The best Electronic Music of 2025: Albums

My top 30 albums of 2025, in no particular order

As another year draws to a close, it is time for another best-of list, so here are my 30 favourite electronic albums of 2025, listed in no particular order. I hope you might find something you like here, and have a great start into the new year! — Vincent

PS: you can also find my EPs and singles list here:

The best Electronic Music of 2025: EPs and Singles

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Carrier - Rhythm Immortal [Modern Love]

In 2010, Guy Alexander Brewer musically reinvented himself, going from the melodic DnB he had put out as part of Commix to the 4/4 greyscale techno of his Shifted alias. Now, fifteen years later, he has reinvented himself a second time with his new Carrier alias — although perhaps, “reinvention” is a bit too strong of a word here, given that the Carrier project is obviously strongly drawing from the research into texture and timbre that Brewer had carried out as Shifted over the course of the 2010s.

That said, what is undeniably different here is the composition, the way in which these tracks have been built and arranged. In place of the techno athleticism of Shifted, there is now a new kind of asceticism, still “techno”, but in the same sense that Rhythm & Sound is techno, that is, vaguely and ephemerally. I think if Brewer has taken anything from Mark and Moritz — the project is literally named after a R&S 12” after all — it is not so much the sound of those records as their spirit, the alchemistic belief that form should not be imposed on the material, but drawn out of the sound itself. Rhythm from texture and texture from rhythm.

Wetdogg - pssssssp... [Hold Me]

Sometimes, you click play on a piece of electronic music and can just immediately sense within a few seconds that the artist in question has an intimate and intuitive understanding of how to program a synthesizer. This was the case for the debut of Wetdogg (aka Detroit’s Sarah Cohen); I clicked on it more or less expecting standard bedroom pop, but what I was then met with was more like an expertly crafted lo-fi techno beat tape with gorgeous programming and sound design and only a few subtle nods to poppier forms. And so, while the tracks here are generally quite simple, even small figures and arrangements like the interplay between the acidic bassline and the vocals on “ehhh ehhh” or the glassy pads on “the most” are bursting with a level of personality and expressivity that is exceedingly rare. I don’t think I’ve seen this on any best-of lists, but for my money, this is definitely one of the most impressive debuts of the year.

Sa Pa - Ambeesh [Short Span]

In contrast to the traditional Chain Reaction school of dub-alchemy that has primarily focused on exploring the accidental byproducts of the degradations inherent to analog signal processing, Ambeesh experiments with degradative reactions within the digital realm, where what used to be inherent and inevitable has become decoupled from the basic process. So even though Ambeesh is about as mushed as it gets, none of it was ever accidental, its tendency towards degradation deliberate and clinical in a way that was never possible in analog. It pairs highly degraded and hyper-compressed textures with sounds that have remained mostly unscathed and retain a high degree of mobility that allows them to traverse the space as they please, resulting in a discordant sense of spectral dynamics where the landlocked pressure of the bottom center is contrasted with bird-like figures freely drawing circles in the brisk air above the sludgy tectonic plates. After alchemy comes geology.

Susannah Stark - Minor Gestures [STROOM]

I’m admittedly not much into folk or neo-folk, but when I came across this on Boomkat, I was pretty much immediately hooked on this record’s unique harmonic interplay between the expressive synth lines, Stark’s sparse vocals and the careful, organic acoustic instrumentation. Electro-acoustic, in the best sense of the word.

Voices From The Lake - II [Spazio Disponibile]

Arriving a good thirteen years after the first Voices From The Lake LP, II never had it easy, being the follow-up to one of the most beloved techno LPs of all time. And so, while it indeed would have been easier to go in a different direction entirely in order to avoid comparisons with its predecessor, II pretty much continues where VFTL left things off in 2012. That the result feels in no way disappointing or superfluous is a testament to both the artists’ creative endurance and the timeless nature of their organic and aquatically subdued take on ambient techno. A lake is a lake is a lake.

Yetsuby - 4Eva [Pink Oyster]

On her debut album 4EVA, Korean producer Yetsuby shows off the full range of her impressive production chops, effortlessly combining pretty show-offy IDM production with a cutesy, all-pastel aesthetic grounded in a penchant for addictive hooks and solid grooves while never sounding contrived.

