RA: Top 100 albums of the 2010s

评语：[Top 20] Some of electronic music's key developments during the 2010s came from outside its established hubs. Often, these were the result of traditional genres and instruments being electronically re-spun using digital software. (Uganda's electro acholi and Tanzanian singeli are two good examples.) In 2010, London's Honest Jon's unleashed a collection of Shangaan electro, a fast-paced style of electronic music from South Africa, that set the tempo for a decade of increasingly globalised club music. Honest Jon's co-owner Mark Ainley was tipped off by the documentary filmmaker Wills Glasspiegel, who knew the key Shangaan producer, Richard Mthetwa (AKA Nozinja). Together with Basic Channel's Mark Ernestus, Ainley put together a compilation of Nozinja's productions. Shangaan Electro: New Wave Dance Music From South Africa sounded unlike anything else to hit record shelves in 2010. There was frenzied interest whenever the white labels were played at Ernestus' Hard Wax shop in Berlin, while Ainley stuck the record straight in the racks at Honest Jon's, with no introduction, publicity or marketing. "No one had a clue about it, including the people working there," he said. "You had to put the record on to find out." The compilation was followed by an extensive series of 12-inches, gathered together after two years as the album Shangaan Shake, an intercontinental remix package featuring the footwork duo DJ Rashad and DJ Spinn, UK innovators Actress and Peverelist, US heads Theo Parrish and Anthony "Shake" Shakir, and creative outliers like Ricardo Villalobos and Oni Ayhun, bringing Nozinja's music into even more homes and clubs. - Aaron Coultate

评语：[Top 20] Sandwell District slipped out Feed-Forward, the decade's first techno masterpiece, three days before Christmas. It soon had the mystique of a collector's item. The closing chapter in Function, Regis, Silent Servant and Female's hugely influential project, Feed-Forward was techno at its most stunning, a glistening, artful collection of tracks with an appeal that went far beyond the dance floors it soundtracked. This was techno for your mind, the style's familiar four-on-the-floor chug laced with a cool, sculpted ambience that nudged you off toward some faraway place. But Feed-Forward was more than a psychedelic trip. Sometimes icy ("Immolare"), other times deeply emotional ("Falling The Same Way"), tthe album captured why many so of us submit to techno's endless loop: this music has potential to be truly transportive. Feed-Forward was the final transmission from a collective whose influence still colours music today, a rare, unfiltered look inside the minds of artists who helped shape the style's modern sound. Prohibitively expensive and never to be repressed, many fans will forever consider the vinyl version of Feed-Forward as the one that got away. Ten years later, it's like an artefact from a lost planet, and just as elusive. - Matt Unicomb

评语：[Top 20] In the decade since Splazsh, Darren Cunningham has released records inspired by the epic poetry of John Milton, FM radio interference, orchestral experimentation and "the feeling of being dead." But when the second Actress album landed in 2010, following 2008's low-profile Hazyville, it came without instructions, only a certain uncanny aura. Hewn from urban alienation, weed paranoia, night bus dozing and the fetid undergrowth of the city, Splazsh seemed to lurk in the footsteps of Burial while prefiguring other haunted artefacts of the 2010s by Lee Gamble, Zomby and Demdike Stare. But where the rave archaeologists dug down to a kind of gritty social realism, Splazsh beamed itself from deep space. Listening to "Hubble" felt like viewing techno through a backwards telescope: tiny fragments orbiting distant stars, the twisted wreckage of Model 500 lit by their frigid glow. The obvious and the familiar were permanently delayed in Cunningham's zero-gravity universe of crushed-out hi-hats and teleporting bass kicks ("Bubble Butts And Equations"), frozen-solid beats that cracked like joints in a draughty flat ("Supreme Cunnilingus"). On "Maze" he went darker still, conducting the funeral march for an intergalactic evil empire. It's not all bleak. There are tunes so stiff they're groovy: "Always Human," never more capably described than in Todd Burns' original RA review as "snap-crackle-pop-step," and the '80s flair of "Purrple Splazsh," a premonition of vaporwave through its drowsy funk loops. At the time, all of this felt sketchy and hard to grasp. Learning that Cunningham often produced inside the airlocked void of cheap earbuds lent the project a kind of agoraphobic terror. In the decade since, he's become a marginally more knowable figure. But while his aesthetic has hardened in our minds, there's still a kind of gnostic allure to Splazsh, like a cosmic mystery left unsolved. - Chal Ravens

