The 10 Best Electronic Albums of 2020

The year’s best electronic albums drew on influences far and wide, excavating the origins of humanity (Disclosure’s Energy) and looking inward (Arca’s Kick I and Caribou’s Suddenly) or up to the heavens (Sufjan Stevens’s The Ascension and the Avalanches’s We Will Always Love You, the latter of which likely would have made our list of the 50 Best Albums of 2020 had it been released just a few weeks earlier). Twenty-twenty taught us that the answers to these quests aren’t always simple or clear, but if the journey’s half the fun, then these 10 albums are certainly worth the trip. Sal Cinquemani

Against All Logic, 2017-2019

Nicolas Jaar’s 2012 – 2017 was as propulsive and joy-inducing as it was dense. Follow-up 2017 – 2019 had a lot to live up to. The album’s tone is more distressed, the songs more minor-key than those on its predecessor, which sometimes featured melancholy moments but whose prevailing spirit was triumphant. 2017 – 2019 finds its creator processing a crisis, while still not leaving the dance floor entirely. Jaar packs as many dissonant, clanging noises—boiling tea kettles, angry guitar feedback, surging alarm signals—as he can into the music without losing the rhythmic threads he’s teasing through each track. The aesthetic is industrial and modernist, with metal-on-metal percussion and a gloomy pall hanging over everything. When the title lyric of “If You Can’t Do It Good, Do It Hard” barges in, it sounds like a mantra for Jaar’s harsher but no less cathartic intentions. Charles Lyons-Burt

A.G. Cook, Apple

A.G. Cook is best known as a producer for Charli XCX, the label head of PC Music, and one of the figures most responsible for ushering in the “hyperpop” moment, which took hold in a major way in 2020. Cook released two projects of his own last year: the manifold, two-and-a-half hour colossus 7G, and the more approachable Apple, which is still an oddity in and of itself. The album finds Cook laying his vocals, overcorrected with jarring pitch shifts, on top of adventurous beats full of diabolical rug-pulls and assaultive hailstorms of synthesizer. Your mileage may vary, as Cook is almost caustically sincere, and he’s certainly operating in a zone of dichotomies, cemented by the lyric on closing track “Lifeline”: “Melody with no notes/DNA with no bones/Artificially grown.” It’s the work of someone who might cite both DEVO and Cascada’s “Everytime We Touch” as influences. But the album retains a sense of mystery in its polar energies, intentional excesses, and violations that make you want to keep sifting through it. Lyons-Burt

Arca, Kick I

Where Arca’s past efforts sought to express states of dissociation, rendering a consciousness flitting in and out of reality, the songs on Kick I are noticeably present and tuned-in. Arca’s gender identity is infused in the playfulness of her lyrics and compositions. Despite the addition of actual pop hooks throughout the album, Arca’s beats continue to emphasize destabilization and change. Her songs are all bridge—stretches of evolution from one idea or mindset to the next. Just when you’ve grown accustomed to a sound or riff, the floor drops out, shifting to another mode and vibe altogether. The production oscillates wildly between harsh and smooth, as in the way the kinetic, abrasive “Riquiquí” segues into the graceful ballad “Calor”; strings and clanking percussion mix, squaring off in striking juxtaposition. By far the bounciest, most ecstatic song cycle of Arca’s career, Kick I is a celebration of actualization, whether that’s spurned by finding harmony internally or in communion with another. Lyons-Burt

The Avalanches, We Will Always Love You

In 1977, NASA launched gold-plated phonograph records, representing a sort of time capsule of life on Earth, on board the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft. The little green men who are fortunate enough to discover the images and sounds contained on each record, including a 90-minute selection of music, can delight in Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, whale singing, and a recording of brainwaves of a human being in love. You could reasonably mistake the records’ contents as samples from an Avalanches album, and indeed, the Australian electronic group’s third effort, We Will Always Love You, contemplates the spiritual and cosmic implications presented by these records. Though not as technically jaw-dropping as their 2000 debut, Since I Left You, or its belated follow-up, 2016’s Wildflower, both of which are said to employ upward of 3,500 samples apiece, We Will Always Love You is undoubtedly the Avalanches’s most conceptual effort to date. Sophia Ordaz