Bicep - Chroma 000 [CHROMA]

Bicep say go big or go home on their new Chroma LP, a collection of large-scale AAA stadium trancers that liberally borrow elements from various strains of high-energy 90s dance music. Already the first track “HELIUM” wastes no time and whips up a massive breakdown over punchy techno stepping, while “LAVA” ventures all the way to the farthest edges of good taste with its poppy vocals and borderline eurodance beat. Next up, “ROLA” takes a quick detour into progged-up grime, while “ALOE” lays out twinkly arps over a classic think break, and “TANGZ” puts its own spin on modern vocal DnB-pop. For the grand finale, “BRILLO” then says fuck it and turns the stadium trance dial up to 11. Dance music only rarely gets this bombastic, and it very, very, rarely does so while keeping up the quality level like Bicep do here.

Polygonia - Dream Horizons [Dekmantel]

Over the last few years, Polygonia has made a name for herself with a software-driven production style that is both precise and psychedelic. Dream Horizons continues this trajectory with an album’s worth of idiosyncratic and charming tracks. The opener “Crystal Valley” sets the scene with its sweeping and atmospheric glassy FM tones, while “Set Me Free” modulates its eponymous vocal sample over dry clicky drums and “Whirlwind of Hearts” goes into oddball electro-jazz territory. With how omnipresent the hunt for “analog sound” and “warmth” often seems to be these days, it is refreshing to hear someone go in the complete opposite direction and chase the secrets of the crystalline instead.

Eliane Radigue - Asymptote Versatile [Amgen]

Very early compositions from Eliane Radigue here that pre-date even her earliest feedback work from the early 70s. And while there’s really not much of a surprise here sonically, I do think it is quite fascinating how much these early pieces already sound like her post-millenial acoustic work, carrying that same unmistakable approach to timbre and duration. There’s few artists that have ever had it all figured out from the get-go like Radigue had.

Basic Unit - Timeline [Sneaker Social Club]

Timeline was originally released in 1998 on a short-lived DnB label called Nocturnal. According to one Discogs commenter, the album’s initial reception in the British dance music press was mostly negative, with one contemporary reviewer even going as far as to call it “unlistenable”. Looking at it from today’s standpoint, I can see why this record wasn’t met with the most stellar reception at the time; it’s just so completely unlike the prevailing trends of late 90s drum & bass that it would have sounded very out of place in any contemporary DJ set.

Because, while everyone else was chasing fidelity and sonic maximization, Basic Unit went for the polar opposite and dove into strange and cryptic lo-fi territories, long before “lo-fi” became a word in the dance music lexicon. In place of the crispy and extended top-end of the No U-Turn style tech-step of the time, there’s basically nothing but an abyssal sonic swamp here, so stripped-down and rhythmo-texturally opaque that it almost approaches a kind of experimental tape music. But of course, it is those same exact qualities that turned off its contemporaries that make Timeline an utterly compelling listen in 2025. A record that sounded like nothing else in 1998 and still sounds like nothing else now.

Jules Reidy - Ghost/Spirit [Thrill Jockey]

Having always admired the timbral possibilities of auto-tune abuse (which I think has generally remained pretty under-explored in many underground genres), I was pretty much instantly mesmerised when I first encountered Jules Reidy’s unique mixture of metallic microtonal guitar harmonics and distorted autotune warbling on 2019’s Real Life. And while the use of vocals on Reidy’s older records was often more sporadic, Ghost/Spirit goes all-in on the auto-tune articulations, with sublime results like „To Breathe Lightning“ — if auto-tune is the soul of the early 21st century, then this is 21st century mysticism.

Introspekt - Moving The Center [Tempa]

I recently posted on Substack notes about how I felt that dubstep really had a bit of a banner year in 2025, sounding more fresh than it has in a long time thanks to a new, younger generation of producers now giving the genre a spin. The LA-based Introspekt (aka Sage Hunt) is one such producer, and her debut album Moving The Center impresses with an understanding of classic dubstep and garage motifs that respectfully pays homage without being overly faithful.

