One thing you’ll generally notice in our coverage of “dance music” is that we don’t stick to the most basic four-on-the-floor rhythms and most calming ambience. Buzzing EDM bass drops might be great for social media clickthroughs, but 2025 in particular has felt like a very cerebral year for electronica. Streaks of jittery noise like lightning through digital clouds, angry analog beats that hearken back to and legitimize industrial, syrupy hyperpop that elevates R&B’s vocabulary—all of these remind us that electronica doesn’t need to be specifically IDM in order to be intelligent. Here are the 10 best chapters written for this year’s synthesized story.
Blurbs by Adam Blyweiss (AB), Adam P. Newton (APN), Colin Dempsey (CD), Jason Brow (JB), and Jeff Terich (JT).
Note: When you buy something through our affiliate links, Treble receives a commission. All albums we cover are chosen by our editors and contributors.
Barker – Stochastic Drift
As our EIC declared earlier this year, “Barker’s road to transcendence is a delightfully crooked one.” Stochastic Drift overflows with thick layers of tension, as rhythms, instrumentation, and arrangements engage in a deeply syncopated dance that begs for a resolution that never arrives. Across eight terrific songs, the album blurs the line between minimalist IDM, new-school jazz, and traditional techno by embracing delicate movements and encouraging forward momentum. And while you could use it for quiet contemplation, this remarkable record deserves to be enjoyed at a significant volume so that you can first hear and then be enraptured by the intricate flourishes Barker injects into the music. It’s an elevated listening experience that challenges what you think you need and want from electronic music. – APN
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Circuit des Yeux – Halo on the Inside
The musical road from intricate art-pop to clamorous industrial has more travelers than you might imagine at first glance—consider the career of our Lord and Savior, Björk. What matters when you choose that path is that you make it your own, which is exactly what you get from Circuit des Yeux. On Halo on the Inside, she infuses that penchant for technical yet theatrical composition we celebrated on 2021’s -io with glowering bombast and cavernous production. Yet, instead of relying on a preening maximalism that could have turned one-note very quickly, she balances the aggression with tender introspection in the lyrics. As evinced on standout tracks such as “Megaloner,” “Canopy of Eden,” and “Truth,” the effect is akin to a solitary figure standing in the dark petitioning the pantheon of the gods for clarity, relief, and direction. This is a towering triumph of artistic growth. – APN
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)
DJ Haram – Beside Myself
While DJ Haram’s proper debut LP has a purposefully disjointed mixtape feel to it (much like Yaeji’s What We Drew), her hand remains deceptively steady, drawing from consistent emotional and sonic lines. The chords and progressions of Arabic music temper even her hardest dancefloor grooves (“Loneliness Epidemic”) with a sense of introspection. The production on her instrumentals (“Walking Memory”) tracks moody and mournful. And whether she’s backing spoken word (“Remaining”), true guest bars by the likes of Armand Hammer (“Stenography”), or female vocals distorted or otherwise (“Sahel”), DJ Haram makes the party political. – AB
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Djrum – Under Tangled Silence
Largely rebuilt after catastrophic hardware failure, and leaning into his prodigal skills with piano and harp, the London producer’s third full-length album focuses on themes of rebirth and reconstruction. Djrum uses those string instruments as if they were at the center of a self-styled jazz or modern classical combo session with his loops, triggers, and filters serving as the backing “band”—the Van Gelder studio in a bottle. He’s flexible enough to present the work as if he were a soloist with the lightest touches of digital decay (“Unweaving”) as well as storm through full arrangements of the kind of buzzing, cracked drum- and/or drill’n’bass (“L’Ancienne”) that Roni Size and Venetian Snares used to make. – AB
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
FKA twigs – EUSEXUA/EUSEXUA Afterglow (Young/Atlantic)
