We’ve revealed our favorite albums of the year, along with our favorite songs, plus the best in metal, jazz, hip-hop, experimental and reissues. And we’re continuing our coverage of the best music of 2024 with deeper dives.
Today we offer our list of the best electronic albums of 2024. It’s an eclectic batch, leaning heavy on beat-driven dance offerings but taking detours into haunted ambience, industrial buzz, frantic batida and hybrids of ambient and jazz fusion.
Blurbs by Adam Blyweiss (AB), Adam P. Newton (APN), Brad Cohan (BC), 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.
Actress – Statik
Released less than a year after 2023’s LXXXIII, Darren Cunningham’s Statik is the sound of Actress at its murkiest. Pairing crackly, lo-fi production with the urgent thump of techno and a distorted feeling of distance, Statik feels like synth music being beamed in from a source you can’t quite locate, or a DJ spinning through broken speakers. There’s often a sense of sonic vertigo but captivatingly so, as on the arpeggiated mystique of “Ray,” or the cinema noir new age of “Six,” each one like a night out that you only half remember, blinded by oncoming headlights and windows splashed with rain and fog. You never quite know where it leads, and that’s half the fun. – JT
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)
The Bug – Machine
When I reviewed Machine earlier this year, I gushed about how the album provided a pure synthesis of The Bug’s overarching aesthetic. After multiple additional listens over the intervening three months, I’m still agog at the pummeling aural onslaught created by Kevin Martin. It’s more than fitting that metal outpost Relapse released this twelve-song epic, as the music delivers wave after crushing wave of doomy dirges, industrial cacophonies, and dubby sub-bass. Sure, this powerful project might sound like the oncoming storm of apocalypse, but after repeated listens, your senses will eventually be awash in a cathartic denouement. – APN
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)
Caribou – Honey
Dance music can evoke a wide range of emotions—euphoria, lust, anger or melancholy. But Dan Snaith’s latest creation is focused on something more pure: Joy. Honey is one of his most immediately entertaining and enjoyable albums as Caribou—a project that here dovetails with his house alias, Daphni. The productions here are fresh from the club, often retaining the traces of psychedelia that have colored his work since Up in Flames, but with a greater emphasis on moving limbs and gyrating hips. Whether beaming in transmissions from M/A/R/R/S or winking at his own prior work with “Do Without You,” Caribou just wants to get you on the dancefloor. – JT
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Turntable Lab (vinyl)
Earthen Sea – Recollection
Jacob Long balances two bands with decidedly disparate styles, polar opposites in fact. In the recently reunited, beloved Dischord Records group Black Eyes, he helps unleash screaming and skronking art-punk fury; as Earthen Sea, Long is a masterful shapeshifter whose weightless meditations draw from ambient music, techno and dub. With Recollection, his fourth Kranky-released album under his Earthen Sea moniker (twelfth overall including tape and CD-R releases), Long’s collage-like minimalism takes a bit of a stylistic left turn as he incorporates a distinctly more “live” feel to the trademark shadowy aesthetics. The effect is no less blissed-out than previous efforts, especially when immersing yourself in Long’s electric piano stylings. Recollection is actually the jazziest he’s gotten as he locks in on atmospheric vibes that invokes the warmth of Bill Frisell, Miles Davis’ In A Silent Way and classics from the ECM catalog, from which Long took influence as he worked towards the writing of the album. Recollection is Long’s most “live” sounding record in his canon but it remains quintessential Earthen Sea while opening up realms of new sonic possibilities. A stunner. – BC
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Floating Points – Cascade
Floating Points achieved a career high with 2021’s Promises, an album-length piece of music that saw Sam Shepherd paired with the late jazz icon Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra for something as intricate as it was gorgeous. Cascade brings the focus back to Shepherd’s house and IDM roots, escalating the bpms, opening the filters and arpeggiating to infinity. “Vocoder” and “Key103” are as direct as Floating Points gets while retaining his progressive sensibility, evolving over seven minutes apiece while the beat never relents. Yet it’s in moments like “Ocotillo” where an even more remarkable balance is struck, gentle grace escalating and converging into a rich and overwhelming sensory experience. – JT
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Turntable Lab (vinyl)
Joe Goddard – Harmonics
Joe Goddard’s first two solo albums did many interesting things as they distanced him from the sonic and thematic rep he’s built up as part of Hot Chip. Yet there’s also something to be said for the familiar, like sinking into a well-worn couch near your favorite club’s bathrooms. Harmonics feels more connected to the indie-dance Goddard help promulgate, and the house music that underpinned that band’s arrangements. Hitting a stride of groove that his other albums missed, criss-crossing jazz and gospel and Afrobeat, Harmonics is proof positive of the third time being the charm. – AB
Listen/Buy: Spotify | Rough Trade (vinyl)
gum.mp3 – Black Life, Red Planet