This can be heard already in the opener, which starts out sounding very classical with those Lofeah-style dark LFO wobbles, but then drops into a fast-paced and tech-y swing that is quite unlike the locked-in stasis of traditional halfstep. This theme of marrying classic sound motifs with variances in rhythmic programming continues throughout the rest of the album. “Dilation” for example brings some nice garidge swing to the dubstep palette, while “Make Me Dance” subtly iterates on late 00s post dubstep à la 2562 and Headhunter, and “Respect” plays with slinky 90s garage chords over a much less garage-y rhythm. Oldskool to the new school.

Oli XL - Lick The Lens, pt. 1 [XL]

Lick The Lens is the kind of record that is just as odd as it is pleasing; a seemingly chaotic mish-mash of textures and timbres that nonetheless ultimately comes together as a single finely-tuned sensory labyrinth.

DJ Trystero - Cantor’s Paradise [FELT]

DJ Trystero is the elusive Japanese producer behind the equally elusive City-2 St. Giga label. His new album consists of foggy and dubbed out sketches that have been reduced and distressed to the point of almost vanishing. The landscape of Cantor’s Paradise is an alien and desolate one, populated by little more than a few traces of texture and rhythm, isolated shadowy noise figures, and a steaming mist of gaseous pad-vapours emerging from the depths … but within, there does lie a strange kind of warmth; radiating throughout the space, welcoming and inviting. It might be strange in these lands, but it is not unpleasant.

Beatrice Dillon - Basho [Portraits GRM]

Beatrice Dillon’s 2020 album Workaround was a welcome return for a PowerBook era structuralist approach to production that’s gone a bit out of fashion. Five years later, she’s now back with an extended piece that explores territory similar to Workaround, albeit from a different angle — if Workaround was all about finding rhythm and structure in the initial attack stage of sounds, then on Basho everything revolves around the concept of decay, the angles and curvatures in which sounds trail off and extend themselves into the distance. File under: “spectromorphology”.

Cahl Sel - Traces [Reflective]

Traces attempts to (re)capture the kind of starry-eyed early Speedy J style IDM-ambient-Detroit-trance that more or less went extinct somewhere around 1996. Far from an easy task; not even necessarily because of any specific production details, but just because there is something very singular and period-specific to the melancholic naïveté of those records that just seems to run contrary to our often irony-laden and cynical culture in the contemporary. And yet, somehow, Cahl Sel has managed to craft an album that feels authentically naive in its careful arrangement of bubbly acid lines, crystalline pads and twittering IDM glide arps; earnest and fragile and hopeful without the slightest hint of irony or pastiché.

Ariel Kalma & Asa Tone - O [Good Morning Tapes]

Another floaty new-age tinged ambient album? Admittedly, this is the kind of thing you might press play on with a sigh already half-formed, expecting the usual set of tropes. But then all that just evaporates within the first few seconds of being cast into a place as wonderful as the opener “Interlace” … there’s really a sense of fantastical whimsy — think “glistening magical elven forest” — here that is rarely captured in electronic music and stands out sharp from the glut of merely pleasant ambient releases. Genre: portal fantasy.

Steve O’Sullivan - Green Trax 2 [Trip]

Following the first Green Trax collection from 2021, this reissue collects the second half of London producer Steve O’Sullivan’s Green/As It Is (1995-1998) label along with some previously unreleased material. While O’Sullivan is mostly known for the deeper dubwise sound he later developed on Mosaic and its many sub-labels, I’ve always been quite fond of his early Rob Hood influenced minimal techno exercises. While many of these tracks are frankly pretty badly produced by modern standards, they do come with a certain vitality that mostly disappeared with later, more dancefloor focused iterations of dance music minimalism — the inner life of the loop, flickering with an abstract spirit worthy of the legacy of high modernism.

U.e. - Hometown Girl [28912]

While Hometown Girl goes in a similar direction as last year‘s Jazz Plates (w/ Perila), it ventures even further away from traditional electronic music, closer and closer to the purely acoustic. And yet, all things considered, this is not a purely acoustic record, and what‘s really the most interesting to me here are the subtle, but nonetheless present electronic elements, like the ghostly drones on “Drain the house” or the otherworldly metallic vocal reverb on “Little Window”. Electronics have rarely sounded this delicate, but also rarely this haunting.

