Ranked list
The 10 Best French House Albums
French house as the filtered disco tradition that came out of Paris in the mid-nineties and what grew from it: the Roule and Crydamoure circle, Versatile and Solid, the Ed Banger generation who took the same materials and turned the gain up, and the records since that still work from a looped sample and a low-pass filter. From 1995 to now. House, deep house and electro are ranked on their own lists.
The technique is one effect. Take a bar of disco, loop it, and sweep a low-pass filter across it so the record seems to surface and submerge. That is the entire trick and it was not new, but around 1995 a small number of people in Paris worked out that it could carry a whole record if the sample was good enough and the compression was violent enough.
What made it a scene rather than a technique was that they ran their own labels. Roule was Thomas Bangalter's, Crydamoure was Guy-Manuel's, Versatile was Gilb'R's, Solid was Alex Gopher and Etienne de Crecy's. The records that defined the sound arrived as twelve-inches on those imprints, sold to other producers and a few record shops, and the album was an afterthought for most of the people involved.
That has a consequence this page has to state rather than work around. Some of the most important music in this tradition exists only as singles and label collections, and where a collection gathers several artists it cannot be ranked here at all. Crydamoure Presents Waves is the clearest case: the document of an entire label, and outside these rules entirely. A French house list that never mentioned Roule or Crydamoure would be describing a different scene, so the near misses name them.
The ten
- Number 1 on The 10 Best French House Albums
Motorbass — Pansoul1996
№ 64 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
Dust, compression and an apartment. Zdar and de Crecy got there first and stayed calmest, and the record still sounds like it was made by people with nothing to prove and no expectation of an audience.
Why it is number one
Philippe Zdar and Etienne de Crecy made it in a Paris apartment with a sampler, a filter and an apparently limitless supply of records nobody else wanted. Pansoul arrived in 1996, a year before Homework, and it is dustier, slower and considerably stranger than the sound it started. Ezio and Fabulous Hero are loops that have been left to run until they turn into something else. What separates it from everything it inspired is patience: the filter is not a hook here, it is the thing the record is about, and the producers who copied it mostly copied the effect and dropped the discipline.
- Number 2 on The 10 Best French House Albums
Daft Punk — Homework1997
№ 31 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
Two Parisians in a bedroom inventing a national style by accident. Rawer than the reputation and weirder than the singles let on. Da Funk is the calling card and Rollin' & Scratchin' is the reason other producers took it seriously.
- Number 3 on The 10 Best French House Albums
Etienne de Crecy — Super Discount1997
№ 240 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
The cheapest-sounding great record in this canon, and deliberately. De Crecy loops a bar, filters it, and declines to add anything for six minutes at a time. Prix Choc is the one everyone knows and the restraint is the achievement.
- Number 4 on The 10 Best French House Albums
Cassius — 19991999
№ 241 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
Zdar again, with Boombass, and the pair's years producing rap in Paris are audible in every bar: the filtering swings rather than merely repeating. Feeling for You is pure pleasure and the album has more underneath it than that suggests.
- Number 5 on The 10 Best French House Albums
Air — Premiers Symptomes1997
Before Moon Safari made them a lifestyle, Godin and Dunckel made this: six tracks of Rhodes, bass and restraint that sit exactly between French house and something else nobody had a name for. Modular Mix is still their best piece of music.
- Number 6 on The 10 Best French House Albums
I:Cube — Picnic Attack1997
№ 242 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
Versatile's founding statement, playful and slightly wonky where the Roule circle was polished. Adore is the track that hooks people and the record around it is stranger and more curious than the scene's reputation.
- Number 7 on The 10 Best French House Albums
Justice — Cross2007
№ 55 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
The generation that took the same materials and turned everything up until it distorted. Disco, metal and church organ, played through a wall of Marshall stacks. D.A.N.C.E. shows its age in places and Genesis and Phantom do not.
- Number 8 on The 10 Best French House Albums
Alan Braxe & Fred Falke — The Upper Cuts2005Collected works
Twelve tracks under four different names, gathered because none of them was ever issued as an album. Braxe is on all of them, as Stardust, as The Paradise, alone, and eight times with Fred Falke. Intro, Rubicon and Palladium are the purest version of the filtered-disco idea anyone managed, and the record is really Braxe's catalogue rather than a duo's album, which is why Music Sounds Better with You is sitting in the middle of it.
- Number 9 on The 10 Best French House Albums
Mr. Oizo — Analog Worms Attack1999
Quentin Dupieux making the anti-Homework: broken, abrasive, funny, and built from the same parts. Flat Beat sold a million jeans and the album is considerably less accommodating than that history implies.