An album so nice she released it thrice. Kind of. FKA twigs kicked off a year in music with her most amplified and energized album in EUSEXUA, a euphoric and sexy (hence the title) set of dancefloor bangers that found the British artist mostly casting aside the dreamy ballads of previous albums in favor of a more immediate and invigorating pulse. That alone was enough to be our third-favorite album of the year. But it was also only the first in a triptych of records that showcased just how fruitful this period ended up being for her, going the Carly Rae Jepsen/HEALTH route of delivering an album’s worth of outtakes/b-sides (which very nearly match the highs of the original album) months later, as well as an alternate version of EUSEXUA with a reworked tracklist. Normally I’d be wary of overindulging but this case of too-much-of-a-good-thing is just enough. – JT
Listen/Buy: Spotify | Amazon (vinyl)
Rochelle Jordan – Through the Wall
Y’all can argue if Beyoncé’s Renaissance or The Weeknd’s work with Daft Punk kicked off some house-pop revivalism movement, yet it’s smaller, in-the-margins artists who are currently crushing the moment. Rochelle Jordan’s Through the Wall continues the revelations heard from her on Play with the Changes five years ago, transporting everyone and everything in the vicinity to the 1990s. “Ladida” is a bright, playful bookend to that era’s “Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless),” and a gateway to the rest of the album’s infatuation with some of the UK’s greatest hits: enlightened disco, the early punch of garage, big beat’s slide into pop, pop stars’ slide into Eurodance. – AB
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Oneohtrix Point Never – Tranquilizer
Two years ago, I wrote that Daniel Lopatin’s last Oneohtrix Point Never record Again was made “for nobody but him.” It played the Lopatin hits but only he connected with its contents, though that was by design. Again sounded like what you remember Oneohtrix Point Never sounding like, in theory at least, while Tranquilizer synthesizes the way Lopatin’s music has, historically, made you feel. Presumptive, yes, but it taps into the bespoke excitement of technology’s future that only Lopatin can capture through alchemizing nostalgia. Tranquilizer brews the most potent sense of ease that’s ever graced a Oneohtrix Point Never album by rebuilding internet archive samples into a frictionless vision. It is anything but selfish. – CD
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Turntable Lab (vinyl)
Slikback – Attrition
The anger of tuned drums in halting patterns and the sad moans of digitized drone have each leapt off of electronica’s sonic page for years. (See: The Bug and Burial, respectively.) It takes a special kind of producer to know how to integrate both in a way that engages and entertains, and Kenyan DJ Slikback might just be him. He can turn breakneck breakbeats and the telltale wobble of bass music into focused journeys like “Taped” that feel narrative in nature, then spin around and create aggressive sonic baths like “Trars” and “Sheltered” built to compete with the legacy of industrial music. Attrition is a headphone trip to be sure, but it’s one fraught with no small degree of danger. – AB
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Soulwax – All Systems are Lying
Soulwax said that they wanted All Systems are Lying to feel like “a band playing electronic instruments.” Achievement unlocked. The Belgian band’s album is expansive like arena rock but breathes with the air of intimacy you’d find in the smallest underground clubs. After a wistful opener (“Pills and People Gone”), the party starts back up with the space-disco bop of “Run Free.” Ebbing and flowing like an adrenaline rush during the last night on Earth, All Systems are Lying beams with moments of sparse minimalism, offering miles of dancefloor between the tracks. Lyrically, the songs run lean and efficient: repeated phrases about society and tech yield clarity. The energy peaks with “Hot Like Sahara,” a banger by all definitions, before a sweet coda. All Systems are Lying is Soulwax’s first fully focused album since 2004’s Any Minute Now; if it takes another two decades for another LP like this, we’ll be waiting. – JB
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)
Sudan Archives – The BPM
Where Rochelle Jordan’s Through the Wall took up the banner for house in 2025, Brittney Denise Parks filters her latest work as Sudan Archives through conceits more modern, swift, and aggressive. “The BPM is the power,” she chants on this album’s title track, proclaiming her collective commitment to trap, to unique twists on dancehall, and to EDM percussion and synth lines that hew dangerously close to high-speed EBM if we’re being honest. These vertical grooves inform lyrics obsessing over horizontal ones—a thread of entertaining hedonism winds throughout The BPM, lifting up scenarios that range from the literally and comedically sexy (“Ms. Pac Man”) to Bonnie-and-Clyde faithful (“The Nature of Power”). – AB
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Turntable Lab (vinyl)
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