"Somehow, individually, we have to reclaim our own experience," psychedelic guru Terence McKenna intones at the beginning of "Ride Free," a track from Eris Drew's debut Quivering In Time. With new variants throwing wrenches in reopenings around the world, this year electronic artists have experienced ascetic periods and euphoric dance floor reunions in equal measure. Normalcy, as we know it, is turned off and on like a faucet, and 2021's LPs are grounded in one of the few things we have control over: the personal. This was articulated through ecstatic synth lines and bounding breakbeats as in Drew's case, or with a palette of ambient electronics, left field R&B and jazz as in the offerings by Space Afrika, L'Rain and Joy Orbison. Most of these albums share a common introspective thread. Here are 30 releases that Resident Advisor's staff and contributors gravitated towards in 2021. They epitomize what defined this year for so many of us: loss, hope and an ache for clarity and purpose in turbulent times.

Album of the Year

- Dais Records
  Space Afrika - Honest Labour
  
  Listening to Honest Labour feels like street lights burning onto tired retinas and long nights of feeling small in a big city. On their sophomore album, producers Joshua Inyang and Joshua Reid created a series of nocturnal meditations, a series of nineteen short tracks bleeding into one another, in tribute to their hometown of Manchester. The duo's instrumentation is replete with field recordings of urban white noise, balanced by resonant cellos, hazy guitars and spectral guest performances with fragments of profound conversations—as if overheard from the night before—resulting in the audio equivalent of subconscious dreamscape.
  
  Put simply by Inyang and Reid themselves, Honest Labour is "an album about love and loss." The track "Indigo Grit," for instance, abruptly ends just as the speaker is about to explain the difference between liking and loving someone—a fleeting snippet of wisdom lost just before listeners could grab hold of it. But as with any inquiries into life’s most existential questions, the artists weren't intending to arrive at any conclusions. Through their album, they embraced the sheer mystery of the human experience, remaining at the mercy of their emotions just like the rest of us.—Emeka Okonkwo
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud

- Haus of Altr
  AceMoMA - A Future
  
  AceMo and MoMA Ready have released a gob-stopping amount of music over the past few years, but their second album together, A Future, really put it all into perspective. The duo work in a well-worn transatlantic tradition, blending drum & bass, jungle and techno, but in their hands it feels cutting-edge as they jump from one tempo to the next with tangible excitement. In spite of its name, the album is the sound of the duo creating a better present, of reimagining Afrofuturist narratives to suit the here-and-now rather than a distant future, of AceMoMA paving the way for everyone around them in New York and beyond.—Andrew Ryce
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
- T4T LUV NRG
  Eris Drew - Quivering In Time
  
  After conquering the DJing circuit with a mix of psychedelic evangelism and irresistible old-school techno flair, Eris Drew started dipping her toes into production with vibrant results. On her debut album, Quivering In Time, she outdoes herself with nine tracks of club heat packing a festival-sized dose of euphoria into a retro sound palette of tight drum loops, breakbeats and dewy pads. She even includes a sample of psychonaut and ethnobotanist Terence McKenna to drive the point home. House music in 2021 hardly got much more ecstatic than this.—A.R.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- A-TON
  Emeka Ogboh - Beyond The Yellow Haze
  
  Is Beyond The Yellow Haze pretty funky for an art installation? Quite possibly. The original piece catalogs the sounds of bustling Lagos—car horns, traffic, chatter. Those recordings, made into an album for A-TON—Ostgut Ton’s art-forward sublabel—forms the foundation for ghostly broken techno that moves with the start-stop pulse of everyday life in the city. Ogboh's rich, layered atmospherics approximate fog and the motion blur of brake lights on a busy freeway, capturing the vibe of a city in the midst of immense growth, like a moment encased in amber.—A.R.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- 4AD
  Erika de Casier - Sensational
  
  It's difficult to think of any other record this year that united more people from across different electronic music scenes than Sensational. Building on the Danish artist's Y2K R&B obsession and backed with lush yet subdued production from collaborator Central, it is a quiet storm of plucked strings, ornate piano and pitter-patter drums. De Casier's hushed voice alternates between vulnerable and sarcastic, full of biting phrases and memorable one-liners: "You gotta be polite if you wanna roll with me." It’s the kind of music that's made for both memorable dance floor moments and cryptic Instagram captions directed at you-know-who.—A.R.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Self-released
  George Riley - interest rates, a tape
  
  It's tempting to call George Riley an old soul given her use of R&B vocals over '90s-influenced jazzy breaks, but that wouldn't do justice to her first mixtape, which felt ambitious even at its most relaxed. Her words come out in a stream-of-consciousness blur, revealing and incisive in their casual, say-whatever-comes-to mind-flow ("I don't want any man / Full stop!"). Oliver Palfreyman's beats feel dynamic and fluid, as if tailored to every twist and turn in Riley's sinuous vocal melodies. Dark, uplifting and sometimes even funny, it is one of the most striking R&B debuts of the year—Afrofuturism tuned to a very personal frequency.—A.R.
  