Xenia Reaper - Gambling [INDEX:Records]

In my notes, I have jokingly referred to this record as “trancebient”. But perhaps it shouldn‘t be a joke — after all there is plenty of trance here, and it is ambient. While the opener “You Really” is more of a regular ambient number, already the second track “Faded” is plenty trance-y with its big proggy reese and mournful vocal chops. “Gambling” then introduces some straight-up twinkly trance arps into the mix that also make an appearance on “Beau Arp”, while the closer “Long For” goes out in a gloriously tranced-up blaze, sounding like the product of a mid-2000s prog producer that had just heard Untrue for the first time.

Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force - Khadim [Ndagga]

After a good decade of approaching his Ndagga Rhythm Force project from more of a neutral recordist perspective, Mark Ernestus has found the confidence to take on a more directly creative role and to put his legendary dub engineering skills in action, resulting in a killer fusion of hypnotic drum virtuosity and Kreuzberg dub abstraction that makes for what is easily the best Ndagga album yet.

Mike Storm - Tales Of The Celestial Rift [Warm Up]

Dutchman “Metro Skim” (aka Mike Storm, aka Michael de Winde) has been putting out a steady stream of solid Millsian sci-fi techno for well over a decade now, and his new album for Oscar Mulero‘s long-running Warm Up label is no different. There’s no new gimmicks or genre experiments to be found here, just eleven all-mono techno one takes; usually made up of nothing but a 909, a bassline and a few sequenced bleeps. This is the kind of dance music that is so relentlessly dedicated to its own form, and nothing but its own form, so thoroughly and unapologetically artless, so radically unfashionable and unconcerned with being “tapped in”, that I just can’t help but adore it. An acquired taste, perhaps, but it can be quite fun here, in the shadows beneath the discourse.

Beppu - IPOP [Organic Analogue Records]

The material collected on this LP was originally released as a series of hyper-limited CDRs back in 2009, a time when many underground producers were trying to go back to the very basics of electronic music itself without paying too much attention to dance floor functionality. IPOP follows this ethos by paying homage to the most basic foundations of electronic music with titles like “Treble Control” and “Playback Amplifier”. It’s all very elemental — a bit of noise, a bit of bass, a chord stab here or there — but there’s also a real charm to the back-to-the-basics ethos of this material that has aged very well and still sounds fresh now that it is seeing a wider release for the first time ever.

Ash Fure - Animal [Smalltown Supersound]

While at a first glance, Animal might look like just yet another “grey-scale drone sound-installation” piece, what really sets it apart is its strong sense of rhythm and pulse; often subtle, but nonetheless omnipresent across the entire piece. And while each individual section might not necessarily stand out too much on its own, taken together there is something very entrancing, almost seductive, here that I enjoy quite a bit.

Nathan Melja - Djo Sinego [PARODIA]

Only halfway through the opener “One More Last” and I’m already all Leo pointing at the TV here … that bassline, those vocals — that’s some big time early 00s twinkle prog! The following tracks alternate between more nods to prog (”Tricks”, “Cement Brain”) and deep house influences (”Drake Fan”, “Magic Bells”), until the final track “Babyface Djo” goes straight for the prize, by which I mean I have Put Out the Light era early James Holden. Glorious.

Ryu Hankil - Rhythm Machine [Self-Released]

Rhythm Machine? Yeah, that sounds about right. It’s a weirdly organic machine though, maybe more of a cyborg, because my brain really can’t make out whether what it is hearing here are “frogs turning into creaking doors”, or “doors turning into printers”, or “printers turning into insects”. But either way, it ends up sounding strangely satisfying on a very immediate and visceral sensory level. Actually, with how popular ASMR is, I really do wonder if music like this wouldn’t be significantly more popular if it was marketed as some kind of “relaxing binaural ASMR beats” thing, rather than as “experimental avant-garde computer music” — because at least to me, this really is the musical equivalent of having your back scratched … by a cyborg?

