Ranked list
The 10 Best Downtempo Albums
Downtempo as the instrumental slow lane: the Ninja Tune and Mo' Wax school, British chill-out, nu jazz, and the Vienna axis. Trip-hop has its own list and is deliberately absent here, which means no Portishead, no Massive Attack, no Tricky. The dividing line is the voice. Where trip-hop is built around a singer, this tradition is built around a sampler and a groove. From 1993 to now.
Downtempo is the genre most often used as furniture and it has never entirely recovered from the association. For most of the 2000s the word meant a compilation with a beach on the cover, sold in a shop that also sold scented candles. That version is real and this list ignores it, because underneath the wallpaper there is a tradition of inventive sample music that happens to move slowly.
It came out of two places at once. In London, Ninja Tune and Mo' Wax were treating hip-hop production as an end in itself rather than a bed for a rapper, which produced a decade of records built entirely from other people's jazz albums. In Vienna, Kruder and Dorfmeister were doing something similar with dub at the centre. Bristol, Hull and Manchester filled in the rest.
The distinction from trip-hop is not snobbery, it is practical. Trip-hop is a singer's genre and this is a producer's one, and merging them would mean ranking Dummy above records it has almost nothing in common with. Kept apart, both lists can say something specific.
The ten
- Number 1 on The 10 Best Downtempo Albums
DJ Shadow — Endtroducing.....1996
№ 22 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
An entire emotional world built from other people's records. Josh Davis turned crate-digging into composition and produced something considerably sadder and stranger than the technique-first reputation suggests.
Why it is number one
A basement in Davis, California, filled with vinyl nobody else wanted, and a man with the patience to listen to all of it. Endtroducing is the record everyone reaches for when they want to argue that sampling is composition, and the argument holds because the album is not a demonstration of technique. Midnight in a Perfect World and Stem are genuinely sad pieces of music built from fragments of other people's sessions. Whether it was truly the first album made entirely from samples has been picked over for thirty years and matters far less than the fact that it carries real grief, which almost nothing else assembled this way does.
- Number 2 on The 10 Best Downtempo Albums
Nightmares on Wax — Smokers Delight1995
№ 70 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
George Evelyn moving from Leeds bleep to the most generous record in this tradition. Warm, unhurried and faintly stoned, and it became Britain's default evening record without ever sounding like it was aiming to be.
- Number 3 on The 10 Best Downtempo Albums
Air — Moon Safari1998
№ 76 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
Analogue synths pointed at Gainsbourg rather than the dancefloor, made by two men from Versailles with no interest in being a club act. It sold the world on French sophistication and still sounds like a photograph left in the sun.
- Number 4 on The 10 Best Downtempo Albums
Global Communication — 76:141994
№ 10 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
Tracks titled by running time, which tells you the temperament, and the warmest music the British ambient techno school produced. It sits between this list and ambient proper and belongs on both.
- Number 5 on The 10 Best Downtempo Albums
Amon Tobin — Bricolage1997
№ 229 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
The sampler treated as an orchestra pit rather than a crate. Tobin chopped jazz sides into music with no obvious parents, and the drum programming here is more inventive than anything else the label released that decade.
- Number 6 on The 10 Best Downtempo Albums
The Cinematic Orchestra — Motion1999
Live jazz musicians inside sampler logic, recorded so that neither side wins. Jason Swinscoe built the bridge between Ninja Tune's crates and a working band, and Channel 1 Suite still sounds like a discovery.
- Number 7 on The 10 Best Downtempo Albums
Mr. Scruff — Keep It Unreal1999
№ 232 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
Manchester's most cheerful sample obsessive. Get a Move On is the famous one and the record around it is deeper, funnier and more musically curious than the cartoon sleeves prepared anyone for.
- Number 8 on The 10 Best Downtempo Albums
Bonobo — Black Sands2010
The point where Simon Green stopped making beats and started arranging. Strings, live players and Andreya Triana, and the record that gave the genre a second life after the chill-out compilations had killed it.
- Number 9 on The 10 Best Downtempo Albums
Tosca — Suzuki2000
Dorfmeister with Rupert Huber, slower and stranger than anything the Vienna pair did as remixers, and considerably more patient. Dub-lounge at the point where it stopped being lounge at all.
