsome electro-pop songs crafted alongside Die Vögel’s Mense Reents: She has an ear for unusual melodies, captivating storytelling, and unforgettable turns of phrase (“Being lonely makes you special/But being special makes you lonely too”). As alternate-universe showtunes go, few make for a more life-enhancing daily soundtrack than these.
Listen: Sophia Kennedy, “Build Me a House”
Karen Gwyer: Rembo
Retreating to her studio late at night, after her family had gone to bed, Karen Gwyer channeled all the hard-charging urgency and psychedelic excess of her acclaimed live shows into a compact double LP: eight tracks, 40 minutes, not a sound or moment wasted. Her gleaming synths and throbbing drums are wild and wooly, yet they’re also ruled by an abiding sense of controlled severity—the fury of the focused mind.
Listen: Karen Gwyer, “The Workers Are on Strike”
Four Tet: New Energy
Since he went fully independent around the turn of the decade, Four Tet has been such a constant presence in so many areas—collaborating with Burial, Terror Danjah, et al; remixing Indian film music; and releasing a steady stream of singles—that it can be hard to remember that, until this year’s New Energy, he hadn’t put out a full album of new material since 2013’s Beautiful Rewind. Despite the record’s title, the sounds within—shuffling house beats, jewel-toned arpeggios, acoustic harp and kalimba—are hardly new; they’re the same as he’s been working with for years, just rendered with more grace and clarity than ever. The sense of familiarity makes the album that much more welcoming.
Listen: Four Tet, “Planet”
Call Super: Arpo
Berlin-based producer Call Super’s second album builds on the unusual structures laid out on its predecessor, 2014’s Suzi Ecto, with rhythms that twist and pivot like the impossible architectures of Monument Valley. All that skitter gives Arpo the intricacy, and also the intimacy, of early Autechre, but keening clarinets and woody bass tones steer the music away from the airlessness of circuitry and back toward the overgrown chaos of the wild.
Listen: Call Super, “Arpo Sunk”
Midland: Fabriclive 94
In a year when house and techno sometimes didn’t seem like they had many surprises left in them, UK DJ Midland spun 74 minutes of mostly four-to-the-floor beats into a spellbinding excursion across moods both murky and ecstatic. In this Fabric set, electronic textures are dusted with a pearlescent shimmer as shapeshifting grooves carve a corkscrewing path through the darkest corners of the dancefloor.
Listen: LFO, “Ultra Schall”
Equiknoxx: Colón Man
This Jamaican duo and their signature eagle screech came swooping down right at the tail end of the year, just in time to upend everything you thought you knew about the state of dancehall in 2017. Forgoing vocalists, the better to let their spiky beats do all the talking, Gavsborg, Time Cow, Bobby Blackbird, and crew hone in on glassy, ultra-vivid timbres and elliptical rhythms forged from found sounds. It’s rare for Jamaican pop and experimental electronic music to find themselves so tightly interwoven.
Listen: Equiknoxx, “Enter a Raffle... Win a Falafel”
Errorsmith: Superlative Fatigue
A veteran of Berlin’s anarchic techno scene, Erik Wiegand had slowed his musical output in recent years while developing a software synthesizer for Native Instruments called Razor. And on this wildly kinetic album, Weigand puts the synth through its paces, bobbing and buzzing his way across punchy 808s and swinging dembow rhythms, carving out queasy melodies that can stop in midair and turn on a dime. It’s as giddily inventive as techno has sounded in years.
Listen: Errorsmith, “I’m Interesting, Cheerful & Sociable”
DJ Sports: Modern Species
The first major album statement to come from Denmark’s Regelbau crew, DJ Sports’ Modern Species could easily be mistaken for a lost classic from the mid 1990s. Rolling drum ‘n’ bass rhythms, pneumatic deep house, shimmering ambient techno, and dubby downtempo all share space on a gentle record that balances the chill-out room’s beatific vibes with the questing drive of a great road-trip soundtrack.
Listen: DJ Sports, “World A”
DJ Python: Dulce Compañia
Ambient reggaeton feels like it should be a contradiction in terms: Reggaeton is turbo-charged with high-octane swagger, while ambient music just wants to curl up and float away. But in the hands of Queens’ DJ Python, the two styles make for a spellbinding fit, mixing slinky, waist-winding grooves with deliriously ethereal vibes. With loping dembow rhythms layered beneath chiming electronics that hark back to Aphex Twin’s most tranquil jams, the real question isn’t what these two sounds are doing together, but why did it take so long for someone to join them?