评语：[Top 20] In the run-up to Severant, Jamie Teasdale was fretting about how his transition away from Vex'd would be perceived. In the mid-'00s, his project with Roly Porter had turned in some of the heaviest dubstep in existence, bringing a level of expectation to what the newly solo artist would do next. He needn't have worried: as Kuedo, Teasdale thrived in open space where once there was claustrophobia. It was a rebirth that stayed the course, having an outsized influence on a new generation of introverted producers. A deft balance of elements helped keep Severant locked in rotation long after the buzz wore off for many of Teasdale's peers. He formed a unique alliance between warp-speed footwork rhythms (a scene still then in its international infancy), occasional depth plunges of Lex Luger-style trap bass, and grand flourishes of melodic synth-playing. It was finely poised, allowing an interpolation of Carly Simon's "Why" to glide over hi-hat rushes with balletic grace at one moment, and orange-alert dread to stalk the alleyways of an otherwise bright tune at another, without ever feeling like a vibe clash. Teasdale was at pains to note that Severant was not the future, but a "romantic futurism" borrowed from the past. This checked out. The long shadow cast by Blade Runner across the 2010s meant that Severant was roughly aligned with a neon-ish zeitgeist, no doubt helpful in making it a sleeper favourite with stoners, stargazers and sci-fi fantasists. Pincered somewhere between 1982 and 2049, the sheer range of Severant makes it an eternal pleasure. - Gabriel Szatan

评语：[Top 20] James Leyland Kirby's work as The Caretaker had been puttering along since 1999, but it struck a fresh nerve in 2011, when temporal concerns were a hot-button issue and sadness was a valuable commodity. An Empty Bliss Beyond This World was released during a bubble in what you could call memory music, bracketed alongside other headsy fare by the likes of Oneohtrix Point Never and James Ferraro that prodded at our relationships to the past. On the surface, it might be tricky to explain how a collection of easy listening records from the 1920s stood out from the crowd, and trickier still to parse how it grew in stature to one of the most profound artistic statements of the 2010s. But Empty Bliss was all about the decay found below the surface, and therein lay its appeal. Where others were unlocking deep-held memories, Kirby explored what happens when you can no longer find the key. Applying a light treatment to Dixieland-era 78s of jazz and ballroom, Empty Bliss conveyed how it is to be fogged out of your routine. Muted cornets drift from song to song, the audio pans awkwardly, loops don't make it a full bar round and many tracks unexpectedly fade to black. Yet none of this is overtly disruptive. It's as if you know something's not quite right but you're powerless to pinpoint the problem, so you quietly go along with it. The album is a tragedy of suspended motion, waltzes spinning round to nowhere in particular. It got darker from there. By the point of "Place In The World Fades Away," the closer on The Caretaker's 2019 swansong, Everywhere At The End Of Time, the hiss that speckled Empty Bliss's source material had become a roar—all that's left. So file An Empty Bliss Beyond This World next to William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops in the annals of music that is at once comforting and disquieting, beautiful and kind of horrible; records cursed with terrible weight, transmitting the immutable feeling of sinking down, down, down into the abyss. - Gabriel Szatan

