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Ranked list

The 10 Best Progressive House and Rave Albums

The long-form rave album: British dance music of the late eighties and nineties built into something that holds together across forty minutes rather than collected from twelve-inches. Progressive house, the album wing of rave, the chill-out room that ran beside it, and the producers who treated the LP as the unit rather than as a container. From 1988 to now. Big beat kept the breakbeat and dropped the long form and has its own page, which is why the Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim and the Prodigy are ranked there. Records that gather tracks rather than argue across a side are named in the near misses with the reason.

Almost nobody in rave made albums. The music was built for twelve-inches, sold in white labels, and consumed at a tempo that made forty-five minutes of it an endurance test rather than a listen. A rave album, for most of the scene, meant the singles plus enough filler to reach a running time.

A handful of people decided that was a failure of ambition rather than a fact about the music. They took the same machines and the same tempo and built records with a shape, an argument and an ending. Some came out of the same warehouses as everyone else, some arrived from art school with a Roland and a theory, and one pair worked out that the room next door to the dancefloor was where an album could actually happen. Between about 1990 and 1999 they made a form that had not existed before and has barely existed since.

The tradition is narrower than the scene that produced it and wider than it first appears. Seven acts hold the ten, and the near misses name the records built the other way and say what that costs. It is the one list on this site where the boundary does most of the work, and the boundary is the argument.

The ten

  1. Number 1 on The 10 Best Progressive House and Rave Albums

    Orbital — Orbital 2 (Brown Album)1993

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

    Two brothers from Sevenoaks with a sequencer and no interest in anyone's idea of what a dance record was for. Halcyon is the famous one and Lush 3 is the better one, and both work by taking eight minutes to say something a twelve-inch would have said in three.

    Why it is number one

    Phil and Paul Hartnoll made the strongest evidence anyone has produced that rave's own grammar contains enough information to build an album. There is no singer, no guest, no concept imposed from outside, no retreat into ambience and no borrowed rock architecture. There is a sequencer, a sampler, two brothers who had been doing this since 1989, and the discovery that a track's second half can disagree with its first. Halcyon is the famous one, built from a slowed Opus III sample and named for the drug their mother was prescribed, and it works because it takes eight minutes to say something a twelve-inch would have said in three. Lush 3 is the better one and the clearer demonstration: the same figure examined from several angles until the examination becomes the piece. Impact closes the record the way an album closes rather than the way a set does. Everything above it in ambition arrives later and brings something extra to the job. This one solved the problem with nothing but the materials the problem was made of.

  2. Number 2 on The 10 Best Progressive House and Rave Albums

    Underworld — dubnobasswithmyheadman1994

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

    Karl Hyde had spent a decade in bands that went nowhere and Rick Smith had spent it learning machines, and the record they made when they stopped trying to write songs is the most complete world on this page. Cowgirl runs nine minutes and arrives somewhere it did not start. Hyde treats language as another loop, cut from overheard speech and shop signs, which supplies continuity without supplying songs. It is the better record to live inside and the second-purest answer to what this page asks.

  3. Number 3 on The 10 Best Progressive House and Rave Albums

    Leftfield — Leftism1995

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

    Neil Barnes and Paul Daley spent four years making singles and then made the record those singles had been sketching. Afro-Left, Original and Open Up are three different arguments about what a dance record can hold, sequenced so the shifts read as range rather than as indecision. Where Underworld solved the album through continuity, this solves it through variety, and both are answers.

  4. Number 4 on The 10 Best Progressive House and Rave Albums

    Orbital — In Sides1996

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

    The Hartnolls at their most compositional. The Box moves like a piece of music rather than a set, and Out There Somewhere closes the record the way a symphony closes. It sits below Orbital 2 because by 1996 it has started becoming something other than rave, which is an achievement and a departure at once.

  5. Number 5 on The 10 Best Progressive House and Rave Albums

    Underworld — Second Toughest in the Infants1996

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

    It opens with a twenty-minute suite that changes three times and earns the duration structurally rather than simply occupying it. Where dubnobass is one world discovered in real time, this is several things done by people who now know how, and the sense of pacing across a full side is the most developed on this page.

  6. Number 6 on The 10 Best Progressive House and Rave Albums

    808 State — ex:el1991

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

    Manchester's answer, arriving before the Orbital and Underworld solution had hardened into a model. Bernard Sumner on one track and Bjork on two, and none of it sounds like a guest spot. Cubik and In Yer Face are the hard end, Qmart and Lift are the other one, and holding both without the record coming apart is the achievement.

  7. Number 7 on The 10 Best Progressive House and Rave Albums

    The Sabres of Paradise — Haunted Dancehall1994

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

    Andrew Weatherall's laboratory, and a deliberate concept album by club producers who had decided club production was not enough. London dub noir with a shape imposed from the first track, made by someone who had already produced Screamadelica and had nothing left to prove.

  8. Number 8 on The 10 Best Progressive House and Rave Albums

    The Orb — The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld1991

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

    Two hours built as an environment rather than a sequence, by people who ran the room next door to the dancefloor and understood it needed its own music. It proved this scene could sustain something at album scale before anyone else managed it, and it did so by not behaving like a rave record at all. That is what places it here rather than higher.

  9. Number 9 on The 10 Best Progressive House and Rave Albums

    Spooky — Gargantuan1993

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

    Guerilla Records at its peak and the most complete progressive house album made in the style's own moment, by two men writing at album length before most of this list had tried. Little Bullet and Schmoo are the tracks people still play and the record around them holds.

  10. Number 10 on The 10 Best Progressive House and Rave Albums

    Leftfield — Rhythm and Stealth1999

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

    Four years after Leftism, heavier and colder, and the record that closes the decade this page is mostly about. Where Leftism expands outward, this reduces: space becomes part of the arrangement and bass becomes structural. Less generous than the first record and more assured.