Caribou, Suddenly

The narrative arc of Dan Snaith’s career as Caribou (and Manitoba before it) has been one of increasing devotion to humanity. His earlier work was chilly enough that the Shakespeare-referencing title of 2005’s The Milk of Human Kindness could be read as tongue-in-cheek. But starting with 2007’s Andorra, Snaith began delving deeper into human emotions. Suddenly takes family as its central theme—the title comes from his daughter’s obsession with the word—with songs that express the perspectives of a range of characters. Snaith builds his songs with a cool, measured precision, as one might expect from someone who holds a doctorate in mathematics, and one of the fun games to play with this album is unpacking its myriad references and samples. “Lime,” for instance, boasts the peppiness of a Röyksopp song filtered through the muzak setting on a Casio synthesizer. The album rewards this type of reference-spotting, and it’s a treat to listen to the way such a masterful musician mines his own record collection for inspiration. Seth Wilson

CloZee, Neon Jungle

CloZee, neé Chloé Herry, is a Toulouse-based DJ whose sound could be described as New Age-y, with its invocations of vaguely indigenous rituals in vocal samples and Asian-influenced classical guitar. But as Neon Jungle proves, nearly all of Herry’s choices feel earned; the producer is adept at merging disparate sources into warm, lovingly layered dance tracks that boast a delectable sonic density. Songs like “Air” and “Heya” have a downtempo jaunt, with sputtering, tactile drums and spiraling synth patterns, sometimes trailed by the sounds of gurgling water. The idea of a jungle sound is borne out by the fact that every element on the album seems as if it’s inhaling and exhaling. The most transcendent moments can be found on the pop anthem “Us” and the brassy “Winter Is Coming,” with their flashes of dubstep and big, buzzing basslines, but none of it ever feels cheap. CloZee is first and foremost a proprietor of funky grooves, and Neon Jungle is a testament to her ability to get you moving with both a dramatic flair and a polished cool. Lyons-Burt

Disclosure, Energy

The cover art of Disclosure’s Energy depicts the electronic music duo’s signature masked silhouette embedded in a unified landmass that’s beginning to break apart. The album itself creates a diasporic sound that foregrounds the origins of a plethora of musical genres—and, by extension, the first record of human life. Collaborating with a guest list composed entirely of artists of color—most of them Black, two from Cameroon and Mali—and pulling from the long stylistic history of hip-hop, R&B, and West African pop-rock, brothers Guy and Howard Lawrence apply their distinct brand of house music to these myriad styles, syncing everything up into a combustible, richly layered party record. Lyons-Burt

Kelly Lee Owens, Inner Song

Welsh producer Kelly Lee Owens creates featherweight soundscapes whose effect, when they finally give way to a percussive breakdown or a culminating eruption of some kind, is all the more impactful. Through circuitous beats and sparse vocals, Inner Song traces a path to satisfaction with being alone (“Love is not enough,” she decides at one point), and with Owens’s personal growth paradoxically ending up back at a place of finding delight in companionship (“It feels so good to be alone…with you”). The songs shape-shift genres, Owens’s arrangements weaving between techno and house with a breezy agility, imprinting each style with her quiet, understated needling. On standout “Melt!,” she programs the hollowed-out synths to ascend and then cascade, trickling down again and again, evoking processes of breakdown and renewal. Lyons-Burt

Sufjan Stevens, The Ascension

It was only a matter of time before the musical trickster in Sufjan Stevens returned after the stripped-down, soul-baring Carrie & Lowell. But while it may be overstuffed with ideas, The Ascension is far from the old precious orchestral ornamentation of Illinois. Stevens creates massive, complex soundscapes from electronic scraps of sound here—call it his digital orchestra. He isn’t interested in being clever (with the possible exception of the on-the-nose, Rx name-dropping “Ativan”), instead letting these sprawling tracks reflect simple emotions (the detachment of “Video Game,” the morose come-ons of “Sugar”) or pointed political commentary (the epic “America”). As usual, Christianity is never far from his mind (the title track is a kind of personal hymn), but Stevens isn’t trying to proselytize—he wants to take us deeper than ever into his own spiritual journey. Paul Schrodt

Tchami, Year Zero

Year Zero is a full hour of immersion into beatsmith Tchami’s aesthetic, a clean, shimmering brand of house music some have dubbed “future house.” What’s interesting is how Tchami navigates and brings to life new sounds within and around the tight, 4/4 strictures of the genre: Several songs, such as “Buenos Aires” and “Shine On” sound like we’re underwater or the beat has been pickled. Elsewhere, on “Toxic Love” and “Praise,” he subverts the driving percussion with crisp, interlocking hi-hats and wobbling bass notes. It’s all extremely kinetic but also pleasingly serene due to Tchami’s control of mood; his trick is finding spontaneity in a kind of orderliness. Lyons-Burt