- Number 10 on The 10 Best French House Albums
Daft Punk — Discovery2001
№ 2 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
Pop built from house parts, and the reason it sits here rather than higher is that the parts are in service of the songs. Bangalter and de Homem-Christo took the filter, the vocoder and a childhood's worth of radio and made the most loved electronic record of its century. It belongs to this tradition by construction and to a much larger one by effect.
Eleven to twenty
Ranked, and held to the same rules as the ten.
- Number 11 on The 10 Best French House Albums
Sebastien Tellier — Sexuality2008
Produced by Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, and the record where the tradition's obsession with texture gets attached to actual songs. Slow, French, faintly ridiculous, and completely committed to it.
- Number 12 on The 10 Best French House Albums
Cassius — Au Reve2002
Warmer and more song-shaped than 1999, and the one their peers rate highest. Less immediate, more durable.
- Number 13 on The 10 Best French House Albums
Vitalic — OK Cowboy2005
Dijon rather than Paris, and harder than anything else here. La Rock 01 hit the scene like a brick and the album keeps up.
- Number 14 on The 10 Best French House Albums
Thomas Bangalter — Trax on da Rocks1995
The Roule sides under his own name, and the sound arriving before Daft Punk had made it famous.
- Number 15 on The 10 Best French House Albums
SebastiAn — Total2011
Ed Banger's most extreme producer at album length. Exhausting by design and the best-engineered record on that label.
- Number 16 on The 10 Best French House Albums
Alex Gopher — You, My Baby & I1999
The Solid axis at its most melodic, and the record that shows how close this scene sat to French pop.
- Number 17 on The 10 Best French House Albums
Etienne de Crecy — Tempovision2000
Cleaner and more electro than Super Discount, and the moment the scene started looking at itself.
- Number 18 on The 10 Best French House Albums
Kavinsky — OutRun2013
Eighties pastiche taken to its logical end, with Nightcall as the hinge. More sincere than the concept suggests.
- Number 19 on The 10 Best French House Albums
Phoenix — United2000
The band adjacent to all of this, produced in the same rooms. Filed here for its rhythm section rather than its guitars.
- Number 20 on The 10 Best French House Albums
St Germain — Boulevard1995Collected works
№ 231 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
Ludovic Navarre putting live jazz players over deep house before the combination became a lounge cliche, with genuine respect for both sources. It gathers the early series rather than being written as an album, and like the Braxe and Falke record ten places above it, that is the only form in which the music exists. Enormous in Europe, and the discovery is here rather than on Tourist.
Near misses
Records considered and not ranked, with the reason each fell short.
Crydamoure — Presents WavesNot eligible
A various-artists compilation, so it cannot be ranked anywhere on this site. It is also the document of an entire label and one of the two or three most important objects in this tradition, which the album rules simply cannot reach.
Roule — the label's twelve-inchesNot eligible
No album exists. Bangalter's imprint released the sides that half this scene was built from and never gathered them, which is the same problem in a different shape.
Stardust — Music Sounds Better with YouNot eligible
One track, and the most famous record French house produced. There is nothing to rank and pretending otherwise would help nobody.
Air — Moon Safari
French, and third on the downtempo list. It comes out of the same Versailles moment and belongs to a different tradition, which is where it is ranked.
№ 76 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century · № 3 on The 10 Best Downtempo Albums
Daft Punk — Random Access Memories
A studio record about disco played by the session musicians who made the originals. Extraordinary, and not a French house album by any reading.
Dimitri from Paris — Sacrebleu
Filtered Gallic lounge-disco with real charm, and closer to a pastiche of French sophistication than to the club records around it.
How this list was built
Ten from 126 records considered, running from 1995 to last year. The field took in Roule, Crydamoure, Versatile, Solid, Ed Banger and the producers working around them, because this scene organised itself around small artist-run labels and a list drawn from album release schedules would miss most of it.
The Upper Cuts gathers Braxe and Falke's Vulture and Roule twelve-inches rather than being written as an album, and is ranked with that stated. Those records exist in no other album form, and a rule designed to keep DJ mixes and hits packages out should not be used to delete the purest version of the idea this genre had. Crydamoure Presents Waves cannot be ranked at all: it gathers several artists, which no exception reaches. Stardust's Music Sounds Better with You is one track. Both are named in the near misses because a page about this scene that passed over them in silence would be less honest than one that says the rules cannot hold them.
Every french house record on this site, ranked within its own canon rather than against each other, is on the french house genre page.