Eleven to twenty

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

  1. Number 11 on The 10 Best Progressive House and Rave Albums

    The Future Sound of London — Lifeforms1994

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

    A double album built from rave materials with almost no rave left in it, which is why it is here rather than higher. The furthest this tradition travelled from the room it started in, and still made of the same parts.

  2. Number 12 on The 10 Best Progressive House and Rave Albums

    Underworld — Beaucoup Fish1999

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

    Born Slippy had made them famous and this is the record that had to follow. Cups, Jumbo, King of Snake and Moaner make a coherent long album; it is looser than the two above it and better than its reputation among people who stopped listening after 1996.

  3. Number 13 on The 10 Best Progressive House and Rave Albums

    LFO — Frequencies1991

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

    Warp's bleep manifesto, and a sequence of brilliant machine studies rather than a sustained arc. It survives away from the dancefloor better than almost anything from 1991 and it does not argue across a side.

  4. Number 14 on The 10 Best Progressive House and Rave Albums

    Orbital — Snivilisation1994

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

    Angrier and more political than the records either side of it, with the best individual tracks of their middle period and the least coherent shape.

  5. Number 15 on The 10 Best Progressive House and Rave Albums

    Fluke — Oto1995

    Enormously well made and consistently overlooked, by a band who spent a decade being the most professional act in British dance music. A studio-built progressive record with real continuity, and not the same thing as big beat.

  6. Number 16 on The 10 Best Progressive House and Rave Albums

    The Orb — U.F.Orb1992

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

    Blue Room is forty minutes long and was a top ten single, which is the most absurd fact in this canon. Tighter than Adventures and less inexhaustible.

  7. Number 17 on The 10 Best Progressive House and Rave Albums

    The Shamen — Boss Drum1992

    The record where a Scottish psych band finished becoming a rave act, with Ebeneezer Goode attached to it forever. Better constructed than its reputation. En-Tact is the stranger record and this is the fuller one.

  8. Number 18 on The 10 Best Progressive House and Rave Albums

    The Future Sound of London — Accelerator1992

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

    Papua New Guinea is why it is remembered and the rest is stranger and less finished. The rave album they made before working out what they wanted an album to be.

  9. Number 19 on The 10 Best Progressive House and Rave Albums

    808 State — Newbuild1988

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

    The first British album where rave materials are built to album length, which is this page's own definition arriving before the tradition it defines. Raw acid doing more work than album construction, and being first is not the same as being best.

  10. Number 20 on The 10 Best Progressive House and Rave Albums

    Ultramarine — Every Man and Woman Is a Star1991

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

    Pastoral, folk-inflected and entirely its own thing, made by two men who heard acid house and thought of the English countryside. The record on this page an insider is most likely to omit.

Near misses

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

  • The KLF — The White Room

    The most famous record not ranked here. Justified & Ancient and 3 A.M. Eternal are enormous and the album around them moves between rave, country and stadium pop without deciding which it is. It loses on coherence rather than on ambition, and it would be in the twenty on either of those alone.

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

  • Faithless — Reverence

    Song-based dance-pop with a rapper at the front, which is a different form from the one this page ranks. Insomnia and Salva Mea are enormous and neither needs an album around it.

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

  • Altern-8 — Full On Mask Hysteria

    Hardcore's biggest album, and a run of tracks rather than an argument across a side. Activ 8 and Infiltrate 202 are era-defining and the record is a container for them. Bizarre Inc's Energique, Shut Up and Dance's Dance Before the Police Come! and the Ragga Twins' Reggae Owes Me Money are all the same shape, all four are legitimate studio albums, and all four matter more to rave than most of the twenty above.

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

  • One Dove — Morning Dove White

    Weatherall producing and Dot Allison singing, and the released version is substantially unlike the mixes the group had made. What survives is beautiful and it lost to Haunted Dancehall, which is the same producer solving the same problem with nobody else in the room.

  • Sasha — Airdrawndagger

    A real studio album, four years in the making, and a mood rather than an argument. It is the best answer this tradition produced to the question of what a DJ does with an album, and it stays in the room without ever quite raising its voice.

  • Hybrid — Wide Angle

    Progressive breaks with the Russian Federation Orchestra, and the most ambitious production job in this field. Its orchestral scale outruns the material underneath it more often than it lifts it.

    № 237 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century · № 12 on The 10 Best Big Beat and Breaks Albums

How this list was built

Ten from 295 records considered, running from 1988 to this year. The field was walked from the catalogues of thirty-eight acts, 1,721 masters in all, and an earlier version of this page was ranked from a fifth of that and reached a different answer.

A maximum of two records per artist in the ten. The band and the near misses are not capped. The chill-out room is in scope. The Orb, System 7 and the ambient wing of this moment were part of rave rather than adjacent to it, and a page about the long-form rave album that excluded the longest-form records of the era would be describing the dancefloor rather than the night. The Future Sound of London and Amorphous Androgynous are one act for the cap. Cobain and Dougans under two names is still Cobain and Dougans. Big beat is ranked on its own page. That tradition kept the breakbeat and dropped the long form, which is the distinction this page is built on. Live albums, soundtracks, remix and dub companions, two-in-one reissues and the FSOL subscriber series are excluded on format. FORMAT means a record that cannot be ranked at all. A legitimate studio album that fails the long-form test fails on merit and is labelled that way. Underworld's first two albums are excluded on scope. Underneath the Radar and Change the Weather are a synth-pop band with Karl Hyde and Rick Smith in it, made before Darren Emerson and before rave. They are a different band with two of the same people.

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

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