The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century

Near misses

Records considered and not ranked, with the reason each fell short.

• Taylor Deupree — Sti.ll 2024

  Each piece is scored for a named ensemble: clarinets and vibraphone, guitar and lap harp, a shaker. Sti.ll is Taylor Deupree's own 2002 glitch album Stil. transcribed for acoustic players by Joseph Branciforte, close enough that the two line up if you play them together. It is for a chair, and this page ranks records for a floor.

• Shawn Rudiman — Flow State 2021

  Shawn Rudiman has been making hardware electronic music in Pittsburgh since 1989, and is best known for live sets improvised end to end. Flow State is that slowed to ambient pace. 'There Never Was A Tomorrow, Was There' and 'Another Imminent Collapse' are the titles of someone who has stopped expecting things to improve, and half the record faces a floor while half of it faces away.

• Mu — Afro Finger and Gel 2003

  Mutsumi Kanamori shouting over Maurice Fulton's productions, with a track called 'I Hate U' and another called 'Destroying Human Nature'. Mu is electro-house made by someone with no interest in being liked. Afro Finger and Gel has a personality nothing else near it can match, and it never reached past the scene that made it.

• Container — LP [2018] 2018

  'Drain', 'Leaker', 'Retractor', 'Chunked': Ren Schofield names tracks like industrial processes and makes techno out of overdriven tape and broken equipment. This is the fourth Container album called LP. The 2011 one is ranked, and a canon does not need two.

• Teengirl Fantasy — 7AM 2010

  Two Oberlin students who met at orientation, making hazy half-formed house out of borrowed equipment, and 7AM sounds like the hour it is named for. The drift is lovely. The tunes underneath it never quite arrive.

• Hieroglyphic Being — Dance Music 4 Bad People 2025

  Hieroglyphic Being has been making Chicago's most abrasive house since the nineties, and Dance Music 4 Bad People is aimed squarely at a floor in a way much of his catalog is not. It came out months ago. Nobody knows yet whether it is the one that lasts.

• Tiga — Sexor 2006

  Tiga singing over electroclash productions, with covers of Public Enemy, Nine Inch Nails and Talking Heads on the same record. Sexor is expertly made and it wants the charts. The records it loses to want a dark room.

• Tyondai Braxton — Hive1 2015

  The Battles co-founder took HIVE to the Guggenheim in 2013, five musicians cross-legged on purpose-built pods in the rotunda. Hive1 is the studio version, mostly Braxton alone with a modular rig and three percussionists on a few tracks. It is brilliant at listening-room detail and almost aggressively uninterested in a dancefloor.

• Booka Shade — More! 2010

  Booka Shade write tech-house as pop songs, and by 2010 they had been doing it long enough for Get Physical to be a sound rather than a label. Everything on More! works and nothing surprises.

• Evian Christ — Revanchist 2023

  Joshua Leary spent a decade producing for other people, including Kanye, before making his own debut. Revanchist is trance euphoria and deconstructed-club wreckage, a stranger combination than either half suggests. Two years on, the producers who should have followed it have not shown up.

• Fluxion — Perfused 2010

  Konstantinos Soublis put the first Fluxion records out on Chain Reaction in 1998, and Perfused is him twelve years later reaching for a floor the early ones ignored. A chord changing still counts as an event. His own Vibrant Forms II is on this page, and it is the record that did not need a groove.

• Luke Vibert — YosepH 2003

  Luke Vibert makes acid that is funny without being a joke. YosepH has a track called 'I Love Acid' and another called 'Acidisco', which is the whole record stated twice, and it is the most consistent run of it he managed. Three Vibert records are ranked under three different names. This is the fourth.

• Mall Grab — What I Breathe 2022

  Mall Grab spent the best part of a decade being the lo-fi house producer everyone had an opinion about, then put out What I Breathe on his own label and it sounds like none of that. Warm, long, unhurried, closing on 'Lost In Harajuku'. It is a record about leaving a sound behind, and it has not found the next one.

