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Ranked list

The 10 Best Jungle and Drum & Bass Albums

One list, because it is one field. Jungle and drum and bass are the same lineage at different points in its life: the records overlap, the producers overlap, and separating them would leave two thin pages where one good one belongs. Admitted: hardcore's breakbeat children from 1992 onward, jungle proper, techstep, liquid, jazzstep and the modern revival. Breakcore and dubstep have their own lists.

Jungle was built for a sound system and a dubplate, and for a long stretch nobody making it had any reason to think in albums. The music moved at the speed of a white label handed across a counter on Friday afternoon and played the same night. Producers who sat down to write forty-five minutes usually ended up with a collection of their own twelve-inches, which is a different object.

Then 1994 and 1995 happened. Parallel Universe put string arrangements over breakbeat science, Black Secret Technology treated the break as living tissue, and Timeless opened with a twenty-one minute title track and charted anyway. Within two years the genre had a Mercury Prize and an argument about whether any of this was good for it. The albums below are the ones that survived that argument.

The last thing worth noting is how tight this canon is. Seventy-one records were assessed against a hundred and eighty for house, and the gap is the point rather than a shortfall. Jungle's greatness lives on twelve-inches to a degree no other genre here can match, and a top ten has to be honest that it is ranking the exceptions rather than the rule.

The ten

  1. Number 1 on The 10 Best Jungle and Drum & Bass Albums

    Goldie — Timeless1995

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

    The ambition record. Strings, Diane Charlemagne, a title track running twenty-one minutes, and a chart position nobody predicted. Jungle arguing for its own seriousness and winning on the first attempt.

    Why it is number one

    Twenty-one minutes of strings and Diane Charlemagne before the breaks even settle, on a major label, in 1995, from a man who had been painting trains a few years earlier. Timeless is where jungle stops apologising for its ambitions. It is not the purest thing here and Goldie has never pretended otherwise; Inner City Life alone gave the genre a melody people who never went near a rave can still hum. What it has over everything else is scale and nerve. Metalheadz became the most important logo in British music for about four years on the strength of it, and the album still sounds like someone trying to build a cathedral out of a breakbeat.

  2. Number 2 on The 10 Best Jungle and Drum & Bass Albums

    A Guy Called Gerald — Black Secret Technology1995

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

    Breaks treated as living tissue rather than loops, recorded and mixed so murkily that the original pressing is part of the legend. Gerald had already made Voodoo Ray and left 808 State, then built jungle's deep end more or less alone.

  3. Number 3 on The 10 Best Jungle and Drum & Bass Albums

    Photek — Modus Operandi1997

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

    Engineered to watchmaker tolerances from a bedroom in St Albans. Every hit is placed, every silence is deliberate, and the whole record moves like something stalking you. Nobody has matched the precision since, including Photek.

  4. Number 4 on The 10 Best Jungle and Drum & Bass Albums

    4hero — Parallel Universe1994

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

    Dego and Marc Mac putting orchestration over breakbeat a year before anyone thought it was allowed. Reinforced was already the most important label in the scene; this is where its ambitions arrived in full.

  5. Number 5 on The 10 Best Jungle and Drum & Bass Albums

    Roni Size / Reprazent — New Forms1997

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

    Drum and bass played as a band, with upright bass and live percussion, when the genre was almost entirely machines. Two hours long and occasionally sprawling. It took the Mercury and dragged the music onto the national news for a fortnight.

  6. Number 6 on The 10 Best Jungle and Drum & Bass Albums

    Ed Rush & Optical — Wormhole1998

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

    The turn toward metal and menace. Settle brought No U-Turn's filth, Quinn brought the mixdown science, and techstep stopped being a tendency and became the default for years.

  7. Number 7 on The 10 Best Jungle and Drum & Bass Albums

    Omni Trio — The Deepest Cut Vol 11995Collected works

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

    Rob Haigh came from experimental music, which is why the piano rushes have real harmony under them. It gathers the Moving Shadow sides rather than being written in one go, and Renegade Snares defined a whole euphoric strain that is still played out three decades on.

