DJ Elmoe knocked our socks off with footwork that still sounds as fresh as the first day we heard the style. Lindstrøm returned with the umpteenth coming of space disco and got us starry-eyed for the umpteenth time. Purelink dusted off ambient dub, Anthony Naples dabbled in tech-house, OPN reacquainted himself with a beloved sample pack—there were plenty of reasons to feel just fine about feeling nostalgic this year. But there were just as many opportunities to scrape your jaw up off the floor: the mangled drum science of Blawan’s SickElixir, the polyrhythmic abandon of Djrum’s Under Tangled Science, the non-Euclidean geometries of Barker’s Stochastic Drift. Those were just a few of our favorite electronic releases this year; here are all 30.
Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2025 wrap-up coverage here.
(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)
Jeremy Hyman: Low Air
A drummer with credits on records by Dan Deacon, L’Rain, and Lifted, the in-house ambient-jazz braintrust of D.C.’s Future Times label, Jeremy Hyman steps out on his own with a solo album of luminescent boogie and acid-squiggled atmospherics that’s part Windham Hill, part Detroit techno, and positively bursting with personality.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade
DJ Elmoe: Battle Zone
A track from DJ Elmoe had the pole position on Planet Mu’s landmark compilation Bangs & Works Vol. 1, which introduced Chicago footwork to the wider world, but Elmoe has mostly been self-releasing his music since then. Collecting more than a decade’s worth of his work, Battle Zone is a fascinating showcase of his singular style: nimble, pointillist, and seemingly zero-G, reminiscent of hummingbirds communicating in Morse code.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
james K: friend
London’s AD 93 label put out some of the year’s most rewardingly challenging releases—records like YHWH Nailgun’s bracing 45 Pounds and Moin’s math-rocking Belly Up—but it also gave us one of 2025’s most gratifyingly listenable records with james K’s friend. The New York singer-producer’s long-awaited album, following a recent string of scene-stealing features, slots loosely into the ubiquitous early-’00s revival in its blissed-out downtempo and dream pop. But the enveloping richness of her production and the gossamer drift of her voice elevate her music far above her pastiche-besotted peers.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal
Whatever the Weather: Whatever the Weather II
Loraine James’ first album as Whatever the Weather floated a simple enough concept, pairing atmospheric sketches with the temperatures they evoked for her. Whatever the Weather II is a continuation of the conceit, but the first album’s contrasts have been smoothed out into a more cohesive collection of ambient etudes. Whatever the thermometer might say, the emotional temperature here is gratifyingly consistent—the forecast generally cloudy, with a chance of rumination.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal
Voice Actor & Squu: Lust (1)
After the bewildering four-and-a-half-hour sprawl of Voice Actor’s 2022 album Sent From My Telephone, Noa Kurzweil’s second album under the alias clocks in at a far more manageable 45 minutes, but the contents are just as slippery. A co-production with Wales’ Squu, Lust (1) seeps outward like a stain, grainy synths and screwed samples blurring at the edges. It’s Kurzweil’s narcoleptic voice that holds it all together as she mutters half-intelligible incantations like some high priestess of ASMR.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal
Call Super: A Rhythm Protects One
Ever the trickster, London producer JR Seaton, aka Call Super, invents nine new aliases—names like Scarletina, Conny Slipp, and DJ Flowerdew—as the cadre behind a faux compilation meant to pay tribute to canonical mix CDs of yore. But one listen to the fractal funk of the set’s intricate minimal techno and there’s no doubting that it all comes from the same inspired source.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify
K-LONE: sorry i thought you were someone else
Josiah Gladwell’s third album as K-LONE maintains the refinement of its predecessors; the UK producer has always approached his singular brand of techno like a jeweller armed with needle-nose pliers and a loupe. But his gems have never been as radiant as they are here, nor his spinning clockworks so elegant.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
ex_libris: 001 / 002
After a decade of silence, Dave Huismans—the Dutch musician formerly known as 2562 and A Made Up Sound—returned this year with some of his most adventurous work yet, deep in a long career spent testing the limits of electronic music. In contrast to the leftfield dubstep, garage, and techno of his previous output, his music as ex_libris—on a pair of simultaneously released EPs—largely ignores dancefloor convention, opting instead for narcotic downtempo, ambient soundscaping, and labyrinthine house grooves. The common denominator of it all is Huismans’ evident determination to pry apart familiar sounds and find hidden secrets lurking inside.
