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Ranked list

The 10 Best Breakcore Albums

Breakcore and the extreme-tempo family around it: the amen-driven records, gabber, digital hardcore, speedcore, and the producers who moved between all four. From 1993 to now. British breakbeat hardcore is a different lineage and is not ranked here. It is named on the progressive house and rave page, where the album-length version of that scene is judged. Drill and bass belongs to IDM, because tempo is not a genre and a page admitting every record over 180 BPM would be a filter rather than an argument.

Breakcore is what happened when hardcore's tempo met jungle's breaks and neither would give way. The amen break, already the most overworked six seconds in music, got cut into smaller and smaller pieces until the cutting itself became the content. By about 1997 there were producers in Australia, Germany, Canada and the American midwest doing this independently and mostly unaware of each other, connected by mail order and a handful of labels.

It has always been half a joke and entirely serious, which is the hardest register to sustain. The records here sample Hungarian orchestral music, gabber kicks, anime, hymns, their own artists' earlier records and whatever was on television, and the good ones are not collages. They are compositions that happen to be made of shrapnel.

Gabber and digital hardcore share this page because they were part of the same collision rather than neighbours being accommodated. Rotterdam producers were making the kicks that breakcore then abused, and Berlin's digital hardcore label was releasing records that were faster and angrier than either. Ranking them together is a claim about what happened, not a compromise about numbers.

The ten

  1. Number 1 on The 10 Best Breakcore Albums

    Venetian Snares — Rossz Csillag Alatt Született2005

    № 23 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century

    Hungarian orchestral samples, seven-eight time, and amen breaks arranged by someone finally interested in something other than speed. The genre's one undisputed masterpiece and the only record in it that a classical listener could be handed without apology.

    Why it is number one

    Aaron Funk had spent a decade proving he could programme faster than anyone alive, and then made a record about grief in seven-eight time using Hungarian orchestral samples and almost no jokes. Rossz Csillag Alatt Szuletett translates roughly as born under a bad star, and Funk built it from Bartok, Elgar, Billie Holiday and amen breaks arranged with a composer's attention rather than an editor's. Szamar Madar is the track people play to convert sceptics and Hajnal is the one that stays. Nothing else in this tradition attempted a work of this scale, and the technical facility that made his earlier records exhausting is here put entirely at the service of something sad.

  2. Number 2 on The 10 Best Breakcore Albums

    Christoph de Babalon — If You're Into It, I'm Out of It1997

    Not fast. That is the point. De Babalon slows the ambience to a crawl and lets the breaks arrive like something going wrong in another room, and the result is the most genuinely frightening record in this canon. Rediscovered every few years by people who assume they have found something obscure.

  3. Number 3 on The 10 Best Breakcore Albums

    Atari Teenage Riot — Delete Yourself!1995

    Digital hardcore as a manifesto with a band attached. Alec Empire, Hanin Elias and Carl Crack shouting over breakbeats at punk tempo, made in Berlin with an explicitly political programme that most of the scene around them lacked entirely.

  4. Number 4 on The 10 Best Breakcore Albums

    Venetian Snares — Songs About My Cats2001

    № 73 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century

    Built from recordings of his own cats and some of the most violent programming he had done to that point, which should be unbearable and is instead oddly tender. The record where the jokes and the craft stopped being separate things.

  5. Number 5 on The 10 Best Breakcore Albums

    Kid606 — Down With The Scene2000

    Miguel Depedro taking apart everything the scene held sacred, including the scene, on Mille Plateaux. Pop samples, gabber kicks and a title that means what it says. The funniest record here and the most structurally intelligent.

  6. Number 6 on The 10 Best Breakcore Albums

    Nasenbluten — 100% No Soul Guaranteed1995

    Three men in Newcastle, Australia, with an Amiga and no interest in what anyone in Europe thought. Cheap, hostile and extremely funny, and the record that proved this music did not need a scene around it to exist.

  7. Number 7 on The 10 Best Breakcore Albums

    Machine Girl — WLFGRL2014

    The revival's founding document, made in New York on almost nothing and released to an audience that found it through the internet rather than a label. It sounds like a rave being demolished while still in progress and it brought a generation to this music who had missed the first one entirely.

  8. Number 8 on The 10 Best Breakcore Albums

    Panacea — Low Profile Darkness1997

    German darkstep at its most punishing, and the point where drum and bass and hardcore stopped pretending they were different projects. Mathis Mootz makes no concessions at any point across its length.

  9. Number 9 on The 10 Best Breakcore Albums

    Igorrr — Savage Sinusoid2017

    Baroque harpsichord, death metal vocals, breakcore programming and an accordion, held together by someone with genuine conservatory training. It should be a novelty and it is one of the most carefully constructed records in this whole tradition.

