commendation for outstanding service to human race: resident advisor

i gave the barker mix a listen thanks to this revive - nice write-ups tim - and it's good and all but i don't think it's nearly as exciting as his recorded output lately. it's a lot more four-to-the-floor and otherwise standard than i was expecting, whereas the new album and the unfixed ep are almost approaching ae levels of dynamism with the off-kilter almost-falling-apart drum programming (although very tonal and major-key otherwise).

funny, I listened to and enjoyed the RA mix before the new album as well and the record still hasn't fully clicked for me. I don't dislike it or anything but it isn't quite what the mix got me hyped up for! (this is one of those "me problems"...)

yeah mine is also a "me problem" i'm pretty sure haha

map your description made me dive into the album again and I'm liking it a lot more now

The bigger names like Theo Parrish, DJ Sprinkles, Frankie Knuckles, Andrew Weatherall are ofc deservedly getting posted about but don’t sleep on the Sama’ Abdulhadi mix

parrish mix is madness

don’t sleep on the Sama’ Abdulhadi mix

was raving about this in some other thread!!! the RA mixes have been such a highlight of my week

don’t sleep on the Sama’ Abdulhadi mix

This is fantastic

The Laurel Halo podcast from a few months ago is (unsurprisingly) fantastic also

This Sama' Abdulhadi mix is massive

Also recommended this in the amapiano thread but the Mark Ernestus (Basic Channel, Hard Wax) mix is excellent as well

Also this 7 hour + Tim Reaper set, my god

The Laurel Halo podcast from a few months ago is (unsurprisingly) fantastic also

― Tim F, Monday, August 18, 2025 12:11 AM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

wow!!! i mean i am biased bc she is the most brilliant musician alive but wow!!! this mix!!!!

I thought the Laurel Halo one was fine but not exceptional and paled in comparison to her amazing Nowadays mix from a few years back.

idk i mean the nowadays set is actively a banger but the ra one is really good for walking around after midnight with headphones on

I love LH but wasn't vibing with the RA mix, could have been the wrong context though (I was driving in daylight, so clearly the opposite of what I should have been doing).

idk it's a set that prioritizes mood and narrative in such a way that it really enhanced reality last night when i listened to it. the darks seemed darker and to ulcerate with something beneath them

published today: there is a lot to absorb

RA: The Best Electronic Tracks of 2000-25
https://ra.co/features/4481

It's impossible to know how many songs exist in the world, though estimations place it between 100 and 230 million. Humans have produced more recorded music since the year 2000 than in any other period in history, a digital tsunami that has continued to mutate and expand in 2025. It would take multiple lifetimes to listen to all the new electronic music in a single year, let alone the past 25.

So, how to get arms around the most enduring tracks of the quarter-century? We listened. And polled, and talked, and listened a lot more. Our picks travel the globe, make pit stops in dingy Chicago basements, dusty bush doofs and bailes de favela. They're weighted toward the productions that sparked sub-genres or movements, electrified clubs or stood out for their sheer uniqueness.

Where else will you find the freakiest acid next to the soulful timbre of deep house, or laser-focused techno sitting alongside hauntological drone? This is the place. Welcome to Resident Advisor's best electronic tracks of the 21st century so far.

200 tracks

YouTube playlist:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnZOad80R4noXzWGj1Lkhun6oWjIPW9av

Spotify playlist:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2GdGoF0fy6U5DNlQ4KANS6?si=a2b7c610671b47c9&pt_success=1&nd=1&dlsi=cb5339b525d04eae

I will look out for a summarized list.

I was scrolling the list, expecting to see this

38
Girl Unit
Wut

at Number 1

1
The Other People Place
Let Me Be Me

the only 2025 track

93
Tracey & Riko Dan
Sex Life

have a sneaking suspicion this list was created just to be able to canonize OAR003-B

A quick skim suggests this is all stuff covered in their previous EOY lists and decade round-ups - it doesn't seem like a particularly new direction or creation of an alternative to the established canon and narrative of this century's dance and electronic music.

