Written by Tom Maguire.

The album is a strange beast in electronic music. The longer playtime provides an opportunity for artists to flex their range, but the tracks also require a careful balance between catering to home listening & carrying enough heft that they’d knock your head off on a good soundsystem. 2025 was a sick year for this form, so here are the 10 absolute standouts for me in no particular order:

KID LIB – NATURE OF REALITY [Green Bay Wax]
Since 2013, Kid Lib’s label Green Bay Wax has been on the frontlines of the contemporary jungle revival. In 2025 he’s not slowed down, having released 4 banging albums in rapid succession. Nature of Reality is the best of these by a hair for tunes like Ease Off, Tonight, Brk My Hrt and Morning Light. It’s pure no-nonsense jungle music, full of skittering breaks, chunky 808s, warm pads, and spectral soul and ragga samples. What makes Kid Lib’s particular approach so deft is the restraint. There are some tearout moments, but he also knows when less is more—the simple power of stripped-back breakbeats and the bowstring pluck of the iconic 808, drum and bass at its most literal.

INTROSPEKT – MOVING THE CENTER [Tempa]
Introspekt is a US-based artist with an uncanny knack for capturing the UK sound. This album is an extension of those skills, exploring the dark garage/proto-dubstep chimera which briefly took hold in the early noughties UK and again during the post-2020 garage revival. The tracks are assured, cumulative, and patient. They eschew the manic skip and slap of the genre’s more upbeat tendencies for shuffling drums and snarling b-lines. Cuts like Make Me Dance manage to simultaneously reference UKG, UK funky, and dubstep through just a few carefully re-arranged kicks and snares. Moving the Center combines the groove of artists like Horsepower Productions with an intimate knowledge of the genres Horsepower’s dark 2-step went on to birth; an album of both nostalgia and futurity.

SBWT – MORE WATER [Temple of Sound]
Infectious, heads-down business from Sub Basics & Witch Trials. Each tune on this album draws from a prudently limited range of sounds, so expect heaps of driving percussion, dubby overlays and technoid bleeps and squeaks. There’s a moreish skip and roll to the drums which counteracts the drone nicely. Close your eyes and you can feel the sweat dripping off the ceiling, the pummel of the subs, the crush of a faceless crowd. Tracks like 4AM are certified peak time bangers, but quieter cuts like Liquify have a subtler draw. Techy hypnotics all round.

YETSUBY – 4EVA [Pink Oyster]
The perfect afters album. On the surface it’s very wispy and chilled, but there’s enough eclecticism beneath to keep commanding your attention. You have breaks, footwork and ambient techno, all drawn together through the use of a well-selected palette of chopped-up vocal and instrumental samples. The sampling, really, is the album’s engine, and it’s what makes 4EVA so re-listenable. The ghosts of vocals turned into cut-off half-breaths, the skittish piano licks—it’s all very UKG coded despite only one of the tunes having a 2-step beat. And while most of the offerings are more chillout, there’s plenty of wonk and grit in I AM 뇌로운 인간 and SOUNDCLOUD, which flex Yetsuby’s more muscular sound.

GEORGE RILEY – MORE IS MORE IS MORE [confessions]
More is More is More stands out in a crowded year for hybrid dance/pop LPs like Rose Gray’s Louder, Please and Ninajirachi’s I Love My Computer. Riley’s approach undergirds cheeky 2010’s style R&B vocals with a range of UK bass standards, the percussion shifting hyperactively between jungle, garage, uptempo house, grime, electro/footwork. This bonus version of the album is elevated further by two sweatboxy remixes by Verses GT and SHERELLE, providing necessary shadow to the gleam of funky house bops like Forever. Throughout there’s a satisfying mix of bassweight and euphoria which keeps looping you into bubblegum screwface mode.

BLACK SITES – R4 [Tresor]
The first full length album from Helena Hauff & F#X. Murky, chuggy, and abrasive. I knew I’d have it on repeat as soon as I heard the squirming, distorted bass of opener C4, and the album only builds from there. Most of the tunes might send people to the smoking area if played in the wrong environment, but that’s what’s charming about it. It’s all so layered, playful, rough-edged, swampy with its own sound which is closer at times to noise. The mangled chop of an electric guitar in BOXX; the crackling, propulsive stomp of FLIKK; the plonky fun of MOTHERJAM. This is a live hardware set made for your headphones, as unserious as it is experimental. It describes itself as punk in the bandcamp liner notes and I couldn’t really put it better. R4 feels like an intentionally provocative inversion of techno’s cleanliness and precision. Electronic music for bog people.

SAMMY VIRJI – SAME DAY CLEANING [Capitol]
Same Day Cleaning notably fails to include the bassline-adjacent 4×4 chest-rattlers for which Virji is arguably best known. It instead focuses on the artist’s more soulful, snappy productions. It’s a risk that works well. The few heavier tunes present—Roads Roulette, Dis Badman and Match My Mood—are swaggering steppers rather than super high-energy belters, a more natural contrast to the brightness of horns-and-bass womper Up and Down and slick garage/tech house hybrid 925. The album skilfully marries the upbeat champagne opulence of UKG’s peak with Virji’s signature meaty sound design. A capable successor to the classic LPs of the early millennium like MJ Cole’s Sincere and Wookie’s Self-titled.

LEON VYNEHALL – IN DAYTONA YELLOW [Ooze Entertainment]
Leon Vynehall’s previous albums are full of headsy instrumental tunes. In Daytona Yellow contrasts massively as a self-conscious, vulnerable attempt to grapple with imperfection in the creative process. Vynehall uses a focused toolkit to reflect this ethos: the beats vary and progress unpredictably, even as each track is hewn to the 3-4 minute duration of a pop single. The punch of his previous work remains, but vocals are pushed to the forefront, whether in the feature-heavy headline tracks or the introspective pieces which call to mind a leftfield-house take on James Blake’s first album. It feels raw and messy and also like that’s the point.

ROCHELLE JORDAN – THROUGH THE WALL [Empire]
Rochelle Jordan started off in the early 2010’s as an R&B artist, but since 2021 she’s been turning her talents to singing over some absolute heaters. Through the Wall feels like a refinement of the sound laid out in Jordan’s last album, this time more firmly grounded in the aesthetics of classic Chicago house. It bottles the slinky energy of the genre’s early vocal bangers while the production remains current enough to mix with modern, bassier variants. Jordan explores higher BPMs adeptly too: the second drop on Words 2 Say wouldn’t sound out of place in a Halogenix set. It’s all very classy, precise and sincere, and you can feel Jordan’s passion for the music she references throughout.

DJRUM – UNDER TANGLED SILENCE [Houndstooth]
There’s that much-memed David Lynch quote that goes something like: people ask me to talk about my films, but the films are the talking. In this vein the best way to grasp Under Tangled Silence is to go and listen to it. Pay attention to the movement between Unweaving and L’ancienne, introspective piano like a Ghibli film score jerking into wonked head-beating percussion. The precise mania of Three Foxes Chasing Each Other. Let Me, one of the best jungle tunes I’ve ever heard, which is so all over the place I’d be bricking it trying to mix it into a set. Listen to the album from start to finish on an overcast drive through bleak British countryside. Play it until it rattles your walls. Then when you think you know it, listen to Let Me, only Let Me, over and over. Try and figure out how Djrum arranged those breaks, that utterly mental progression. You never will. Forget 2025: one of the best albums of the last two and a half decades.

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