  Listen:
  Spotify / Apple Music
- Peak Oil
  Hoavi - Invariant
  
  With Invariant, Hoavi set a new standard for what you might call ambient jungle. Combining the luxe atmospherics of dub techno, the fidgety pulse of footwork and the acrobatic loop-de-loops of jungle, the Russian producer's album is uncommonly beautiful, blowing minds while soothing them at the same time. You can pick any track at random and find something to obsess over—the breakcore-in-the-clouds of "Dver," the Balearic funk of "Streamline." But the LP is best taken as a whole, a wash of creamy chords and aerodynamic drum programming.—A.R.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
- MUSIC FROM MEMORY
  Virtual Dreams: Ambient Explorations In The House & Techno Age, 1993-1997
  
  Landing at the very end of 2020, when so many of us were deep in another round of lockdowns, Music From Memory's Virtual Dreams compilation was practically made for daydreaming in your bedroom. Bringing together some of the finest downtempo cuts from both lesser-known names like MDA Analog and lesser-known projects from established names (like Move D and Roman Flügel), the compilation creates a half-lidded world where kick drums dreamily float in and out of focus. Virtual Dreams maps a time when the boundaries between electronic music for the club and the living room weren’t totally solidified, occupying a corridor space between the chill-out room and the dance floor. —Henry Ivry.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Limousine Dream
  Various - The Sound Of Limo
  
  Gene On Earth's The Sound of Limo compilation is a roster of the artists du jour of the new minimal scene, providing documentary evidence of a vital corner of the underground while also working surprisingly well as a cohesive album. Each producer gathered here, from Sugar Free to Dyed Soundorom, has their own quirks, but certain throughlines—chunky basslines, swung drums, cascading video game bleeps—define a sub-genre of a sub-genre unto themselves. The music here is club-ready tech house, but the flourishes of fluorescent synth and often wacky melodies make it as whimsical as it is functional.—H.I.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Soundcloud
- Ilian Tape
  Skee Mask - Pool
  
  Clocking in at over an hour and 45 minutes, Pool demanded a commitment to active listening when it dropped. But Skee Mask has always excelled in the album format, and the extended run time allowed him to cover more ground than ever before. Pool takes the plunge into the sui generis cannabis haze of its soundscapes, where Skee Mask put his love of ambient atmosphere and UK dance music into conversation with bits of soulful funk, jazz and some of his fastest tempos yet (Pool went north of the 170 Arctic Circle at points). But, as only Skee Mask can, he creates an immersive and singular trip where genres come second to the textural richness and detail of his soundscapes, which range from danceable to stop-you-in-your-tracks gorgeous—H.I.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / SoundCloud
- bié RECORDS
  Yu Su - Yellow River Blue
  
  Yu Su's steady stream of dance-adjacent 12-inches over the past four years established a dusky and increasingly ornate twist on the Vancouver house sound, but her debut album Yellow River Blue took her somewhere entirely new, both figuratively and literally. The album functions both as a travel diary and love song. It documents a tour through her native China from Qingdao to the far-west city of Xining, recorded in different cities across the country where Yu Su both reconnected with her homeland and found a whole new community of electronic producers she was previously cut off from. The album is appropriately restless and exploratory, as Yu Su charts a path through geography and genres, from slo-mo breakbeat to Krautrock to dubby downtempo. —H.I.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Smalltown Supersound
  Perila - How Much Time It Is Between You And Me?
  