001: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify
002: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify
Nazar: Demilitarize
After what he called the “rough kuduro” of debut album Guerilla, an album informed by his experiences in war-torn Angola, Nazar turns more reflective on the followup, softening the beats and sweetening the atmosphere. The penumbral mood and crumbling rhythms both find common cause with the the nocturnal brooding of his labelmate Burial, but Nazar has one crucial tool to keep the darkness at bay: his softly melodic voice, which casts a warm glow over even the starkest passages.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal
Nick León: A Tropical Entropy
The Miami DJ-producer caps his remarkable ascent over the past few years—2022’s underground hit “Xtasis”; remixes for Lucrecia Dalt, Ela Minus, and DJ Babatr; the Erika de Casier collab “Bikini,” destined to soundtrack pool parties from now until the world’s water supply runs out—with a richly varied album that looks beyond his club bona fides. Propulsive percussion and infectious syncopations are in ample supply, but so are weirder, woozier moments keyed to the humid psychedelia of Miami after hours.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal
Lindstrøm: Sirius Syntoms
Hans-Peter Lindstrøm has been turning out exactly this style of silky Norwegian disco for decades now, so what was it that made Sirius Syntoms hit so hard? It might have something to do with the richness of his synthesizers, which seem to have aged like fine wine over the years; it might also be because his hooks are sharper than ever, and his chords more buoyant. More than anything, it’s the sense of intentionality that illuminates every string vamp and handclap. After so many years spent making cosmic disco, it would have been easy to hit autopilot, but on the idiosyncratic and highly skilled producer’s delightful seventh album, there’s no doubt who’s in charge of the ship.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Cahl Sel: Traces
You could be forgiven for assuming that this album from San Francisco’s newly revived Reflective Records—a staple of ’90s leftfield electronic music—was a lost gem from three decades ago, given how faithfully it recalls the glories of golden-age IDM and ambient techno. Traces does, in fact, boast a storied provenance: Cahl Sel is none other than Jasper Sharp, son of Reflective founder Jonah Sharp, better known as ambient-techno legend Spacetime Continuum. But the variety and vivacity of these dozen tracks, all created on an old-school hardware setup, are proof that Cahl Sel doesn’t lack for ideas of his own.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade
Purelink: Faith
The dub-techno revivalists’ second album is even foggier than their 2023 debut: When there are beats, which is seldom, they’re so muted as to go almost unnoticed, and the trio’s synths and guitars tend to swirl in a pastel blur. But even at its subtlest and most diffuse, the trio’s music is more emotionally direct than ever; a plaintive feature from Loraine James and a measured spoken-word performance from poet Angelina Nonaj prove that Purelink have no interest in obfuscation.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
DJ Haram: Beside Myself
Rebellious forms of dance music are typically hailed for their liberatory potential, as though jagged beats could tear a hole through the status quo, offering glimpses of a better world. DJ Haram’s Beside Myself, on the other hand, trades elation for claustrophobia. Her fusions are even more radical than on previous releases, smashing together club beats, Egyptian darbuka, blasts of noise, and glowering features from Armand Hammer, Moor Mother, and BbyMutha. Faced with the ugliness of the world, Haram’s uncompromising response is to fight fire with fire.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal
Anthony Naples: Scanners
The lean, streamlined sounds of ’00s minimal have been bubbling back up in recent years—not enough to call it a revival yet, maybe, but enough not to be merely coincidence. On his most dancefloor-focused album ever, American DJ-producer puts his own muscular stamp on the tradition, stripping his grooves back to the essentials: sternum-thumping drum machines, subliminally low bass grooves, and the stealthiest of synths. But there’s a willful spark in these fleet, buoyant tracks that refuses to settle for mere revivalism.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
gyrofield: Suspension of Belief EP
A rising artist better known for deconstructing drum’n’bass reinvents their own sound on their debut EP for Objekt’s Kapsela label, reimagining staple elements of ’90s progressive house and techno as the building blocks for storming dancefloor cuts that don’t fit any known mold.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Shinichi Atobe: Discipline