Elias. - FM Therapy Extension [Ranges]

While FM Therapy is mostly a fairly traditional dub techno affair based around low-octave minor FM stabs, there is a very interesting sketch-like quality to these tracks that contrasts nicely with the lovely sound design and chord work and can be felt especially in the more reduced tracks like “Info” and “Midnight”. A nicely haptic piece of dub abstraction.

Sunik Kim - Formenverwandler [Feedback Moves]

In our conversation from earlier this year, Sunik Kim mentioned being currently drawn to the concept of duration in music. Kim‘s new album Formenverwandler then is the actualization of those experiments in duration, coming in at almost two hours. Considering its length and that it is mostly composed of sonically intense and densely orchestrated computer music fragments, I think this could fairly be considered a “challenging listen”. But I also don‘t think it is “challenging” in the way a lot of experimental music (usually unearnedly) presumes to be — there‘s no attempts at didactics here, it‘s not trying to teach you about the “dialectics of listening” or some other nonsense. It‘s just music that, above all, is, that exists.

So you may like or dislike it (but aren‘t “like” and “dislike” also the least interesting attribute a piece of music could have today?) but you can‘t deny that “it is interesting that this exists”. And if you don‘t think of it as some kind of challenge or endurance test and just take stock of its existence, I think there are a lot of genuinely musically captivating moments here, ranging from the chaotic (the opening of “Formenverwandler”), to the beautiful (around 30 minutes on “Fast Money Blues”, the three-minute mark on “Formenverwandler” ), the tragic (the first ten minutes of “Fast Money Blues”), and even the comedic (“Formenverwandler” around 19 minutes, the beginning of “Confirmation”). There‘s something very emotionally expressive, almost hysterical, about this piece that kind of reminds me of an old-fashioned opera — you know, I remember once sitting in a three-hour Italian 19th century opera in a very serious, bourgeois opera house, just thinking “this isn‘t high-culture at all, this is just the most emotional and sensory stimulation that they could produce with the tools that were available at the time” … doesn‘t the same also apply here? An opera in SuperCollider.

J. Albert - Return To Sender [Self-Released]

Return To Sender goes into a similar direction as J. Albert’s previous self release i want to be good so bad, presenting another collection of glitchy, IDM-ized ambient-dub sketches. As with its predecessor, what is really drawing me in here are the moments in which bare and skeletal tracks like “Genie’s Coma” and “Soma” begin to veer into an unexpected euphoric haze; something strangely anthemic that is lending them an irresistible tranced-up pop quality. Pop ambient dub hits, vol. 2025.

F7 - Lost In Flower [Acting Press]

Few projects have ever managed to capture the spirit of techno’s primordial first wave sublime as well as Acting Press has over the last decade. Keeping with that ethos, the label’s new 3x12” Lost In Flower imagines itself back to a time when techno was not yet a global dancefloor sound, when it was still little more than the aching bedroom dreams of a few dozen Detroiters and Beneluxians. It pays tribute to that moment in time less through exact historical accuracy (there are motifs lifted from all over the last thirty-five years of dance music here) than by embodying the emotional gestalt of dance music in its embryonic state, when nothing seemed off-limits, when anything that could be imagined could become possible; the general intellect of dusky BFC-era Carl Craig cassette textures, the naively fluttering patterns of a 909 still found in pawn shops, the abyssal pad-scapes of Ross 154, the yearnful FM fragments of a young Luke Slater …

Much like Walter Benjamin’s arcades were never about mundane acts of shopping, but about the amorphous promises held in their steel, glass and lights, this is not a record about dance music’s history, but about its pre-history; the virtual state in which it was still unburdened by having been actualized into a concrete form, nothing but a field of dreams and potentials … not history as it really happened, but history as a fantasy of what could be, the dreams lingering in our present … but then why not indulge those dreams and imagine yourself as free from history as it really happened, free from genre blueprints, and production standards, and “what works” on the dancefloor, and DJ careers and festival bookings, and Twitter discourse and Instagram … what would that be like then, to make electronic music like an embryo, facing nothing but the machines in front of you and the night outside the window and the gleaming stars above your bedroom?