  10. Number 10 on The 10 Best Breakcore Albums

    Bogdan Raczynski — Samurai Math Beats1999

    Rephlex-era braindance at its most unhinged and most affectionate. Raczynski programmes like someone laughing, and the record is warmer than anything else at this tempo has managed before or since.

Eleven to twenty

Ranked, and held to the same rules as the ten.

  1. Number 11 on The 10 Best Breakcore Albums

    Venetian Snares — Doll Doll Doll2001

    The horror one, and the hardest to sit through. Admired more than played, and that is the correct relationship to it.

  2. Number 12 on The 10 Best Breakcore Albums

    Kid606 — Kill Sound Before Sound Kills You2003

    № 174 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century

    Sugar and shrapnel, and the record that took the genre closest to pop without softening a single edit.

  3. Number 13 on The 10 Best Breakcore Albums

    Sewerslvt — Draining Love Story2020

    Breakcore, ambient and jungle fused by a producer who found the tradition through the internet and rebuilt it as something narcotic.

  4. Number 14 on The 10 Best Breakcore Albums

    Lauren Bousfield — Palimpsest2020

    № 189 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century

    Composed like a pit orchestra on fire, with harmonic ambition the genre almost never attempts.

  5. Number 15 on The 10 Best Breakcore Albums

    DJ Scud — Ambush!2003Collected works

    The Ambush Records sides gathered because they were never issued otherwise. Ragga, dread and distortion, and the London end of this music at its most physical.

  6. Number 16 on The 10 Best Breakcore Albums

    Hellfish & Producer — Bastard Sonz of Rave2002

    Deathchant's two principals at full strength, and the strongest argument that British hardcore made albums worth ranking.

  7. Number 17 on The 10 Best Breakcore Albums

    Atari Teenage Riot — The Future of War1997

    Angrier and better produced than the debut, and the most widely owned record in this entire field.

  8. Number 18 on The 10 Best Breakcore Albums

    Drumcorps — Grist2006

    Hardcore guitars cut into breakcore rhythm, by a producer who understood both traditions rather than borrowing from one.

  9. Number 19 on The 10 Best Breakcore Albums

    Somatic Responses — Accidental Happiness2001

    The Healy brothers from Wales, working an industrial seam nobody else in this scene bothered with. Enormously prolific and consistently overlooked.

  10. Number 20 on The 10 Best Breakcore Albums

    Alec Empire — The Destroyer1996

    Scorched jungle from the digital hardcore founder, made alongside Atari Teenage Riot and considerably less legible.

Near misses

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

  • Rotterdam Terror Corps — Sick & TwistedNot eligible

    Gabber's problem stated plainly: the scene's power was in twelve-inches and a room, and its albums are compilations of tracks that worked elsewhere. Rotterdam has seven records in this pool and none of them makes the case an album needs to make.

  • Enduser — Form Without Function

    Cincinnati breakcore with real melodic instincts, and the most consistent catalogue in the field's second rank. It loses to the ten on peaks rather than on average.

  • Otto von Schirach — 8000 B.C.

    Miami bass filtered through Schrodinger's blender. Genuinely strange and slightly too pleased with itself.

  • Xanopticon — Liminal Space

    The most technically extreme record in the pool, and closer to a demonstration than a record. Ranked below things that do less better.

  • Shitmat — Full English Breakfest

    Ragga, novelty samples and a straight face. The joke is the point and it wears thinner across an album than across a twelve-inch.

  • Ruby My Dear — Brame

    French breakcore at its most melodic, and the closest anyone has come to making this music pretty. Just outside on weight.

How this list was built

Ten from 255 records considered, running from 1993 to this year. The field was built from the full catalogues of the artists working in it rather than from the records that are easy to remember, which is why it is four or five times the size of the other genre pools on this site and why several of the entries below are not the albums those artists are usually represented by.

DJ Scud's Ambush! gathers his Ambush Records twelve-inches rather than being written as an album, and is ranked with that stated: the music exists in no other album form. Gabber is the one part of this page's argument the field cannot fully support. Rotterdam Terror Corps, Neophyte, Promo, Angerfist and DJ Producer are all here and none reaches the ten, because the Dutch scene's power lived in twelve-inches and in a room and its albums mostly gather tracks that worked elsewhere. That is a finding about how the music was made rather than a judgment on the producers, and it is why Hellfish and Nasenbluten carry that end of the tradition instead.

Every breakcore record on this site, ranked within its own canon rather than against each other, is on the breakcore genre page.

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