Japan’s most celebrated dub-techno icon continues his recent trajectory toward sunnier sounds, trading the shadowy atmospheres of his early work for driving house tracks filled out with bright, crisp, almost opalescent sound design. What makes it so captivating is that even at its most seemingly straightforward, the music’s glistening timbres and tactile textures lend an unmistakable sense of otherness, a sense of mystery you can’t quite unravel.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Blawan: SickElixir
The funniest joke of the year in electronic music is surely Blawan—the techno brutalist responsible for the unhinged noise terror of 2012’s “Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage”—calling a song “Don’t Worry We Happy.” Talk about a bait and switch: Instead of Bobby McFerrin-style a cappella or reggae uplift, it plays out like a car-crash video looped on infinite repeat. (The only whistling is the air seeping out of your punctured lung.) Such malevolence is par for the course for Blawan, but on SickElixir, he makes the violence sing like never before. Beyond the mere heaviness of his drums, what makes this stuff so awesomely daunting is the ragged sound design of his blistered synths and guttural demon voices. You can just about imagine the effects plugins lined up in his Ableton window: distortion, reverb, compression, meat grinder.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal
Heinali / Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko: Гільдеґарда (Hildegard)
Nine centuries since it was written, the abbess, composer, and mystic Hildegard von Bingen’s music can still feel almost shockingly contemporary. Here, Ukraine’s Heinali confirms its links to the ambient canon with a set of longform renditions on modular synthesizer, while his compatriot Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko finds in Hildegard’s devotional songs a powerful expression of wartime anguish.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Ø: Sysivalo
This is not the first posthumous release since Mika Vainio’s untimely death in 2017, but it’s clearly his swan song. The former Pan Sonic member was nearly finished with the album when he died—his survivors assembled the final tracklisting from his drafts and notes—and its 20 short tracks reveal a rarely heard side of the Finnish electronic musician. In place of his usual severity, its distant clouds of fuzzed-out tone are filled with tenderness and grace.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force: Khadim
Having developed their live show into a heavyweight mbalax juggernaut featuring nine or 10 drummers, vocalists, and musicians, Mark Ernestus and his ensemble strip down to a percussive skeleton crew held together by the sinewy tones of dub techno. But even the most dynamic dub techno never moved quite like this stuff does.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Eiko Ishibashi & Jim O’Rourke: Pareidolia
Quite unlike Eiko Ishibashi’s song-based Antigone, from earlier in the year, Paraidolia collects and reworks a series of 2023 live performances with her longtime collaborator Jim O’Rourke. Across four extended tracks, synths and flute collide and crumble with electroacoustic abandon, exploding into vast clouds of drone and sending tracers scurrying along new pathways. You could call it labyrinthine if the whole thing weren’t so maddeningly, rapturously diffuse.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
James Holden / Wacław Zimpel: The Universe Will Take Care of You
Surrounding themselves with instruments both relatively traditional (clarinet, organ, lap steel, synths) and not so much (alghoza flute, walnuts, teacup), the two musicians let loose their wildest architectural fantasies across interlocking chains of arpeggios: towers, staircases, Escherian flights of fancy. It’s a psychedelic sandbox filled with imaginary castles reaching to the sky.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal
Carrier: Rhythm Immortal
There’s nothing new about dystopian electronic music; fantasies of collapse are central to both drum’n’bass and techno, genres that have informed Guy Brewer’s work under a number of aliases, most recently Carrier. But societal ruin has rarely sounded as sensuous as it does in these soot-choked elegies for abandoned cities and blackened landscapes, in which a pall of white noise traps the last traces of analog warmth. In contrast to his dancefloor work of yore, the grooves are lumbering and uncertain, but both the music and the title suggest that long after the last discotheque has crumbled to dust, the pulse of our machines will go on.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
feeo: Goodness
Theodora Laird’s early EPs were innovative, mixing tactile sound design, incisive songwriting, and a soulful showstopper of a voice. But her debut album is revelatory in large part for what it doesn’t do. Having proved her facility for beauty and grace, she gives free rein to her darker instincts, mulling over minimalist electronics and unleashing the occasional barrage of blackened noise. But as proven by the gorgeously vulnerable “Here,” when she feels like it, she can also break hearts with little more than a held chord and a sigh.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
aya: hexed!