评语：[Top 20] Did any dance producer of the 2010s pull off such a dramatic U-turn as Jam City? By 2015, Londoner Jack Latham had dismissed the barbed, lustrous soundworld of his debut album as "redundant" and turned to dreamy bedroom pop. But Classical Curves retained its bionic grip on club music for the rest of the decade, consistently referenced by younger artists as a touchstone for their precision-tooled, neon-lit productions. The album emerged from the UK's post-post-dubstep landscape, when Latham's Night Slugs cohort were rebooting London's nightlife just as dubstep started its decline. Latham was combining the jackhammer rhythms of Jersey club with the stark, empty spaces of grime—an idea often copied but rarely bettered over the rest of the decade. Through its harsh light and cold surfaces the album seemed to reflect something dark, even inhuman, like empty glass towers rising above a megacity; pneumatic rhythms were punctuated with fruity organ stabs, like flickering neon signs in a soon-to-be-demolished vice alley. There were moments of levity too, like the way "Strawberries" dismantles an '80s house groove and awkwardly smashes it back together, helping lay the blueprint for an untold number of deconstructed club jams. The ambiguity of Classical Curves was captured best in the squeak of rubber that cut through "The Courts"—not any old sneaker soles, obviously, but the rubber of mass-produced, artificially scarce, worn-once Air Jordans, the capitalist fetish object par excellence. As much a wry examination of consumerist rituals as an experiment in cutting-edge club production, Classical Curves brought both brain and brawn to the table. - Chal Ravens

评语：[Top 20] After 30 minutes of ultra-deep techno, Voices From The Lake's mood shifts with the arrival of a major chord. On other music, the effect would be limited. Here, it was the equivalent of drawing the curtains back on a sunny morning, a burst of emotion that drew us even deeper into Neel and Donato Dozzy's world of sound. Built with just a few elements, Voices From The Lake told a story in a way only the most gifted producers can, weaving a subtle yet clear narrative using flecks of melody and atmosphere. Perhaps the greatest achievement from the Italian school of deep techno, a heady style driven by texture over anything else, Voices From The Lake's charm will endure as long we listen to dance music's four-on-the-floor chug. The album will be forever associated with Labyrinth festival, an annual celebration of ambient, deep techno and experimental music on a Japanese mountainside. Neel and Dozzy debuted the Voices From The Lake project at Labyrinth a few months before this album's release, playing one night's closing slot through a pristine soundsystem. You won't need a world-class soundsystem to get lost in Voices From The Lake, but good headphones and patience will help. This album speaks to the power of techno, where producers craft entrancing, emotional sounds without the signifiers—pianos, strings, melody—of conventional music, and abstract tones combine to create magic. - Matt Unicomb

评语：[Top 20] When footwork emerged in Chicago, it resided primarily in the city's dance battlegrounds, skating rinks and underground clubs. At the start of the '10s, however, the genre was catapulted from the comforts of home into sets across Europe and the US, bringing fame to its originators. While there still remains little consensus on who actually invented this frenetic style, many attribute the sudden entrance of footwork into the worldwide mainstream to DJ Rashad's Double Cup. Landing on the UK label Hyperdub, the long-incubating, ghettotech-influenced sound finally had access to a wider audience. Its polished sound, boasting surgically precise percussion, piqued the interest of clubbers outside of the Windy City. Seven years after its release, Double Cup retains its propulsive energy. Passing from the honeyed emotional resonance of tracks like "Show You How," to the more indulgent sounds of songs like "She A Go," to the confrontational "I Don't Give A Fuck," the album showcased the diversity of footwork. It was music that could be soaring and reflective with harmonious chords, but also draw in writhing crowds with sample splices wedged between skittering percussion. When DJ Rashad died in 2014, Teklife artists like DJ Spinn and DJ Taye became the new champions of footwork, taking it into previously uncharted realms. As footwork evolves, and more controversially, distances itself from its dance origins, Rashad's enduring legacy can still be heard in the crisp hi-hats, the intricate structures and the seemingly endless drum pattern shifts that once drove footworkers into delirium. - Kiana Mickles

