7 Great Electronic Albums from Summer 2026
Welcome back to Artificial Intelligence, focusing on electronic and adjacent musics as part of Treble’s series of quarterly genre-based roundups. What is your dance-music summer like? Is it a bouncy workout deep in a club or at a crowded beach or festival? Is it a subdued atmosphere, heavy as a humid night? Does it zig and zag like an insect swarm, or provide focus as pool lanes or a yoga mat might? Whether they’re escapist like vacation or oppressive like drought, beats and beeps have long defined the soundtrack of our middle months. Here are some recommendations of recent music meant for kissing the sun, along with a hot throwback.
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Berndt/Schmidt – Cloud Machines
You’d be forgiven if you listened to the relentlessly jagged instrumental lines on this album, saw the name on the cover, and immediately thought of Krautrock, kosmische, or some other facet of Continental post-Cold War avant garde. Instead, Cloud Machines freshly emanates from deepest, darkest Baltimore, courtesy of local experimental musician John Berndt and Matmos member M.C. Schmidt. The tracks bring together a host of unlikely sonic bedfellows, from their hands and those of sampled others: endless analog beeps and drones, unvarnished hand percussion and glitched guitar, wildly modified synth lines and washes. You can draw a line in this pair’s work from the tech-heavy background music of Raymond Scott’s later catalog to contemporary weirdness from Mouse on Mars and Oval. Playful and challenging, their incognito songcraft is full of scraps of found and constructed beats, and melodies that go nowhere and everywhere at once.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)
Alan Elettronico – Odyssey
This veteran Italian musician’s second album finds him transitioning from the space disco influences found on 2023’s Electric Mind to soothsaying Balearic house. Elettronico’s broad inspiration here was the Homeric epic referenced in the title, but he really focuses on the water and waterways that carried Odysseus on his journey. The LP is an exercise in flow, in constant momentum, in patterns mapped out by currents and tides. Indeed, in every track from “Spaceman 3” through “All in My Mind” there’s a sense of 4/4 calm and comfort, reliable as early Moby or Röyksopp were, right down to the BPM.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Front 242 – Black Out
When you’re a fan of an artist with a back catalog fractured by rights and distribution issues, it absolutely does not help if they decide to hang things up. If they must retire, here’s hoping they follow the lead of Patrick Codenys, Jean-Luc De Meyer, and Richard23, capturing for posterity a farewell concert that shines a bright, loving light on the legacy of Belgian EBM legends Front 242. Black Out was recorded at their final show in Brussels in January of 2025, an energetic celebration of their aggressive industrial dance stretching from their first releases more than 40 years ago (“Take One”) and cult classics (“Headhunter”) to their later label-hopping (“Happiness [More Angels]”) and new concert exclusives (“Fix It”). In the absence of wide availability of Front 242’s discography, Black Out is the closest we might get to paradise in the meantime.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Amazon (vinyl)
PIG – Hurt People Hurt
If you’re longing for industrial metal with a militaristic feel that comes from an artist with far fewer cancel-culture considerations, it might be time to reconsider PIG, the creative concern from KMFDM founding member Raymond Watts. Hurt People Hurt holds more than a few moments where the arrangements and delivery have the kind of theatrical flair meant for Broadway stages. Alongside longtime collaborator Jim Davies (whose best-known guitar riffs appear on The Prodigy’s “Firestarter” and “Breathe”), Watts produces half-time grooves with sludgy, drawled statements on blind faith, false gods, embracing imperfection, and more of the genre’s greatest-hits laundry list of critiques from the outcast.
Rare DM – Attention
Brooklyn musician Erin Hoagg is a whole mood as Rare DM, her confidently blasé talk-singing and spare electro conjuring images of goth club nights and domme-girlfriend weekends. And that feeds into Attention being as telling an album title as it gets; these songs address attention paid and received, ignored and responded to, and the consequences thereof. Occasionally dipping into an affected accent as “Alain” Jourgensen once did, Rare DM slowly layers keyboard and drum-machine parts to build monuments to both the flirtatious (“I’ve got some room in my passenger seat if you want a ride” from “325”) and intensely disinterested (“We’re not even fucking/Why am I worried about you?” from “Mean Girled”). Tribute must be paid.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Rikki G. Godd – Cost of Living
With a new stage name for Portland, Oregon percussionist Colin Blanton comes a new set of sonic expectations. Cost of Living delivers what might politely be described as intricately arranged power noise, with gabber’s speed and dub’s echoes, as heard through old and busted speakers. The threads of melody he gives us in tuned percussion and the guitar drone track “Diet Heaven” are scratchy and uncomfortable, and bless your heart for attempting to head-nod to cuts like “I Am Dead” and the title song. The open spaces in the last two tracks, “Scum” and “Tomb Work,” give your senses some measure of recovery from an overall breathtaking release. Cost of Living feels like the bonus beats Godflesh might have asked for, meant to drown out the voices in your head.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Saavan – PURE
After a 6-month-long trickle of singles, Parisian duo Lucas Mokrani and Claire Lengaigne finally pulled them together with four other songs on their second full-length. The highlights of PURE are their double-time cuts like the soulful bounce of “Where Did My Friends Go?” and the insistent “Saint,” which suggests Jamiroquai being led down Everything But the Girl’s Walking Wounded path with PinkPantheress as a guide. But it’s not like the rest of the album gets left behind, as Savaan not only construct solid contemporary pop and R&B balladry but cuts like “Nosferatu” that clearly take notes from breaks music and trip-hop. Music for new streams, made from old parts, inspired by respected sources.
Listen: Spotify
Repeat One
Orbital – In Sides (1996)
Paul and Phil Hartnoll had already transformed their acidic techno to something more hypnotic, and then again on 1994’s Snivilisation to something akin to storytelling. The work that showed up two years later on In Sides found Orbital going all-in on the development of contemplative, non-linear grooves, presaging the work they would soon start to do for soundtracks. “Petrol” feels like it should be running behind a racing game; “The Girl with the Sun in Her Head” suggests that it represents someone in the form of autobiography or senior project. But the two-part suite version of “The Box” is what really charges up the album and the duo’s career. It would be released in various forms including a 28-minute self-contained score for Paul Hartnoll’s recurring childhood dream, and it would inform their take on the theme for the movie version of The Saint the next year.
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