Ranked list
The 10 Best Electro Albums
Electro in the machine-funk sense: the 808 lineage that runs from Kraftwerk through the Bronx and Detroit and out into the European revival. Breakdancing-era electro-funk, Drexciya's underwater Detroit, the Dutch and German revivalists, and the modern hardware school. Techno, house and synth-pop are ranked elsewhere, and electroclash is treated as a cousin rather than a member. From 1977 to now.
Electro is the only genre here with a documented origin argument. In 1982 Afrika Bambaataa and Arthur Baker took the melody of Trans-Europe Express and the rhythm of Numbers, put them over an 808, and Planet Rock came out of it. Detroit was listening. So were the Bronx, Miami, Los Angeles and eventually most of Europe, and the drum machine at the centre of it has never really been replaced.
Then it went quiet, or rather it went underground and stayed there. Through the nineties electro was kept alive by people working deliberately outside techno's spotlight: Drexciya inventing an underwater mythology and refusing to be photographed, Aux 88 keeping the vocoder in service in Detroit, Dopplereffekt making Cold War science fetishism nobody could tell was a joke. The Hague and Berlin joined in. None of them were making career moves.
That is why this list looks older and stranger than the others. Electro never had a commercial moment after 1985, which means it also never had to survive one. The records below were made by people with almost no expectation of an audience, and it shows in the best possible way.
The ten
- Number 1 on The 10 Best Electro Albums
Drexciya — Neptune's Lair1999
№ 80 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
Detroit Afrofuturism at full depth, and the record where the underwater mythology stops being an idea and becomes a place. Cold, funky, entirely uninterested in being liked, and better every year.
Why it is number one
The concept is that the children of pregnant women thrown from slave ships adapted to breathe underwater and built a civilisation down there. Drexciya put that on record sleeves and in track titles and then declined to explain any of it. Neptune's Lair is where the mythology and the music arrive at the same level: James Stinson and Gerald Donald making machine funk that is genuinely alien, cold on the surface and moving underneath, with basslines that sound like pressure at depth. Stinson died in 2002 at thirty-two. The record has grown in stature every year since, and nothing else in electro carries this much weight without ever raising its voice.
- Number 2 on The 10 Best Electro Albums
Kraftwerk — Trans-Europe Express1977
№ 42 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
Not electro yet, and the reason electro exists. Bambaataa lifted the melody in 1982 and the whole genre followed. It also happens to be a beautiful record about trains, Europe and the strangeness of moving through both.
- Number 3 on The 10 Best Electro Albums
Cybotron — Enter1983
Juan Atkins and Rick Davis in Detroit, building the bridge between Kraftwerk and everything the city did afterwards. Clear and Cosmic Cars are the DNA samples half of electro and techno grew from.
- Number 4 on The 10 Best Electro Albums
Dopplereffekt — Gesamtkunstwerk1999Collected works
№ 151 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
Cold War science fetishism delivered so deadpan that people argued for years about whether it was satire. Perfect machine funk underneath, and the record the European revival has been quietly copying since. Gathered from sides that were never issued as an album.
- Number 5 on The 10 Best Electro Albums
Drexciya — The Quest1997Collected works
№ 112 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
The mythology laid out in full, collected from twelve-inches that were never issued any other way. Rougher than Neptune's Lair and arguably the more important object of the two.
- Number 6 on The 10 Best Electro Albums
The Other People Place — Lifestyles of the Laptop Café2001
James Stinson alone, and warmer than Drexciya ever allowed itself to be. Melodies left exposed, drums soft enough to sleep through, and a tenderness nobody expected from that quarter. He died the following year, which has made it harder to hear it as anything other than a farewell.
- Number 7 on The 10 Best Electro Albums
Aux 88 — Bass Magnetic1993
№ 176 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
While Detroit chased techno, Hamilton and Tucker kept the 808 and the vocoder in service. Bass-heavy, unfashionable at the time, and load-bearing for everything the revival did ten years later.
- Number 8 on The 10 Best Electro Albums
Egyptian Lover — On the Nile1984
West Coast electro-funk with an 808 and a persona. Los Angeles answering the Bronx, and the record that made the machine sound sexual rather than futuristic.
- Number 9 on The 10 Best Electro Albums
Anthony Rother — Sex with the Machines1997
The German revival's founding album. Kraftwerk's grammar with a harder chassis and none of the irony, made by someone who clearly thought the future had been abandoned too early.