The intensity and energy of the music of gum.mp3 is undeniable, but it’s counterbalanced with a sense of melodic richness that makes it stand out as a mesmerizing headphone experience. Black Life, Red Planet braids threads of footwork, jungle and dubstep around gorgeously lush funk and jazz samples, crafting a detailed and layered overall production that leans heavy on deep bass grooves and infectious licks of guitar. Strip away the beats from a track like “Blue Period,” and what’s there would still be a stunning strata of flute, vocal loops and shimmering Rhodes piano; with its skittering rhythm there, however, it becomes an even more complex work, intensely physical and chill all at once, the best of all possible worlds. – JT
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Heavee – Unleash
Chicago producer Heavee came up in the footwork collective Teklife, which has also included members such as DJ Spinn, RP Boo, and its late co-founder, DJ Rashad. With his new album Unleash, Heavee juxtaposes the frantic rhythms of footwork against an eclectic backdrop of sounds that range from buzzing bass and ethereal synths to more intricate jazz-influenced arrangements. And yet the beats themselves, while clocked at escalating BPMs, often feel as featherlight as the gauzy textures he wraps around them, crafting a record engineered for zero-gravity dancefloors. It’s heavenly. – JT
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)
HHY and the Macumbas – Bom Sangue Mau
Portugal’s HHY and the Macumbas landed on our list of the best jazz of 2020 on the strength of a live album featuring mixing from On-U Sound founder Adrian Sherwood. But their latest is far from any kind of jazz you’d recognize, or really any familiar genre. The group’s sound is rooted in the rhythmic sound of batida, but they bathe it in terrifying shades of deep red and dread-inducing stabs of synth. It’s akin to the soundtrack to a horror film set at Carnaval. It’s not always easy to move your hips while constantly watching over your shoulder, but HHY and the Macumbas are finding new connections between primal fear and ecstatic movement. – JT
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Jamie xx – In Waves
In another timeline, Jamie xx could have easily departed The xx after three albums, changed his name, and created ultra-obscure minimalist electro. Thankfully, he went the opposite direction by becoming an in-demand live DJ, producer, and remix genius who knows his way around a pop hook while also keeping his finger on the BPM underground. With In Waves, his first new album in nine years, he delivers bangers designed to fill the dancefloor without placating the lowest common denominator. As before, he calls on his old bandmates to provide occasional vocals, but he also collaborates with other ringers such as Panda Bear, Honey Dijon, The Avalanches, and the iconic Robyn. It’s a near perfect combination of fun dance music and artful house. – APN
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Turntable Lab (vinyl)
Jlin – Akoma
Look: this is my favorite album of the year. Jlin gets better with every sliver of music she creates, and she also finds ways to absolutely break my brain with her creative approach. Akoma overflows with powerful production, exacting execution, and immaculate ideas, and it’s all in the service of the craft. How many other contemporary electronic artists would choose to go toe-to-toe with Kronos Quartet, Björk and Philip Glass on the same album and not just hold their own, but actually provide the kind of production that makes those contributions sound even better? This album goes beyond footwork, ensnares trap, doubles down on grime, dances with jungle, and retains a reverence for minimalism. It goes hard as fuck while still providing a breathtaking showcase for more detailed nuances and subtleties. – APN
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)
Loidis – One Day
If the name Loidis doesn’t sound familiar, his music might be. It’s the project of Brian Leeds, best known for his ambient techno work as Huerco S., and the producer’s debut album under this alias is an atmospheric drift into spectral, beat-driven dreamscapes. Highlights like “Love’s Lineaments” gradually take shape like fog condensing on window glass, physical in the sense of water vapor rather than the deep thud of EDM. But it’s still dance music in some form, evoking the mesmeric minimalism of ‘90s-era innovators like Basic Channel, Porter Ricks and Gas, and even finding a deeper funk on “All of Em.” One Day is techno as chemical reaction, transforming from one state to another in an act of headphone alchemy. – JT
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Machinedrum – 3FOR82
North Carolina probably isn’t your first thought as a go-to spot for creators of dance music, but working as Machinedrum it turns out Travis Stewart is a secret agent, a veteran chameleon cosplaying as a London or Berlin knob-twiddler. With 2013’s Vapor City he proved himself adept at sonic worldbuilding, but this year’s 3FOR82 saw his productions both star in and lift up performances by many different vocalists. He snaked in multiple directions both inside and between songs, able to craft psychedelic ambience and trap goosebumps in short order. The album opens with aja monet seemingly instructing not just dancers but him as the dance-maker, “You can show them where to go,” and off he zooms from backpack rap to two-step R&B to hyperpop as if curating his own Apple Music “Essentials” playlist. And all of this is before we even get to the drum and bass revivalism. – AB
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)
Priori – This But More
