Ranked list
The 10 Best Trance Albums
Trance in the European sense: the Frankfurt and Berlin schools of the early nineties, the Dutch and British melodic wing, and the Goa and psytrance strain that ran alongside them. The word has meant four different things over thirty years and this list follows the lineage rather than the marketing. Progressive house, hard trance and the festival era sit at the edges and are admitted only where a record earns it. Psybient and psychedelic downtempo belong to the ambient and downtempo pages. From 1990 to now.
Trance has the worst reputation of any genre on this site and the least deserved early catalogue. What the word means to most people now is a main stage in 2006, a build, a breakdown and a hundred thousand hands in the air. What it meant in Frankfurt in 1992 was considerably weirder: long, patient, psychedelic records made by people who had come out of acid house and wanted to go further in rather than further up.
The collapse is worth being precise about. The early German wave, around Eye Q and MFS and Harthouse, was genuinely experimental and largely album-shaped. Then the form found stadiums, and a stadium wants a build every three minutes. By 2000 the interesting work had mostly moved sideways into Goa and psytrance, where the records were still long and strange and nobody was watching. Both halves are represented below.
This is also the list where the site's main canons had least to offer. They hold five trance records between them, which reflects a dancefloor-first scope rule rather than a judgment about the music, and almost everything here had to be found somewhere else.
The ten
- Number 1 on The 10 Best Trance Albums
Jam & Spoon — Tripomatic Fairytales 20011993
№ 199 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
Frankfurt at its most psychedelic and least cynical. Stella is the famous one and the album around it drifts further out than the reputation allows. The high point of trance before the form learned to sell itself.
Why it is number one
Rolf Ellmer and Markus Löffel had already remixed Age of Love into the template half of Europe then copied. Tripomatic Fairytales 2001 is the album where they stop building templates and just go. Stella runs nine minutes and earns every one of them; the rest moves between ambient drift and something close to acid without ever reaching for the obvious release. It is trance made before the genre knew what it was supposed to do, which is exactly why it still sounds unforced. Löffel died in 2006, and this remains the strongest argument for taking the early German wave seriously.
- Number 2 on The 10 Best Trance Albums
Hallucinogen — Twisted1995
№ 155 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
Simon Posford engineering Goa to a precision the genre rarely bothered with. LSD and Fluoro Neuro Sponge are still what people play to explain what this music could do, and the album has aged far better than its scene.
- Number 3 on The 10 Best Trance Albums
Sven Vath — Accident in Paradise1992
№ 168 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
The Eye Q sound at full stretch, made by the man who ran the club, the label and eventually half the industry. Adventurous in a way German trance stopped being once the brand grew larger than the artist.
- Number 4 on The 10 Best Trance Albums
Paul van Dyk — Seven Ways1996
The definitive artist album from the melodic wing before the superclub era flattened it. Van Dyk writes progressions rather than builds, and the record moves rather than climbs.
- Number 5 on The 10 Best Trance Albums
Astral Projection — Trust in Trance1996
Israeli Goa at its most anthemic and most confident, made by a scene that thought it was building something closer to a religion than a genre. Enormous melodies, no embarrassment about any of them.
- Number 6 on The 10 Best Trance Albums
Cosmic Baby — Stellar Supreme1992
№ 198 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
Harald Blüchel studied composition and it shows in every bar. The romantic, classically trained side of Berlin trance, made when the genre was still an experiment with melody rather than a formula for one.
- Number 7 on The 10 Best Trance Albums
Juno Reactor — Beyond the Infinite1995
№ 182 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
Ben Watkins treating Goa as film music years before Hollywood agreed. Percussion troupes, choirs and real arrangement, and the most cinematic thing the psychedelic wing produced.
- Number 8 on The 10 Best Trance Albums
BT — Ima1995
American ambition applied to British progressive trance. Brian Transeau came out of Berklee and built tracks with more layers than the form had asked for, which is either the record's flaw or the whole point.
- Number 9 on The 10 Best Trance Albums
X-Dream — Radio1998
Psytrance turning into machine funk. The tightest album the genre made and the one that pointed at everything the harder European wing did afterwards.
