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Ranked list

The 10 Best House Albums

House as the four-four tradition that starts in Chicago and spreads: the Chicago founders, Detroit's house wing, New Jersey and New York, the French filter school, German microhouse, and everything since that still answers to the swing. Techno, IDM and ambient are ranked elsewhere. Deep house and French house each get a list of their own, and the strongest of both appear here too. From 1986 to now.

House was a room before it was a music. Frankie Knuckles took over the Warehouse in 1977 and spent years building an audience that wanted something the records of the day were not supplying, so he and the people around him made it. That origin has consequences. House is a DJ's music and a singer's music at the same time, which is why its albums are so much stranger than techno's.

An album has to pick a side. Either it becomes a collection of songs, in which case it needs a voice worth forty minutes, or it becomes a producer's record, in which case it has to survive without one. The ten below solve that problem in wildly different ways. Two of them are essentially soul albums. One is a lecture. One is two Parisians in a bedroom working out how to make a sampler sound like a stadium.

The other thing worth saying is that house has been political for longer than most of its audience has noticed, and the records here that say so out loud are not outliers. They are the tradition being honest about where it came from and who paid for it.

The ten

  1. Number 1 on The 10 Best House Albums

    Fingers Inc. — Another Side1988

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

    The first house album that works as an album, and still the emotional high-water mark. Heard's programming and Owens's voice do not sound like a producer hiring a singer. They sound like a band that happens not to have one.

    Why it is number one

    Larry Heard programmed it, Robert Owens sang it, and house stopped being tracks. Another Side arrived in 1988, when the genre was four years old and still mostly a run of twelve-inches with a drum machine on the front, and it behaves like a soul record that happens to have been made by two men and a machine. Heard came to house as a drummer, which is why the programming breathes instead of ticking, and Owens sings like someone who wandered out of a church and into a warehouse and could not decide which building he preferred. Everything tender that house has done since is a footnote to this, usually a worse one.

  2. Number 2 on The 10 Best House Albums

    Moodymann — Silentintroduction1997

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

    Detroit house as collage: Prince, gospel, dusty jazz, crowd noise, all shoved together and left slightly out of focus. Kenny Dixon Jr. built a mystique thick enough to obscure how carefully this is assembled. Nobody has copied it successfully and plenty have embarrassed themselves trying.

  3. Number 3 on The 10 Best House Albums

    DJ Sprinkles — Midtown 120 Blues2009

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

    Terre Thaemlitz opens by explaining what house is and who it was for, then spends the next hour proving it over some of the deepest tracks anyone made that decade. An argument and a beautiful record at once, which almost never happens.

  4. Number 4 on The 10 Best House Albums

    Daft Punk — Homework1997

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

    Two Parisians in a bedroom with a filter, inventing a national style by accident. Rawer than the reputation suggests and considerably weirder than the singles let on. Da Funk is the calling card; the record earns its place on everything around it.

  5. Number 5 on The 10 Best House Albums

    Theo Parrish — Parallel Dimensions2000

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

    Swing pushed until it nearly falls apart, and dust treated as a compositional value rather than a fault. Parrish plays with time the way a jazz drummer does, which is why other producers study these records instead of merely enjoying them.

  6. Number 6 on The 10 Best House Albums

    Herbert — Around the House1998

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

    Microhouse with a pulse and a manifesto behind it. Matthew Herbert built tracks out of kitchen sounds and domestic noise, then hung Dani Siciliano's voice over them, and the result is far warmer than the concept has any business being.

  7. Number 7 on The 10 Best House Albums

    Motorbass — Pansoul1996

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

    Philippe Zdar and Étienne de Crécy in a Paris apartment, with dust and compression doing half the work. French house has an origin point and this is very close to it, which the people who copied it were generally happy to admit.

  8. Number 8 on The 10 Best House Albums

    Basement Jaxx — Remedy1999

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

    The whole history of the genre crammed into one carnival, played too loud and with no restraint whatsoever. Felix and Simon treated house as a party rather than a lineage, which offended some people at the time and sounds like the correct decision now.

  9. Number 9 on The 10 Best House Albums

    Ten City — Foundation1989

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

    Byron Stingily's falsetto over Marshall Jefferson's production, written in the Philadelphia soul tradition rather than assembled for a DJ. That's the Way Love Is is the one everyone knows. The album around it is where house's gospel and disco parentage sits in plain view.

  10. Number 10 on The 10 Best House Albums

    DJ Koze — Amygdala2013

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

    Funny, sad and extremely well made, often inside the same bar. Koze is the only producer of his generation who can put a joke in a track without cheapening it, and this is where the humour and the melancholy finally hold each other up rather than take turns.

Eleven to twenty

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

  1. Number 11 on The 10 Best House Albums

    Larry Heard — Sceneries Not Songs, Volume One1994

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

    Heard alone in his ambient jazz register, and the deepest record in this whole field. It leads the deep house list, which is where it says most.

  2. Number 12 on The 10 Best House Albums

    Isolee — We Are Monster2005

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

    Microhouse at its warmest and least legible. A slow-release record half of minimal's melodic wing has been studying since.

  3. Number 13 on The 10 Best House Albums

    Frankie Knuckles — Beyond the Mix1991

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

    The godfather in the studio rather than the booth. Carries The Whistle Song and the weight of everything before it.

  4. Number 14 on The 10 Best House Albums

    Luomo — Vocalcity2000

    Sasu Ripatti stretching vocal house into something patient and strange. Aged into one of the decade's most quietly influential records.

  5. Number 15 on The 10 Best House Albums

    Floating Points — Elaenia2015

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

    Club music dissolved into ensemble composition, by a man with a doctorate in neuroscience and a jazz collection. Sits at the edge of this list and belongs on it.

  6. Number 16 on The 10 Best House Albums

    Omar-S — Just Ask the Lonely2005

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

    No distribution deal, no press, no interest in your opinion. Stubborn and beautiful in exactly the proportions Detroit specialises in.

  7. Number 17 on The 10 Best House Albums

    Blaze — 25 Years Later1990

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

    New Jersey gospel house written as a song cycle rather than a set of tools. Closer to Motown than to Chicago.

  8. Number 18 on The 10 Best House Albums

    Kaytranada — 99.9%2016

    Montreal swing applied to R&B, house and rap at once. The most purely enjoyable record in the modern half of this field.

  9. Number 19 on The 10 Best House Albums

    Nuyorican Soul — Nuyorican Soul1997

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

    Masters at Work with Tito Puente, Roy Ayers and George Benson in the room. Less a house album than a syllabus you can dance to.

  10. Number 20 on The 10 Best House Albums

    Move D — Kunststoff1995

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

    Heidelberg warmth, passed between producers like a secret and rediscovered whenever a new generation finds it.

Near misses

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

How this list was built

Ten from 207 records considered, running from Chicago in 1986 to last year. The field took in deep, Chicago, Detroit, French, micro and outsider house, because house has never belonged to one city and a list drawn from one would be answering a smaller question than the title asks.

Five of these ten also appear on the deep house list, including the record at the top of both. The two pages ask different questions: this one is about what defines the whole tradition, that one about a register inside it, and Another Side happens to answer both. Two records that gather earlier twelve-inch sides rather than being written as albums, Theo Parrish's First Floor and St Germain's Boulevard, sit in the near misses with that noted. Neither is disqualified by it. They are simply not the strongest case for their makers here.

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

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