  8. Number 8 on The 10 Best Jungle and Drum & Bass Albums

    Adam F — Colours1997

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

    Jazz fusion at 170 with a completely straight face. Circles put a bassline into the genre's permanent furniture, and the album around it is the rarest thing in this field: drum and bass that works as a varied, properly written long-player rather than a run of tools.

  9. Number 9 on The 10 Best Jungle and Drum & Bass Albums

    LTJ Bukem — Journey Inwards2000

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

    Rhodes chords, rainforest samples and an entire parallel aesthetic, arriving as an album after the sound had already spread everywhere. A summary rather than a discovery, and one of the very few that justifies its length.

  10. Number 10 on The 10 Best Jungle and Drum & Bass Albums

    Source Direct — Exorcise the Demons1999

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

    St Albans noir. Baker and Aslett built tracks out of silence and threat, and every break lands like something is about to happen in the next room. The most cinematic thing the genre produced.

Eleven to twenty

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

  1. Number 11 on The 10 Best Jungle and Drum & Bass Albums

    Krust — Coded Language1999

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

    Afrofuturist argument with Saul Williams on the title track. Ideas ahead of dancefloor function, deliberately.

  2. Number 12 on The 10 Best Jungle and Drum & Bass Albums

    Alex Reece — So Far1996

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

    Pulp Fiction pulled jungle toward the jazz club, and this catches the moment before it hardened into a formula.

  3. Number 13 on The 10 Best Jungle and Drum & Bass Albums

    T.Power — The Self Evident Truth of an Intuitive Mind1995

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

    Science fiction cinema at 170. The most sustained atmospheric statement of the era.

  4. Number 14 on The 10 Best Jungle and Drum & Bass Albums

    Boymerang — Balance of the Force1997

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

    Graham Sutton of Bark Psychosis crossing over properly rather than as a tourist. A door opened once and quietly closed.

  5. Number 15 on The 10 Best Jungle and Drum & Bass Albums

    Bad Company — Inside the Machine2000

    Techstep's commercial and technical peak. The Nine and Planet Dust, and very little fat on it.

  6. Number 16 on The 10 Best Jungle and Drum & Bass Albums

    Calibre — Musique Concrete2001

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

    Set the standard for liquid and he has out-written most of the genre since. The catalogue is the achievement more than any one record.

  7. Number 17 on The 10 Best Jungle and Drum & Bass Albums

    dBridge — The Gemini Principle2008

    Autonomic before Autonomic. Halftime, space, and the moment the genre started listening to itself again.

  8. Number 18 on The 10 Best Jungle and Drum & Bass Albums

    Instra:mental — Resolution 6532011

    Where drum and bass met Detroit and electro, and pointed at the decade after it.

  9. Number 19 on The 10 Best Jungle and Drum & Bass Albums

    Spring Heel Jack — 68 Million Shades1996

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

    Jungle as compositional material rather than dancefloor form. The art-school wing at its lushest.

  10. Number 20 on The 10 Best Jungle and Drum & Bass Albums

    Zomby — Where Were U in 922008

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

    Hardcore nostalgia constructed single-handed, and adjacent to this scene rather than inside it. Belongs in the conversation regardless.

Near misses

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

How this list was built

Ten from 71 records considered, the smallest field of any list here apart from Detroit. That is not a shortfall in the search. Jungle's album canon genuinely is this narrow, and padding it would have meant ranking twelve-inch collections as though they were written as records.

Photek's Form & Function gathers and reworks earlier singles rather than being written as an album, and it sits in the near misses with that stated rather than ranked around. Zomby's Where Were U in 92 is hardcore nostalgia rather than jungle in the strict sense and is ranked with the qualification visible. Breakcore, dubstep and UK bass have their own lists, and several producers here appear on them too, which is what happens when one lineage keeps splitting.

Every jungle / drum & bass record on this site, ranked within its own canon rather than against each other, is on the jungle / drum & bass genre page.

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