  Aleksandra Zakharenko, alongside similar-minded artists like Ulla and Ben Bondy, makes ambient music that breaks the mold: it's not necessarily intended to bring you solace and definitely won't make an easy soundtrack for any hotel lobbies (or elevators). How Much Time It Is Between You And Me?, is just as unsettling and eerie as it is delicate. The album uses these mixed emotions—as well as touches of post-rock melodrama and angst—to create a liminal state between waking and dreaming held together by Zakharenko's voice, which guides you through labyrinths that can be nightmarish but, just as quickly, morph into luxurious daydreams. —H.I.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Modern Love
  Andy Stott - Never The Right Time
  
  It's been a decade since Andy Stott released the pair of EPs that introduced us to the dubby world of "knackered house." Since then, the UK artist's music has incorporated decaying memories of pop, like a ghostly outline caught in a photograph, through his ongoing collaborations with Alison Skidmore. Never The Right Time polished that rusting patina into Stott's most accessible album to date. "Don't Know How" is, by his standards, nearly bubblegum. This was true across the board on the record—even the abrasive mechanical rain of "Answers" ends with an uplifting, choral melody. Stott hasn’t lost his penchant for darkness, but now he isn’t afraid of contrasting it with bold and bright bursts of colour either.—H.I.
  
  Listen:
  Apple Music / Spotify / SoundCloud
- Stroboscopic Artefacts
  Wanton Witch - Wanton Witch
  
  Stroboscopic Artefacts has been a hub for no-frills experimental techno for more than a decade, modeling itself in the restrained but psychedelic-friendly image of label owner Lucy. Following a year-long hiatus in 2020—after Lucy released a ten-year compilation of sleek dance floor cuts by mostly old guard artists—the label returned with the surprising self-titled LP from Bangkok-based Wanton Witch. The album opens a new chapter for Stroboscopic Artefacts, not only by featuring a queer, trans outsider artist, but by presenting a volatile, rave-adjacent sound palette beyond the label's wheelhouse. Wanton Witch dive-bombes and detonates with apocalyptic thuds and hardstyle drum fills, marking a new and exciting turn for the imprint and for Alegria's blossoming career. —Chloe Lula
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Merge Records
  Dawn Richard - Second Line
  
  Dawn Richard's sixth album—and first for the indie giant Merge—introduces her Afrofuturist alter ego, the golden, feather-plumed cyborg King Creole, who Richard described as an "assassination of stereotypes." Working Black-rooted genres like bounce and footwork into her usual experimental R&B, Richard balances a sense of play with her core strengths as a vocalist. "Bussifame" explodes with rallying whoops and commanding swagger, "Jacuzzi" aches with crooning sensuality, and "FiveOhFour (a lude)" switches to a braggadocious snarl. In tandem with intimate audio clips of her mother’s musings on love and Louisiana, it is a kaleidoscopic portrait of Richard's inner world and Southern heritage in glossy, florid detail. —Whitney Wei
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Mexican Summer
  L'Rain - Fatigue
  
  L'Rain's second album meditates on the seismic complexities of a single emotion—grief—and its ability to exhaust and to destabilize, but to also spur personal evolution. Fatigue swoons into a tender revelry, both in terms of L'Rain's purring vocals and her warm, glowing productions, where the jangling piano keys and melancholic punctuation of saxophone dance around grainy sound recordings. It reminds listeners that sadness is so often site-specific. As a born-and-raised Brooklyner, L'Rain's singular blend of jazz, neo soul and ambient bears the heaviness of her urban environs on top of an already bruised psyche. —W.W.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / Soundcloud
- NTS
  V/A - Amapiano Now
  
  If anything's apparent from the past few years, it's that dance music is inherently political. The most exciting dance music genre in the world at the moment—amapiano—demonstrates this point in a strikingly literal manner. Born in the townships in Gauteng, South Africa, the fledgling post-kwaito genre is the sound of joy in the midst of struggle. Now it's sweeping the globe. Amapiano Now, the 16-track compilation from NTS, is a bluffer's guide to the new South African dance phenomenon. From established acts like Vigro Deep and Gaba Canal to upstarts like Teno Afrika, the Shannen SP and Joe Cotch-curated collection demonstrates the inherent mid-tempo sensuality of amapiano, the thrilling sound of a generation of artists discovering their powerful collective voice. —Matt McDermott
  
  Listen:
  Spotify / Soundcloud
- Luaka Bop
  Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra - Promises
  