Canadian producer Priori does more than make music, he builds worlds. Each of the tracks on his third album This But More are rich in detail and texture, from the crackle of a record to the rustle of debris, the clang of metal, the hum of glassy surfaces. You can practically see the landscape, which makes each of these dubby, pulsing, ambient-techno pieces come to life even at their most subtle—there’s an almost synesthetic quality, his productions shifting from gray to green to orange. They’re also often unbelievably beautiful, even when taking on a playful tone, as with “Learn to Fly,” whose spoken-word loop feels like a nod to The Orb’s “Little Fluffy Clouds.” And the emergence of beats amid verdant landscapes throughout might remind you of vintage Future Sound of London. But as the contemporary sound of Montreal, Priori’s is singular. – JT
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross/Boys Noize – Challengers Mixed
For all of the danceability woven through the Nine Inch Nails universe, I would argue that the closest Trent Reznor ever got to anything like a long-form “mix” was 1997’s “The Perfect Drug” Versions, an EP that continuously sequenced radical remixes of his song from the Lost Highway soundtrack into something cohesive and bracing. That soundtrack material also figures prominently in Reznor’s first authorized dance mix feels appropriately weird, a recontextualization that seems uncomfortable on paper yet somehow works in the ears. It does help that the Reznor/Ross music for Netflix’ tennis drama Challengers is as upbeat and song-driven a soundtrack as they’ve ever composed, so it doesn’t take much for German dance guru Boys Noize to score an ace with it. – AB
Listen: Spotify
SHXCXCHCXSH – ……t
An esoteric Swedish duo with an unpronounceable name (it’s intended to replicate the sound of static), and a growing body of work of distortion-laden but curiously accessible industrial techno, SHXCXCHCXSH achieve a career-best peak of menacingly captivating beat noise on ……t. Informed as much by dub and ambient as the punishing beats that make up the backbone of their work, ……t is a work of seductive mystery, building a bridge between early Oneohtrix Point Never and the haunted beatscapes of Sandwell District with a little bit of Coil. Beautiful, mesmerizing, aggressive, terrifying, physical—SHXCXCHCXSH’s latest is all of things and then some, earning the ellipsis in the album’s title by suggesting the many corridors, cloisters and tunnels that they can build out from here. – JT
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Silent EM – Real Life
It’s a superhuman feat that the thumping and throbbing synth-punk beast Silent EM meticulously fashions is created, not by a full band, but by a solitary musician. The wunderkind manning the keyboards, beats, sequencers and various electronic gizmos is Jean Lorenzo, the one-man-operation known as Silent EM. Since the early 2010s when he birthed his ultra-propulsive, body moving project, Silent EM has brought his music’s heady, sonic synthesis to a boil. On Real Life, Lorenzo’s vision of blurring the lines of EBM, post-punk, goth and darkwave is fully realized in the form of an accessible, highly melodic and strikingly layered dark synth-pop hybrid. The beat-driven bangers that make up Real Life burst with icy and hooks-laden synth and guitar salvos—topped by Lorenzo’s ghostly, religion-railing yelps—that will definitely blow the roof off the DIY dancefloor. Purely addictive stuff. – BC
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Skee Mask – Resort
The proper follow-up to Skee Mask’s sprawling, spectacular 2021 triple-album Pool—after a palate cleanser of three compilations of orphan tracks—finds the German techno/IDM producer focused and streamlined, but still offering a wealth of material. A somewhat more manageable four sides instead of six, Resort is nonetheless some of his most imaginative and eclectic work, steeped in gentle waves of ambience and riding on eruptions of techno pulse and vibrant breakbeats. The mood rarely feels less than euphoric even as the approach shifts, whether he delves into the hypnotic headspace of early Autechre or getting down to pure house hedonism. – JT
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Total Blue – Total Blue
The debut album by Los Angeles’ Total Blue comprises a unique blend of influences and aesthetics that could have only come together in the present day—or, well, the ‘80s. The group’s blend of ambient and new age sounds with jazz fusion grooves feels suited to a moment where chill-out sounds are back in vogue and grooves move in gradients. Neither wallpaper audio nor a virtuoso shred-fest, Total Blue’s self-titled LP is gorgeously captivating, employing the pulsing, hypnotic influence of Japanese new age pioneers like Midori Takada and Hiroshi Yoshimura in compositions rife with fretless bass and trumpet. Much has been made of this album’s “smoothness,” and it’s not an incorrect assessment, but the group’s impeccable taste and knack for crafting mesmerizing soundscapes turns that into something much cooler than you might have ever imagined. – JT
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Various Artists – Club Moss
Founded in 2014 by Oscar Henson (Facta) and Josiah Gladwell (K-Lone), Wisdom Teeth has become a reliably strong outpost for contemporary electronic music. And coinciding with its 10-year anniversary is the excellent Club Moss compilation, featuring both founders’ projects along with standout moments from Purelink, Maya Q, Yushh and Leif, among others, showcasing some of the year’s boldest and most rewarding sounds in bass, IDM, drum and bass, techno and more. True to its name, it’s like a downloadable/streamable club, rife with sounds for movement and chillout alike, while providing consistent headphone stimulation throughout. – JT
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
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