Alternate-dimensional sound design meets guttural vocalizations of the rawest emotion: After the dissociative spiral of aya’s eerie 2021 album im hole, she goes for the gut punch on hexed!, confronting the pleasures and terrors of newfound sobriety and giving joyfully rage-filled voice to the full spectrum of trans being. The only thing more ecstatically, acerbically overwhelming are the live shows she’s developed around the album.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal
Djrum: Under Tangled Silence
Like a Phoenix from the ashes, Djrum’s third album came crawling from the wreckage of a melted hard drive. The process of grappling with an album’s worth of lost work—salvaging what he could, mourning what he couldn’t—gave shape to this wildly dynamic record, an unpredictable amalgam of Keith Jarrett-esque piano improv, mind-boggling drum programming, hyper-detailed jungle rhythms, and biomorphic sound design. To hear him tell it, the album’s creation was an emotional roller coaster. Maybe that’s why, in ambition and execution alike, it’s leagues beyond anything he’s done to date.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal
Oneohtrix Point Never: Tranquilizer
The inspiration for Tranquilizer came from the disappearance—and eventual reappearance—of a beloved collection of commercial sample CDs that Daniel Lopatin had once bookmarked on the Internet Archive. It seemed an appropriate synecdoche, he thought, for the precarity of digital media and the unreliability of cultural memory. Just as fitting, then, that the album marks Lopatin’s own return to the lysergic sample play of classics like 2011’s Replica, spinning all manner of stray scraps into cobwebbed abstractions. Despite the high-concept framing, though, Tranquilizer never feels like it requires a set of footnotes to understand it—on the contrary, its mix of the enveloping and the unpredictable gives it a welcome sense of immediacy.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal
Barker: Stochastic Drift
On Sam Barker’s second album, the Berlin-based musician feels less like a beatmaker than a glassblower working in real time, coaxing inert materials into luminous, elastic whorls. Barker first made his name by subtracting the kick drum from techno, and Stochastic Drift, true to form, forswears anything like an anchoring bass drum in order to bounce freely atop choppy waves of ambient pulse. But his music here is also heftier and more percussive than it’s been in ages—particularly on the closing tracks, which feel like broken-beat jazz rendered in materials salvaged from a downed spacecraft.
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal
Los Thuthanaka: Los Thuthanaka
It’s not often that the loose agglomeration of styles typically called “dance music” breaks this wide open, shedding virtually all of its customary tropes, and replacing them with sounds and ideas drawn from completely different genres. On their duo debut, siblings Chuquimamami-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton interweave the Andean styles of their Aymara heritage—loping grooves like huayño, caporales, and kullawada—with metal guitars, bright synth melodies, and blown-out radio effects. The result is a sashaying take on trance-drone-noise music that may introduce you to frequencies you’ve never so much as dreamed of.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