  Reading over the personnel for Promises, one might expect a grandiose statement—a multigenerational spiritual jazz odyssey for the ages. Instead, Sam Shepherd and the legendary Pharoah Sanders show a staggering knack for subtlety. Building upon a searching motif of four seven-note chords, both Shepherd and Sanders play with extraordinary humility. The careful arrangements serve as a backdrop for Sanders' restrained sax soloing, but the record doesn’t headline one artist over the other. Instead it reaches for an ineffable oneness, the pinnacle of improvised exploration. Each gradual change feels monumental, like the spaced-out synth exploration on "Movement 7" or the Hammond organ passed through a vibrating Leslie speaker on "Movement 8." That Promises holds its own—and even stands out—within one of the most important catalogues in jazz is a remarkable achievement. —M.M.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
- Planet Mu
  DJ Manny - Signals In My Head
  
  2021 was a golden year for footwork. This year, Planet Mu, once responsible for thrusting the Chicago genre onto the international stage in the mid-'10s, put out a trilogy of releases from stalwarts of this syncopated world: Jana Rush, RP Boo and DJ Manny. On Manny's contribution, the veteran Chicago-born, Brooklyn-based artist sought to bring romance to a genre historically known for soundtracking dance battles. If anyone could step up to this challenge, it would be DJ Manny and his smooth production style. Signals In My Head sees him whipping up some of the most airy atmospheres footwork has ever seen. Rosy melodies swirl into delirium while R&B vocals coo, sometimes lustfully and other times longingly, mellowing out its characteristically rougher rhythms and leaving only traces of a harder past.—Kiana Mickles
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Rough Trade
  Dean Blunt - Black Metal 2
  
  Dean Blunt has long been an elusive character, quietly releasing oblique albums without liner notes and responding to interview questions in riddles. His entire body of work could be viewed like a museum of intriguing abstract paintings, open to interpretation but always astonishing. His most recent record riffs on its predecessor's Americana themes—heart-tugging strings, whining harmonica, desert rock guitar and somber and occasionally tongue-in-cheek lyrics that allude to loss, betrayal and the white critic's flimsy observations. But with the help of Joanne Robertson's girlish voice, as if brought down straight from heaven, Black Metal 2 emerges as one of Blunt's most approachable records. —K.M.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Domino
  Tirzah - Colourgrade
  
  If Tirzah's breakout debut album Devotion was beloved for its intimate romantic love songs, the tracks on Colourgrade will be remembered for expanding the definition of what constitutes a love song in the first place. Moving out of the city and giving birth to two children, Tirzah examined other forms of love, like the camaraderie between creative partners or the bond between parent and child. Some tracks here make it difficult to parse whether she is referring to a lover, a relative or an old childhood friend, but the universality of it all makes Colourgrade a record that will age gracefully with repeated listens. Adding to its introspective beauty and warmth, the album is brought to life with grainy production and endearing imperfections (a cough here, incomprehensible whispers there). Charmingly unpolished and grounded in a human need we can all agree on—love—it's an album that encourages listeners to cherish life's smallest, most precious moments. —K.M.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Hyperdub
  aya - im hole
  Part horror show, part experimental club innovation, part spoken word, im hole consists of many brilliant elements without feeling inconclusive. aya's debut album begins with an eerie maze of diaristic thoughts, an opening ultimately left in a blitz of the ghost trails of umpteen genres, including garage, dubstep, punk, jungle, gqom and even Baroque music. Drums have always been a central component of aya's work, but on this record, they are often responsible for songs falling apart like a line of dominos. Her impish vocals, pitched up and down liberally across the record, transform her lyrics into an elven presence, oscillating between sluggish whispers and cathartic shouts. It is unequivocally one of 2021's strangest and most exciting records, which is a good indicator of electronic music’s cultural progress. —K.M.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
- N & J Blueberries
  HTRK - Rhinestones
  
  People rarely talk about their favourite "band" anymore. HTRK, the Australian duo comprising Jonnine Standish and Nigel Yang, are one of a handful of groups that inspire this level of dedication in their fans. Their music holds similar qualities to other classic "favourite bands," like The Cure—their songs microcosms of ineffable longing and desolation. On their latest LP Rhinestones, HTRK continue to embrace stripped-down guitars, this time going for a twang and effects palette that evokes the Kodachrome skies of Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas. In the film, the sprawling vistas and stark photography set the stage for a hushed, heartbreaking drama. Here, the sparse guitar and unhurried progressions serve a similar purpose, foregrounding Standish's languid vocals. As usual, deceptively simple lines like"If you wanted to / Hang out with mе during the day," on "Sunlight Feels Like Bee Stings," hit like a brick. —M.M.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
- XL Recordings
  Joy Orbison - still slipping vol. 1
  