评语：[Top 20] Jessy Lanza was a star from the minute her debut album, Pull My Hair Back, landed out of nowhere on Hyperdub in 2013. Hers was a sound that came fully formed: throbbing hardware synths and vintage drum machine sounds, courtesy of co-production by Junior Boys' Jeremy Greenspan, paired with a voice that could induce goosebumps. Lanza's music brought together '80s synth pop, noughties dance music and classic R&B and soul. Those last two genres inform her songwriting, to the point that her wordless vocal runs and breathy coos are more likely to stick in your head than any actual lyrics. (She even makes reciting a phone number sound romantic.) In this way, Pull My Hair Back is a series of snapshots of textures and feelings. On tracks like "Kathy Lee," her voice appears and then fades away like warm breath on cold glass. Elsewhere it was embedded into the texture of the electronics, like the dazzlingly weird "Fuck Diamond." Then there were tracks like "Keep Moving," chunky disco anthems that could have been on the radio in an alternate universe where Jimmy Iovine had invested in Hyperdub. It was all underpinned by vintage electronics that highlighted every texture and hiccup of those old machines, which made the music warm and inviting. The only flaw was that it was too short—36 minutes and it's over. At the time, Lanza told us that Hyperdub removed a few songs from the LP's final running order. But maybe that was the clincher. From Lanza's elusive presence to the sumptuous electronics, Pull My Hair Back was addictive because its fleeting pleasures left you wanting more. - Andrew Ryce

评语：[Top 20] The one-man army known as Andy Stott used to work as a paint-sprayer for Mercedes-Benz in Oldham, near Manchester. Given that there are so many electronic music producers who work with, or find inspiration in, the mechanical chuggings of motor vehicles, Stott's case is particularly interesting. His sonic palette is far from the rigid patterning of techno—or, really, any genre in particular. Some of his albums feature guest work from opera singers. Six years ago, he had a track that sounds like a ship blaring its mournful, deep-sea horn on-and-off for upwards of six minutes. Stott is unusual in that he's not typically assessed against others who operate in a similarly gelatinous space between genres, but in that he's measured most often against himself. Nowhere was this sensation more concentrated than in Faith In Strangers, a piece that was really, finally, truly a crossover work in the grand sense, mixing elements of his past albums (and dance music's history)—dub stuff, slow-mo techno, post-punk patter, a rapid oscillation between love and dread—to a more refined DNA of purely Stotty proportions. It sounded so him, so reliably and ultimately part of his wheelhouse that it seemed as if, in order to listen to the album, one necessarily had to listen to his past work to properly assess its strengths and weaknesses. Stott's records can feel like a very apt template for the ideal trajectory of an electronic music producer in this decade. First, a requisite dabbling across standards of various genres like jungle and Chicago house ("For a long time," he said in an interview, "I was just getting that out of my system"), then onward to an honestly personal form that belongs only to the artist. In Stott's case, that's one of not deconstructed club music (which is, at this point, a punchline and a signal for macerated, frenzied, high-concept work), but re-constructed club music, taking the bit parts from a menu of genres and rejiggering them back to life. It's more alchemical than mechanical. - Mina Tavakoli

评语：[Top 20] Best. Recommended. Fans and critics have awarded this distinction to FKA twigs for nearly every record she's put out. Since her very first EPs at the start of this decade, through to last year's MAGDALENE, which nabbed RA's Album Of The Year, the multi-talented English artist has consistently been one of the most hyped names in experimental pop. Why? Revisiting 2014's LP1, twigs' debut album for Young Turks, it's easy to see: her ideas have always been ahead of the curve. Today, artists have to do everything at once; twigs, a singer, dancer, producer and director, has done that since day one. In both pop and club music, UK sounds and unusual genre-hybrids are taking off. LP1, co-produced by Arca, Sampha, Clams Casino, Dev Hynes and others, contains some of the first hints at this stylistic shift, an unclassifiable mix of bassy low-end, choral-like reverb and skittering grooves. The album's best tunes—"Lights On," "Two Weeks," "Hours"—still sound hip in the shops and cafes where they're recycled, while twigs' soft and vulnerable singing will have loveforn listeners replaying them for life. - Steph Lee

