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Ranked list

The 10 Best Detroit Techno Albums

Detroit techno strictly: the Belleville founders, the second wave around Planet E and Underground Resistance, and the producers who came after and stayed in the tradition. The city's house and electro wings have their own pages and are judged there, which is why Moodymann, Theo Parrish and Drexciya are ranked elsewhere. Cybotron is the one deliberate exception, because Enter predates the point at which techno and electro became separate things and belongs to both creation stories. From 1983 to now.

Detroit techno is the only genre on this site with a founding myth that is basically true. Three friends from Belleville, a radio show called The Electrifying Mojo playing Kraftwerk and Parliament back to back, a city emptying out around them, and a set of records that imagined a future the place itself was being denied. Juan Atkins named it. Derrick May supplied the romance. Kevin Saunderson took it to the charts.

What separates it from every techno scene that followed is the insistence on soul. The machines were never the point; they were what was affordable. Put Carl Craig or Kenny Larkin next to their European admirers and the difference is harmonic rather than technical. There are chord changes, jazz sitting under the surface, and a melodic sadness that Berlin spent a decade trying to reverse-engineer.

The city also produced the most politically explicit music in this canon. Underground Resistance released in plain sleeves with slogans and no photographs, and treated the label as a position rather than a business. That posture has been copied endlessly by people who did not mean it.

The ten

  1. Number 1 on The 10 Best Detroit Techno Albums

    Carl Craig — More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art1997

    № 56 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    The city's most complete album. Machine funk with real harmonic movement underneath, made by someone who heard techno as jazz and had the writing to back the claim up.

    Why it is number one

    Carl Craig spent his career insisting this music belonged next to jazz rather than beneath it, and on More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art he stops arguing and simply proves it. The record moves between machine funk and something closer to composition without ever sounding like a producer demonstrating range. At the Heart of It All and Televised Green Smoke have harmonic movement that almost nothing else at this tempo attempts. It is the most complete album the city has produced, made by the man who learned it from Derrick May and then went further out than his teacher ever did.

  2. Number 2 on The 10 Best Detroit Techno Albums

    Robert Hood — Minimal Nation1994

    № 40 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    One idea per track, followed until it gives something up. Hood left Underground Resistance's noise behind and discovered that a kick, a bassline and one moving part could carry an hour.

  3. Number 3 on The 10 Best Detroit Techno Albums

    Cybotron — Enter1983

    Where the whole thing starts. Juan Atkins and Rick Davis building the bridge from Kraftwerk to everything Detroit did afterwards, with Clear and Cosmic Cars as the DNA samples half of techno and electro grew from.

  4. Number 4 on The 10 Best Detroit Techno Albums

    Model 500 — Deep Space1995

    № 54 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Atkins again, a decade on, proving the futurism was a working method rather than a moment he happened to be present for. Still pointed at orbit and swinging harder than a founder needs to.

  5. Number 5 on The 10 Best Detroit Techno Albums

    Derrick May — Innovator1997Collected works

    № 116 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    The Rhythim Is Rhythim sides collected, because they were never issued any other way. Strings of Life is here, and that track gave the entire genre its emotional permission slip.

  6. Number 6 on The 10 Best Detroit Techno Albums

    Underground Resistance — Interstellar Fugitives1998

    № 125 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Plain sleeve, no faces, and a political position argued through sound rather than a press release. The collective's fullest statement, made while techno's politics were being written out of its history elsewhere.

  7. Number 7 on The 10 Best Detroit Techno Albums

    Carl Craig — Landcruising1995

    № 110 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    The first Craig album, looser and more restless than what followed, and the record where the city's second wave works out what an album can be. Everything he did afterwards is visible here in outline, which makes it a document as much as a record, and it holds up as both.

  8. Number 8 on The 10 Best Detroit Techno Albums

    Jeff Mills — Waveform Transmission Vol. 11993

    № 55 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Detroit's most severe export, made for Berlin's Tresor and setting the speed of the whole decade. Mills treats the drum machine as a transmitter and never slows down to help anyone.

  9. Number 9 on The 10 Best Detroit Techno Albums

    Kenny Larkin — Azimuth1994

    № 132 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    The second wave's most elegant melodist, and a reminder that this city produced beauty as often as force. Harmonic care that European techno spent years failing to imitate.

  10. Number 10 on The 10 Best Detroit Techno Albums

    Terrence Dixon — From the Far Future2000

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

    Small loops opening onto very large rooms, made by a producer who has spent thirty years outside the spotlight and shaped a decade of hypnotic techno from there anyway.

Eleven to twenty

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

  1. Number 11 on The 10 Best Detroit Techno Albums

    Paperclip People — The Secret Tapes of Dr. Eich1996

    № 119 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Craig's disco alias, and the home of Throw, which every generation since has revived or re-edited.

  2. Number 12 on The 10 Best Detroit Techno Albums

    Drexciya — The Quest1997Collected works

    № 112 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    The mythology laid out in full, collected from sides that were never issued as an album. Rougher than Neptune's Lair and arguably more important.

  3. Number 13 on The 10 Best Detroit Techno Albums

    X-101 — X-1011991

    № 149 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Underground Resistance storming Tresor under a numeral, as Berlin's scene assembled in the rubble.

  4. Number 14 on The 10 Best Detroit Techno Albums

    Octave One — The Living Key1997

    № 160 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    The Burden brothers keeping the melodic and industrial halves of the city in balance. A formidable live act on record.

  5. Number 15 on The 10 Best Detroit Techno Albums

    Innerzone Orchestra — Programmed1999

    № 128 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Craig again, with Francisco Mora Catlett and Craig Taborn playing. The jazz argument made with actual musicians.

  6. Number 16 on The 10 Best Detroit Techno Albums

    69 — The Sound of Music1995

    № 109 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Craig's four-track alias, for tracks too loose to carry his own name. Detroit thinking out loud.

  7. Number 17 on The 10 Best Detroit Techno Albums

    Robert Hood — Internal Empire1994

    Minimal Nation's stern sibling, and the manifesto continued rather than restated.

  8. Number 18 on The 10 Best Detroit Techno Albums

    MGUN — Axiom2018

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

    Wiry, unquantised hardware funk from the generation after Kyle Hall. Proof the lineage keeps producing.

  9. Number 19 on The 10 Best Detroit Techno Albums

    Drexciya — Neptune's Lair1999

    № 80 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    The underwater mythology at full depth, and the most singular thing the city produced. It tops the electro list, which is the more precise home for it.

  10. Number 20 on The 10 Best Detroit Techno Albums

    Suburban Knight — My Sol Dark Direction2003

    James Pennington, UR's most elusive associate, finally at album length. Dark, patient and entirely of this city.

Near misses

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

How this list was built

Ten from 51 records considered, the smallest field on the site. Detroit's catalogue is enormous and its album catalogue is not, which is what happens when a city spends twenty years exporting twelve-inch records to Europe.

Derrick May's Innovator collects the Rhythim Is Rhythim sides rather than being written as an album, and is ranked anyway, because that music exists in no other album form and a rule written to keep DJ mixes out should not delete a founder's entire body of work. Drexciya's Quest material carries the same qualification further down the page. Cybotron's Enter is the one record here that could equally sit on the electro list, and it is ranked because Enter predates the point at which the two became separate things. Everything after that point, including Drexciya and Aux 88, is judged on the electro page instead.

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

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