- Number 10 on The 10 Best Trance Albums
Chicane — Far from the Maddening Crowds1997
Balearic trance as an album rather than a singles vehicle. Offshore is the hit and the record around it is patient, warm and quietly sad, which is not what anyone expected from this corner of the genre.
Eleven to twenty
Ranked, and held to the same rules as the ten.
- Number 11 on The 10 Best Trance Albums
Hallucinogen — The Lone Deranger1997
Posford at his most baroque. More intricate than Twisted and a shade less alive.
- Number 12 on The 10 Best Trance Albums
Robert Miles — Dreamland1996
Dream trance's one canonical album. Children built a bridge to daytime radio the genre then walked across permanently.
- Number 13 on The 10 Best Trance Albums
Infected Mushroom — Classical Mushroom2000
Israeli psytrance at its most melodic and most quoted. The record that made the scene international.
- Number 14 on The 10 Best Trance Albums
Union Jack — There Will Be No Armageddon1995
UK progressive-Goa hybrid with a cult that has never faded. Cactus is a genuinely strange piece of work.
- Number 15 on The 10 Best Trance Albums
BT — ESCM1997
№ 238 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
More song-shaped than Ima and more American. The stutter edits here became pop production's furniture.
- Number 16 on The 10 Best Trance Albums
Way Out West — Way Out West1997
Bristol's progressive-trance debut, closer to songs than to sets. The Gift still works.
- Number 17 on The 10 Best Trance Albums
The Infinity Project — Feeling Weird1995
Posford again, pre-Shpongle, at his least polished and most exploratory. A genuine scene document.
- Number 18 on The 10 Best Trance Albums
Man With No Name — Moment of Truth1996
UK Goa at its most melodic, and the record the scene's second tier is measured against.
- Number 19 on The 10 Best Trance Albums
Total Eclipse — Violent Relaxation1996
French Goa, hard and kinetic, and considerably less friendly than its Israeli contemporaries.
- Number 20 on The 10 Best Trance Albums
Etnica — Alien Protein1996
Italian Goa at its most detailed, and the record the scene's producers cite when they are being honest about who could actually engineer.
Near misses
Records considered and not ranked, with the reason each fell short.
Shpongle — Are You Shpongled?
Psybient rather than trance. Posford and Raja Ram built something closer to psychedelic downtempo, and it grew out of the Goa lineage without ever working at its tempo.
Energy 52 — Café del MarNot eligible
A single and its remixes rather than an album. It is also one of the four or five most important records the genre produced, which the album rules cannot reach.
Age of Love — The Age of LoveNot eligible
The same problem. Jam & Spoon's remix of it is where German trance found its shape, and there is no album to rank.
Sasha — Airdrawndagger
The superstar DJ making an album closer to ambient than to his sets, and pilloried for it at the time. That distance from the dancefloor is also what keeps it off a specialist trance page.
Tiesto — In My Memory
The commercial summit of Dutch trance as an album. Competent, enormous, and finishing behind ten records with more ideas.
Above & Beyond — Tri-State
Vocal trance at its most composed, and the best-made record of the Anjunabeats school. It belongs to a later and safer era than this list rewards.
How this list was built
Ten from 84 records considered, and most of the field had to be assembled from outside the site's main canons, which hold five trance records between them. The pool ran from Frankfurt in 1990 through the Goa and psytrance scenes to the superclub era, because a list built only from what the bigger canons already held would have been worthless.
Goa and psytrance are ranked here rather than on a page of their own, on the grounds that they are where the interesting long-form work went after 1997. If that wing ever supports ten records by itself it should be split out. Shpongle is the one record where that line had to be drawn against a favourite: it is psybient, it works at a different tempo, and it sits in the near misses rather than the ten. Two of the genre's most consequential records cannot be ranked anywhere, because Café del Mar and Age of Love exist as singles and remix packages rather than albums.
Every trance record on this site, ranked within its own canon rather than against each other, is on the trance genre page.