评语：[Top 20] By the time his debut album arrived in 2014, TJ Hertz's place in the pantheon of the decade's elite was already secure. His preternaturally precise productions drew a line in the sand early in his career. The bar had now been raised to an impossible level, which helped cultivate a new standard for producers hell-bent on achieving a similar level of awe-inspiring perfection. The feeling was the same among audiences and critics, and an assumption emerged that Objekt could do no wrong. But translating the dazzling aesthetic experiences he'd mastered on 12-inch EPs to the subtler demands of the album format posed a new challenge. Flatland answered by strategically weaving recurring themes and devices throughout to signpost the album's narrative development. There was the expected abundance of wow moments, but what really made Flatland work was Objekt's due diligence to the bread and butter considerations that define the end-user experience: careful pacing, effective contrasts and memorable motifs, all rendered in a style that changed what people believed possible in modern dance music production. - Mark Smith

评语：[Top 20] Based in Gary, Indiana, 30 miles from footwork's epicentre, Jerilynn Patton was hardly unknown in the scene when she released Dark Energy in 2015; the former steelworker had been mentored by the godfather of footwork, RP Boo. But with her debut album, Jlin offered a her own vision of electronic music as an abstract force, jettisoning the hip-hop and soul samples that characterised footwork and instead limiting herself to self-made sounds and the occasional horror movie sample. Macabre, ferocious, yet clear as a fork on crystal, the resulting tracks weren't so much dance floor material as feel-bad anthems, bringing forth an anger that dwelled "in the belly of the beast," as she said at the time. "Black Ballet" pitted battle dance against Aronofskian body horror, crushing spines and rattling ribcages. Samples of possessed Hollywood children brought on cold sweats on "Guantanamo." Rhythms accelerated then shattered on impact. '"Black Diamond" conjured a Fourth World fantasy where ritual dances collided with dialtone funk, distant soundworlds brought together down a telephone line. Patton has since graduated to the seated venues of the experimental arts circuit, scoring a ballet for Wayne McGregor, collaborating with William Basinski and soundtracking Rick Owens' runway show. But the grand vision was within her from the beginning. - Chal Ravens

评语：[Top 20] In 2015, the sound of Durban was a burgeoning microgenre, a local scene germinating in the bedrooms and back pockets of South African teenagers. Producers were uploading new tracks to a music platform called Kasimp3, listeners shared their finds through Facebook and WhatsApp, and kids used camera phones to shoot dance videos in school uniform. From these homespun beginnings, gqom has developed into a global phenomenon, its menacing drones infiltrating DJ sets from Nairobi to New York. The ball really got rolling midway through the decade with releases on UK label Goon Club Allstars and, soon after, a foundational compilation on Gqom Oh!, the label set up by Rome-based DJ Nan Kolè specifically to import this dark, droning spin on South African house. Gqom Oh! The Sound Of Durban Vol. 1 landed like a space-borne monolith: an entire new genre, fully functioning, ready to deploy. Gqom was presented at its hardest and heaviest, often offering little more than clusterbombs of percussion exploding through foggy bass drones, and topped off by occasional vocal shrieks or creepy melodic phrases. Emo Kid & DJ Bradolz took the template and added a nagging two-note melody. Forgotten Souls threw a 1990s trance riff into the mix. Julz Da Deejay flipped the usual structure, pairing a higher-pitched drone with a chunky bass rhythm. With their streamlined structures, battle-cry immediacy and techno-cruiser tempo, these tracks were obvious DJ weapons. The likes of Kode9 and Scratcha DVA caught on quick. The legacy of The Sound Of Durban isn't just the popularity of these tracks or the later success of characters like DJ Lag (who didn't even appear on this collection). It's also that any one of these tracks would still tear the room apart in a contemporary club set. Even as it's been absorbed into the global bass universe, adapted by producers in London, LA and Shanghai, gqom has lost precisely none of its impact. - Chal Ravens

