The definition of electronic music has never been broader. It might mean hyperpop or drum’n’bass, Balearic or footwork, Colombian club or Brazilian funk, post-everything ambient or good old Chicago house. This year’s best electronic releases tick all those boxes and more, touching on Egyptian street styles, the Afro-Portuguese diaspora, and a 71-year-old former punk along the way. In alphabetical order, these are our 35 favorite electronic releases of the year.
Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2024 wrap-up coverage here.
(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)
A. G. Cook: “Silver Thread Golden Needle”
Maybe A. G. Cook is crazy for testing the attention span of his chronically online audience with a 10-minute album intro. Or maybe “Silver Thread Golden Needle,” the bionic opener to Cook’s Britpop, is scintillating enough to stay fixated on. The song refracts like a prism at high noon, filled with stuttering blips that shapeshift at each turn. And the merry-go-round of yelps and vocal chops at its core gleam like Christmas morning. A. G. Cook’s electronic epic is everything popular music has become: digital, synthetic, amorphous—ultimately just a WAV file in some sticker-laden Macbook. Well, it’s everything but concise. But there’s no trouble sitting through this one. –Olivier Lafontant
Listen: A. G. Cook, “Silver Thread Golden Needle”
Actress: Statik
Each new Actress release invites a new way of thinking about the artist, as fans ponder what’s different this time about the way Darren Cunningham approaches his usual fare (cryptic pranks, nostalgia, nostalgic pranks). Statik is one of his simpler, and, thus, more beguiling, case studies: What if he turned the structural trickery down a notch, and turned up the ambience? You may be unsettled by how similar Statik can sound, at times, to any number of previous slow-burn atmospheric thinkers in electronic music—from the ’90s ambient-techno greats through to earlier Actress tunes to today. But the nagging uncertainty that makes Actress fun is still here, jockeying for position under layers of cozy, Actress-ian haze. Cunningham makes anxiety feel unusually comfortable. –H.D. Angel
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Burial: “Dreamfear”
Of the dozens and dozens of vocal samples Burial has used throughout his nearly two-decade career, the repeated squelch of the juvenile taunt “Back from the dead, fucked up in the head” on his track “Dreamfear” is probably the funniest. It includes some signature Burial sounds—the threatening synth stabs, the pitched-up vocals, the rainy crinkles for texture—but raises the intensity while lowering the introspection. Instead of feeling like a comment on rave music, “Dreamfear” is rave music, a hardcore take on the sounds Burial was so influenced by but which his productions ultimately inverted. Running a dozen minutes, the track operates like a mini-mix, with various movements taking their turn walloping you with amen breaks. It’s a real puttanesca of hardcore. “I am the lord of ecstasy,” goes one of the other lighthearted vocal samples. Maybe it’s about a drug dealer, maybe not. If Burial is talking about himself, it’s a well-deserved humblebrag. –Matthew Schnipper