- Number 10 on The 10 Best Electro Albums
Helena Hauff — Discreet Desires2015
№ 134 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
Hamburg, hardware only, mixed live to tape and never edited afterwards. Hauff made raw machine music glamorous again at exactly the moment club production had become immaculate and boring.
Eleven to twenty
Ranked, and held to the same rules as the ten.
- Number 11 on The 10 Best Electro Albums
Elecktroids — Elektroworld1995
№ 165 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
Warp's Kraftwerk homage played almost entirely straight, with a fictional Detroit family band attached. Loving, precise, and gone within a year.
- Number 12 on The 10 Best Electro Albums
Gesloten Cirkel — Submit X2014
Anonymous, distorted and genuinely menacing. The best-loved electro album of the last fifteen years.
- Number 13 on The 10 Best Electro Albums
Two Lone Swordsmen — Stay Down1998
№ 152 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
Weatherall and Tenniswood at crush depth. Dubbed-out electro made by people uninterested in trading on a reputation.
- Number 14 on The 10 Best Electro Albums
Convextion — 28452016
№ 195 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
Texas patience applied to deep electro. Thirteen years after the debut and worth every one of them.
- Number 15 on The 10 Best Electro Albums
I-f — Fucking Consumer1998
The Hague's sleaze-electro manifesto, and the record that started Italo's rehabilitation more or less single-handed.
- Number 16 on The 10 Best Electro Albums
Mantronix — The Album1985
Kurtis Mantronik as a producer's producer. Hip-hop and electro before the two had finished separating.
- Number 17 on The 10 Best Electro Albums
Ryuichi Sakamoto — B-2 Unit1980
Riot in Lagos invented a rhythm nobody else reached for years. Sits between this list and everything else Sakamoto did.
- Number 18 on The 10 Best Electro Albums
Dopplereffekt — Linear Accelerator2003
Colder and more abstract than Gesamtkunstwerk, and where the project starts leaving electro behind.
- Number 19 on The 10 Best Electro Albums
Adult. — Resuscitation2001Collected works
Detroit electroclash with actual teeth. The record that scene should be remembered by rather than the ones it is.
- Number 20 on The 10 Best Electro Albums
Legowelt — Pimpshifter1999
The Hague's most prolific mind and one of its most enjoyable records. Six tracks, thirty-two minutes, and nothing wasted.
Near misses
Records considered and not ranked, with the reason each fell short.
Afrika Bambaataa — Planet Rock: The Album
The single invented this music and the album around it does not carry the same weight. Ranking records rather than reputations is the rule this page runs on, and it costs the genre's founding document a place in the ten.
Newcleus — Jam On Revenge
The other founding electro-funk album, and Jam On It is unimprovable. The record around it is thinner than the singles.
Kraftwerk — Computer World
Arguably the better Kraftwerk album and ranked 73rd on the 20th-century canon. Trans-Europe Express is the one electro was actually built from.
№ 73 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century · № 17 on The 10 Best Synth-Pop Albums
Arpanet — Wireless InternetNot eligible
Gerald Donald again, and the most conceptually rigorous thing he has done. Three Donald records on one page was already the limit.
DMX Krew — Nu Romantix
Ed Upton's Rephlex-era electro, funny and warm where the genre is usually neither. Charm rather than weight.
Justice — Cross
Blog-house built from disco and distortion, not electro. It ranks 55th on the 21st-century canon and belongs to a different story.
№ 55 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century · № 7 on The 10 Best French House Albums
How this list was built
Ten from 81 records considered, running from 1977 to last year. The field took in the electro-funk era, Detroit, The Hague, the German revival and the modern hardware school, because the main canons collect Detroit thoroughly and the rest of this lineage barely at all.
Two of the ten were issued as collections rather than written as albums. Drexciya's Quest material and Dopplereffekt's Gesamtkunstwerk exist in no other album form, and a rule written to keep DJ mixes out should not be used to delete the two most mythologised bodies of work in the genre. Planet Rock is the notable absence: the single is foundational and the album is not, and this page ranks records rather than reputations. Gerald Donald appears three times across the page under three names, which is a fact about electro rather than an oversight. Legowelt's Pimpshifter is a single twelve-inch of original material rather than an album in the ordinary sense. It runs six tracks and thirty-two minutes, and the scene has treated it as an album since 1999, which is the test the rules apply: length in its era's terms, plus evidence of reception. Minimal Nation holds the top of the techno list on the same reasoning.
Every electro record on this site, ranked within its own canon rather than against each other, is on the electro genre page.