  Long gone is the Joy Orbison who only makes club bangers. In his place sits a producer whose music is, with every new release, a truer, more vivid expression of not only his ever-broader tastes, but also his life and loves. Building on recent experiments with R&B and downtempo music, still slipping vol. 1 incorporates voice notes from his family—asking Joy how he's doing, making jokes, talking about weed brownies—into a cosy world of tunes that range from sedate garage to hooky, subdued pop. It feels like a Sunday afternoon in Joy's living room: vinyl all over the floor, loved ones popping in and out and talented friends occasionally jumping on the mic, all culminating into a more relaxed look at one of UK dance music's most quietly virtuosic producers.—Carlos Hawthorn
  
  Listen:
  
  Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music
- Gobstopper Records
  Mr. Mitch - Lazy
  
  It can take artists years—decades, even—to be able to authentically express themselves through their music. Mr. Mitch said this personal change occurred around the release of his 2017 album, Devout, a vulnerable record inspired by fatherhood. Not coincidentally, it was also the first time his fans had truly embraced his experimentations with slower tempos, ornate instrumentation and song-oriented structures. The Londoner built on this newfound freedom and confidence on this year's Lazy, with 11 tracks packing a range of energies and emotions. There are heart-rending tributes to his own musician father and strong statements about racism and social justice (the title is a reference to stereotypes about Black people), blending not only genres but personal and political messages in a way that could have felt forced and overblown in less accomplished hands. Instead, one feels profoundly moved. —C.H.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Hyperdub
  Loraine James - Reflection
  
  The late and great Mark Fisher feared that musical ingenuity was being replaced by desperate revivalism in the dying embers of late capitalism. If he was around now, Reflection might soothe those fears. James' mesmerising neo-IDM classic gestures towards dance music or bedroom R&B, only to take sudden detours into terra incognito that eludes categorisation altogether. (Nothing feels more appropriate than the outro being titled "We're Building Something New.") Sludgy, off-kilter kicks thud under pensive chords like some alien life form's interpretation of dance music. At times heartbreaking, at others startlingly vulnerable, James contemplates pandemic-era existentialism, projecting anxieties about the future with a ghostly delivery that feels like inner monologues being broadcast for all to hear: "This is a reflection / Just mine, not yours." —E.O
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / Soundcloud
- Leaving Records
  Arushi Jain - Under The Lilac Sky
  
  Arushi Jain has a buzzy, larger-than-life personality, but you'd hardly know that from her restrained and gentle music. Constantly jumping from project to project, Jain always found solace in Indian classical compositions when feeling overwhelmed, and wanted her own work to channel the same healing qualities. On her second full-length, she captures the evening light in all its ever-changing glory, moving from sunset to darkness. Humming synths and drones conjure the flickering shadows of twilight, while her voice adds bursts of vivid colour. Aimed at instilling a certain kind of intentionality and meditation in its listeners, Under The Lilac Sky is a guaranteed palette cleanser for those seeking clarity or simply enjoying an evening wind-down.—Nyshka Chandran
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
- Love Injection
  Conclave - Conclave
  
  The self-titled debut from New York ensemble Conclave is a masterful study in rhythmic flexibility. True to their jazz roots, the group of rotating musicians—led by DJ and multi-instrumentalist Cesar Toribio—start the record as improvisational jams before narrowing down a vision and a concept. Their live approach is tangible: several tracks start on simple refrains before morphing into full-bodied flurries of dreamy funk, Afro-Latin percussion and downtempo beats. In homage to the clave (an instrument and rhythmic pattern), Toribio and his players concoct a joyous commemoration of the power of collaboration, unity and the cathartic energy of house music itself.—N.C.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / Soundcloud
- Warp Records
  Nala Sinephro - Space 1.8
  
  On her Warp Records debut, London-based harpist and modular synthesist Nala Sinephro creates introspective electronic soundscapes with warm exhortations from the UK jazz new guard (musicians like Nubya Garcia and Eddie Hick). Combining ambient music and spiritual jazz, Space 1.8 lands like a caress, owing to Sinephro's intuitive touch—she knows exactly when to press, linger or just hold still. "While my hands are doing their job, I’m almost sleepwalking," she told The Guardian in a recent interview. Ranging from meditative to pulsating—with an incredible, career-making 17-minute finale—Sinephro's ambitious but effortless compositions comfort and soothe in all the right places. —N.C.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify

Album of the Year

Self-released