评语：[Top 20] How, exactly, do we look back on an album as cunning and multi-dimensional as BBF Hosted By DJ Escrow? Hmmmm. We could start with its humour, the way DJ Escrow played a hapless pirate radio host in the vein of People Just Do Nothing. This was one of the things people were talking about most back in 2016 when this project, a collaboration between Dean Blunt, DJ Escrow and Gassman D, hit the streets. But that doesn't feel right. This isn't an album built for LOLs (even though Blunt, as he often does, leaves you wondering). It's also poignant, sad and pissed off. Taking it on a purely sonic level won't really cut it either. Sure, these are comfortably some of the best hip-hop, R&B and dub tracks Blunt has written. The bass-driven "Shook" is immense. "Meditation," featuring Arca, is one of the dopest beats Timbaland never wrote, while the strings on "The Realness" represent the record's tender emotional centre. But simply head-nodding along to it sidelines the tangled social and political commentary, delivered through Blunt's lyrics and Escrow's chat, the album seems to be making. There's no doubt a message even in the album's shrieks of white noise, and we haven't even talked about the line repeated ad nauseam that ties the thing together: "This makes me proud to be British." Basically there isn't a tidy way of remembering BBF, except to say there'll never be another album like it. - Ryan Keeling

评语：[Top 20] In this day and age, the line "I want to run my fingers up your pussy," taken from "To The Moon And Back" off Fever Ray's second album, Plunge, shouldn't be such a big deal. After all, it was more than 20 years ago that Nine Inch Nails made an MTV hit singing "I wanna fuck you like an animal." Sure enough, though, a Swedish newspaper's review of Plunge "questioned the legitimacy of a 42-year-old woman from the Stockholm suburbs expressing her sexual desires." Beyond the breathtaking sexism of that response, it's hard to imagine hearing Plunge and being so unmoved. Dreijer's second album as Fever Ray was an electrifying account of self-discovery, charting a sexual awakening and railing against the structures trying to hold it back. Where Fever Ray's debut was cryptic and minimalist, this one was wild and ecstatic, its rabble-rousing lyrics backdropped by thrashing, neon-tinted productions made together with Peder Mannerfelt. Building on the sounds and themes of Shaking The Habitual, Dreijer's final album with her brother Olof as The Knife, Plunge showed one of this century's best pop and electronic artists hitting new heights. - Will Lynch

评语：[Top 20] The steely drums and sinuous melodies of Tzusing's first EP on L.I.E.S. immediately stood out from the other music Ron Morelli's label released in 2014. That record, part of a trilogy later collected on an album called A Name Out Of Place, wasn't the last time that Tzusing would surprise us. The album documented the Chinese artist's evolution as a techno producer. The beats got funkier, the production richer and the melodies nervier and more militaristic. Then his debut album, 東方不敗, hit in 2017 and caught us off guard yet again—a bolt from the blue that defined Tzusing as a producer in a class all his own. "Chinese kids really shaped the way I DJ," Tzusing told us in 2017. It was playing to audiences in Shanghai and Taipei (the two cities where he split his time) where he discovered he could play more than just techno. His DJ sets started to include trap, hip-hop, even stuff that bordered on EDM. Those influences came to the fore on 東方不敗, an album of elastic rhythms and traditional instrumentation, incorporating Chinese melodies and ideas without sounding the least bit forced. Named after a wuxia character who castrates himself to better learn martial arts, Tzusing's album presented techno as something lithe, athletic and unpredictable. It's no surprise that it helped inspire a wave of thrilling new Chinese club music as the decade reached its end. - Andrew Ryce