Listen: DJ Python, “Yo Ran(Do)”
Visible Cloaks: Reassemblage
Japan’s experimental electronic music of the 1980s is finally getting its due in the West, as albums by Hiroshi Yoshimura, Midori Takada, Yasuaki Shimizu, and others go from YouTube obscurities to deluxe reissues. Deeply schooled in those bygone sounds, Visible Cloaks’ Reassemblage strikes up a dialogue that stretches across time and space in unpredictable ways, mixing wind-driven MIDI interfaces with watery marimba melodies, and warm human speech with iridescent digital synthesis. The virtual world never felt so close to home.
Listen: Visible Cloaks, “Terrazzo” [ft. Motion Graphics]
Yaeji: EP2
Yaeji’s music would stand out under virtually any circumstances. Korean-Americans are underrepresented in popular culture as it is, yet the New Yorker’s lyrics slip between Korean and English as though juggling identities were the easiest thing in the world. She flips styles just as deftly: Bookended by a ruminative synth ballad and a woozily Auto-Tuned cover of Drake’s “Passionfruit,” her second EP touches on slinky bassline house, slow-motion techno, and even trap music. The delivery is frequently deadpan, the materials consistently luxe. There’s nothing else like it out there right now.
Listen: Yaeji, “passionfruit”
Laurel Halo: Dust
Laurel Halo’s Dust is a grower in more ways than one. Not only is it her most advanced and challenging listen yet—with curiously affectless vocal harmonies riding squishy funk grooves, and electroacoustic abstractions stretched willy-nilly across the frame—it actually feels like something is growing inside its sticky waveforms. It sounds bacterial, organic, alive. Clinical sound design meets hothouse fertility as the record cracks the petri dish, contaminates the lab, and makes the very idea of electronic music infinitely more interesting than before—and maybe a little more dangerous, too.
Listen: Laurel Halo, “Moontalk”
Mount Kimbie: Love What Survives
Mount Kimbie’s third album doesn’t always feel like “electronic music”; “Blue Train Lines,” the bruised heart and soul of this strange, gripping record, sounds like a post-punk band fronted by King Krule at his most acrid and backed by a chorus of whirly tubes. At the same time, the group seems determined to remind us that electronic music can be more dynamic than even its staunchest defenders sometimes give it credit for, tackling chilly Balearic mood-setters and woozy, tropically tinged coldwave that subverts the divide between played and programmed beats. By stripping down their kit to a couple of vintage synths and trading dubstep rhythms for muscular motorik drumming, the British duo came up with the most confident, original, and timeless music of their career. The club scene’s loss is the wider world’s gain.
Listen: Mount Kimbie, “Blue Train Lines” [ft. King Krule]
Kelly Lee Owens: Kelly Lee Owens
Kelly Lee Owens’ debut album introduces the world to a fully formed aesthetic—unusually so, given that the UK producer, songwriter, and singer has only been making music for a couple of years. Despite the occasional nod to the sorts of muscular, pulsing techno she favors in her DJ sets, the majority of the record pairs its weighty bass underpinning with wisps of pastel dream pop. “Arthur” pays tribute to Arthur Russell’s world of echo; “Anxi.,” featuring lost-in-thought meditations from art-pop radical Jenny Hval, is a sprawling, multi-part epic that feels far more expansive than its four blissful minutes. Not many debuts balance emotion and economy with such finesse.
Listen: Kelly Lee Owens, “Anxi.” [ft. Jenny Hval]
Jlin: Black Origami
Whereas Jlin’s 2015 debut LP, Dark Energy, traced footwork’s limits, her second full-length inhabits a different universe all together. The year’s most rhythmically inventive album, Black Origami lives up to its title in beats that fold back upon themselves in dizzying chains of fractals. In their unrelenting kinetics, each track feels like a snapshot of motion itself: a dizzyingly intricate ballet of matter and force.
Listen: Jlin, “Nyakinyua Rise”
Fever Ray: Plunge
The feminist and anarchist Emma Goldman taught us that every revolution worth its salt makes time for dancing. Karin Dreijer expands that formulation to include fucking as an explicitly anti-authoritarian pleasure too—that is, sex according to her rules, her pleasure, and her own non-binary thinking, thank you very much. Eight years after Dreijer’s frosty debut as Fever Ray, the follow-up is a furious, frantic, and joyful attempt to dissolve the patriarchy under the twin flames of queer theory and mind-expanding digital sound design. Electronic pop hasn’t sounded this radical in years.
Listen: Fever Ray, “IDK About You”