• Siriusmo — Mosaik 2011

  Siriusmo makes electronic music that behaves like a sketchbook someone forgot to edit: a fifty-one-second track called 'Call Me', a pair called 'Bad Idea' and 'Good Idea'. Mosaik is funnier and more inventive than most records that outrank it, and nobody built on it.

• Gold Panda — Lucky Shiner 2010

  Gold Panda builds Lucky Shiner out of chopped samples and homesickness, and the sequencing does more work than anyone credits: 'You' opens it, 'You (Part II)' closes it, 'Before We Talked' and 'After We Talked' sit in between. Everything it does, Four Tet and Boards of Canada had done, and both are ranked.

• Manitoba — Start Breaking My Heart 2001

  Dan Snaith's first record is warmer and more domestic than the Four Tet comparisons it attracted, and its titles are places and people: 'Dundas, Ontario', 'Brandon', 'James' Second Haircut'. He gave up the Manitoba name in 2004 under threat of a lawsuit from Handsome Dick Manitoba of the Dictators, and became Caribou. Everything he did afterwards is better, and three of those records are ranked under two names.

• Pharmakon — Bestial Burden 2014

  Six tracks, no durations on the sleeve, titles that read as a diagnosis: 'Body Betrays Itself', 'Autoimmune', 'Primitive Struggle'. Margaret Chardiet made Bestial Burden after emergency surgery and it is about a body that has stopped cooperating. It is power electronics, and this page is about dancing.

• The Bug / Dis Fig — In Blue 2020

  Felicia Chen sings under Kevin Martin's low end, two years of files exchanged between Berlin and Brussels and mixed in lockdown. In Blue is slower and more intimate than anything else he has made as the Bug, and the dread comes from the quiet rather than the weight. London Zoo is the one that got in.

• Venetian Snares — The Chocolate Wheelchair Album 2003

  'Herbie Goes Ballistic', 'Marty's Tardis', 'Ghetto Body Buddy': the tracklist tells you how seriously Aaron Funk was taking himself in 2003. The Chocolate Wheelchair Album is his funniest record and close to his best-programmed. Rossz Csillag Alatt Született is the one that got the place, and no artist gets two on charm.

• Whatever the Weather — Whatever the Weather II 2025

  Every track is a temperature. Loraine James runs from '1' to '26' degrees and back again, out of order, with two annotated for weather: 'Intermittent Sunshine', 'Intermittent Rain'. The second Whatever the Weather record is quieter than the first and the conceit has stopped surprising. It is ambient before it is anything else.

• X-Altera — X-Altera 2018

  Tadd Mullinix made ragga jungle as half of Soundmurderer & SK-1 in the late nineties, then came back to it twenty years later with Detroit techno and IDM in the mix. The breaks have a cold precision the genre does not usually go in for. By 2018 the revival had already found its landmarks, and X-Altera arrived too late to displace them.

• Dauwd — Theory of Colours 2017

  Dauwd builds house out of analog warmth and long dissolves, and Theory of Colours takes its time in a way the genre rarely rewards. 'Unconscious' runs nine minutes and never once raises its voice. Beautiful, but eventually you want it to.

• Fort Romeau — Insides 2015

  Fort Romeau makes house that thinks in kosmische time, chords holding for minutes while almost nothing else moves. Insides is the most complete version of it. It is the one on this page I would most like to be wrong about, and nothing came after it to make the case.

• Kiasmos — II 2024

  Ólafur Arnalds and Janus Rasmussen make minimal techno out of piano and strings, and the second Kiasmos record is more assured and less surprising than the first. It is beautiful and it is furniture, and furniture does not rank.

• Ø [Phase] — Alone in Time? 2015

  Ashley Burchett makes Token techno that works by taking things away. 'The Maze' runs almost ten minutes on a kick, a hiss and a figure that moves about an inch. An hour of that is a discipline, and it is also an hour.