评语：[Top 20] Before Arca released one of the most memorable albums of the decade, she was behind a few of its other ones: Kanye West's Yeezus, Frank Ocean's Endless, Björk's Vulnicura, FKA twigs' LP1. In the mainstream music industry, these production credits established the Venezuelan-born artist as a force to be reckoned with. Meanwhile, at the helm of her own experimental records, 2014's Xen and 2015's Mutant, Alejandra Ghersi showed us the full extent of her underground visions. The albums were chaotic bricolages of rhythm and futuristic sound design, characterized most distinctly by their tortuous emotional quality. Both will stand out in electronic music history, marking a time when ideas around genre, style and identity were fracturing and being reformed. Then, just when you thought Ghersi couldn't get more provocative, along came 2017's self-titled Arca. An intimate, despairing and mesmerizing album, it stands apart from its predecessors thanks to the introduction of Ghersi's singing. She sang lugubriously in Spanish, with lyrics that, for example, implored someone to take off her skin. The dark sensuality of her words matched perfectly with the surreal feel of her production. Recreated onstage with equal parts frailty and fearlessness, it transformed Arca into one of the decade's most iconic performers. - Steph Lee

评语：[Top 20] In March 2013, the UK artist Tessela released "Hackney Parrot," the defining track of a musical trend that saw jungle's amen break recontextualised for modern dance floors. This opened the floodgates. Within a few years, breakbeats were everywhere, breathing fresh life into house and techno. One early proponent, with key EPs on the breakbeat techno label of the decade, Ilian Tape, was Bryan Müller, AKA Skee Mask. His fantastic debut album, Shred, released via the Munich outlet in 2016, was awash with bewitching textures and beautifully sculpted rhythms. Techno had a new star. But there was more to come from Müller. In 2018, instead of sticking with the winning formula, he put out Compro, an album that redefined his talents. This time, broken bombs sat alongside IDM jams and jungle heaters. Cuts like "Vli" and "Cerroverb" showed that, done right, ambient pieces could be highlights, rather than afterthoughts, on techno LPs. The range of rhythms and atmospheres, rough yet always radiating soul, was breathtaking. So many sounds, such as the springy melody on "Rev8617" or the snarling synth on "Dial 274," sounded like nothing else. For years, maybe decades, to come, budding producers will listen to Compro and take from it two vital lessons: hone your craft with zeal and never be afraid to experiment. - Carlos Hawthorn

评语：[Top 20] I hated PC Music when it first came out. In the first half of the 2010s, I remember feeling truly shocked and offended by its plastic sheen and sugary cuteness. Now, revisiting some of its earliest hits—"Nothing More To Say," "Bipp," "Lemonade," all produced by Glasgow-born, LA-based artist SOPHIE—they make me feel happy and normal. Ideas that haunt us often speak to something deeper. PC Music, whether anyone knew it or not, would be one of the biggest storms to hit electronic music in the 2010s. Though it came out through Transgressive Records, SOPHIE's 2018 debut album, OIL OF EVERY PEARL's UN-INSIDES, showed just how far the PC Music style could soar. The album sounded cutting-edge but familiar, combining the sensibilities of avant-garde electronic music with the serotonin-rush of commercial pop. At times it also went thrillingly hard, yet tucked into its club beats were silly and inventive lyrics addressing gender identity. Looking back, I forget that SOPHIE had never directly used her face in her art until OIL OF EVERY PEARL's UN-INSIDES' release. That's because today it would be impossible to imagine a world without her. - Steph Lee

评语：In the run-up to Cosmogramma, Flying Lotus was selling his new album as a space opera, a map of the universe, a window into how it feels to be on DMT, and the musical representation of an out-of-body experience—and you have to admit, he succeeded on all fronts.

评语：This landmark compilation introduced most of the world outside Chicago to one of the most dynamic dance music genres of the 2010s—and to names like DJ Rashad, RP Boo and DJ Spinn.

评语：This lovely record, which includes "Love Cry, "Angel Echoes" and a tribute to everyone's favourite London club, set Kieran Hebden on the path to stardom.

评语：The zenith of autonomic drum & bass perfectly showcased the style's emotional depth and dedication to song craft.

评语：The middle ground between a neon-streaked Akihabara arcade and a smoked-out Croydon basement, Ikonika's playful synergy of chiptune squarewaves and dubstep rumble still feels fresh today.