- Number 10 on The 10 Best Downtempo Albums
Fila Brazillia — Maim That Tune1995
№ 215 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
Hull's finest, wry where the rest of the genre was solemn, and they kept a pulse under everything. British downtempo as an actual album tradition rather than a mood to be curated.
Eleven to twenty
Ranked, and held to the same rules as the ten.
- Number 11 on The 10 Best Downtempo Albums
Amon Tobin — Supermodified2000
№ 96 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
Denser and more violent than Bricolage. The drum edits alone put it ahead of most of this field.
- Number 12 on The 10 Best Downtempo Albums
Four Tet — Pause2001
Folktronica before the word, and Hebden finding the register that made Rounds possible.
- Number 13 on The 10 Best Downtempo Albums
Nightmares on Wax — Carboot Soul1999
№ 159 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
The follow-up, sunnier and more song-shaped. Les Nuits is the one everybody knows without knowing.
- Number 14 on The 10 Best Downtempo Albums
Zero 7 — Simple Things2001
Immaculately made and unfairly filed under coffee table. The songwriting stands up better than the reputation.
- Number 15 on The 10 Best Downtempo Albums
Röyksopp — Melody A.M.2001
Norwegian precision applied to a genre that usually preferred haze. Eple got everywhere for good reason.
- Number 16 on The 10 Best Downtempo Albums
Boozoo Bajou — Satta2001
German dub-downtempo at its most weightless, and one of the few records here that genuinely improves in the background.
- Number 17 on The 10 Best Downtempo Albums
Lemon Jelly — Lost Horizons2002
Deeply English, faintly absurd, and better constructed than the whimsy lets on.
- Number 18 on The 10 Best Downtempo Albums
Coldcut — Let Us Play!1997
№ 226 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
Ninja Tune's founders at their most maximal. More restless than the genre usually allows, which is the point.
- Number 19 on The 10 Best Downtempo Albums
The Cinematic Orchestra — Every Day2002
Fontella Bass singing over an hour of it, and the record that made the live-band approach permanent.
- Number 20 on The 10 Best Downtempo Albums
Jazzanova — In Between2002
Berlin's nu jazz collective with an actual album rather than a set of remixes. Ornate, slightly airless, and it earns the room.
Near misses
Records considered and not ranked, with the reason each fell short.
Kruder & Dorfmeister — The K&D SessionsNot eligible
A DJ mix, which this canon does not rank anywhere. It is also the record that carried this sound into a million living rooms, and pretending otherwise would be worse than admitting the rule cannot reach it.
Portishead — Dummy
The defining trip-hop record and it heads that list. A singer's album, which is precisely the line this page draws.
№ 7 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century · № 1 on The 10 Best Trip-Hop Albums
Boards of Canada — Music Has the Right to Children
IDM by lineage even though the tempo fits. It ranks eighth on the 20th-century canon and belongs to a different conversation.
№ 8 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century · № 3 on The 10 Best IDM Albums
Thievery Corporation — Sounds from the Thievery Hi-Fi
DC dub-lounge internationalism, and the record that launched a thousand hotel bars. Pleasant rather than essential.
Prefuse 73 — Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives
Scott Herren cutting vocals into percussion, which pointed at the whole beat scene. Closer to instrumental hip-hop than to this.
Herbaliser — Very Mercenary
Ninja Tune's most straightforwardly funky act. Loses to Amon Tobin and Coldcut on invention rather than on grooves.
How this list was built
Ten from 81 records considered. The field was drawn to exclude trip-hop, which has its own page, and to include the Ninja Tune and Mo' Wax instrumental school, British chill-out, nu jazz and the Vienna axis, because those four are what is left once the singers are ranked next door.
The K&D Sessions is not ranked here. It is a DJ mix, and this canon does not rank mixes on any list, including one where an argument could be made that the pair reworked their source material thoroughly enough to count as authors. Making that exception for one record while refusing it elsewhere would be worth less than the record gains. Trip-hop is absent by design and has its own page, and Endtroducing tops this list rather than that one because it has no voice at the front, which is the line the two pages divide on.
Every downtempo record on this site, ranked within its own canon rather than against each other, is on the downtempo genre page.