Which would be fine, except it seems to have come at the expense of covering new music at the same rate as previously done, which seems a waste when the experience of clubbing and dance music is so often about new sounds, new tracks, new ways of making people move their bodies.

'let's do a landmark feature that reflects our awkward politics as much as possible'

imo this looks nothing like their lists, at least pre-2020, when their editorial focus shifted - after they got called out for excluding non-white club music scenes.

The list struck me as kind of weird, lots of stuff I’d never heard of, despite following RA for the last 19 years. I also have no idea how you make a list like this make sense on a broad scale, though.

I’m also waaaay more interested in features like this than coverage of new sounds, but that’s me: old, out of the loop, and it’s a stage where I’m shifting my attention to reflecting on the history of music I love through my lifetime, over pursuing the new and different.

i think that awkwardness is very present in the list, like rui da silva at #6 and other people place at #1. also, while i love that track it feels a sort of arbitrary and very safe choice.

probably the only way to really do this would be split it into genres but that would have its own problems. as it is it just feels very loose and doesn't tell any real story of the last 25 years, which while difficult is not impossible.

i mean maybe it does tell a story, of a prog house almost classic dance music magazine type website that now contorts itself into academia-adjacent political takes wherever it can.

like that journey is interesting but not one they want to discuss obviously

I think the list is also more of a collage of tracks that stand in for different scenes and sub-genres, and more often than not avoids going for the obvious representative hits, which is pretty incongruous with the idea of “here are the 200 best tracks in ranked order.” Which maybe is just there for the clicks.

I’m sympathetic to expanding the canon and reflecting that in coverage, even if the cost is that for me, personally, I won’t care about half of what’s on here. But yeah, it would help to start by acknowledging the awkwardness of this list, what they’re actually doing in reviewing this period that covers a lot of editorial turns. And leaving behind anything like a coherent arc or history.

Also kind of puzzled at the idea that they would suddenly change course from previous lists for this one. If you’ve been charting music monthly and yearly for decades, shaking things up for the sake of shaking things up seems kind of… pointless?

It is weird. I genuinely can't imagine scrolling through it and reading each set. The top 20 is terrible imo, even the tracks I like that feature in it are just part of quite a grim, careful, studious whole.

I thought it was made of really predictable selections for the most part. "Oh look here's Snooze 4 Love, there's Coma Cat, some Villalobos, some tasteful dubstep, ooh a curveball in token r&b that's already critically respectable"

Not sure what to tell you, those were huge, popular, defining tracks. Would be kinda weird to exclude them from a list of top tracks of that time. I'm not sure these lists are finding about deep cuts or discovering new things.

Well yeah, that's why it feels like a pointless exercise. There's so much new and exciting music out there, it takes a real effort to keep up if you want to keep up. There's lots of interesting stuff happening in all kinds of pockets and scenes, and I think it's a shame that the new editorial team would rather publish retrospective pieces agreeing with their own canon and explorations of how boring Keinemusik is.

I remember the FACT days when their lists were not always good or even well-written but at least they felt individualistic and idiosyncratic. I would always find something interesting reading them.

There's probably value in this if you're half my age, and complaining "oh no all this wonderful music being celebrated" is not really a valid complaint, but I'd love to just see more risks and character in this. I'd be more inclined to go beyond a skim if I didn't recognise most of these tracks and artists already.

I mean if you wanted to shake up your canon you could look to garage, bassline, UK funky, hard house and donk. You could attempt to pretend r&b didn't exist solely when Aaliyah was alive or white men from London produced it. You could do so much more than write about drugged-out Villalobos epics once again, and I say this as someone who loves drugged Villalobos epics. It just feels like a really wasted opportunity.

This list might be a little nerdier but it's fun (I agree that it's pretty silly to try and reduce such a wide time span to a list though)

https://thequietus.com/tq-charts/here-are-the-25-best-dancefloor-bangers-of-the-21st-century-so-far/

and now this...

The Best Electronic Records of 2000-25
https://ra.co/features/4482

Historically, electronic music struggled with the album format. The sheer volume of club-ready genres that exploded after the late '80s helped project the sense of a golden age—but when it comes to LPs, you'll find it's actually a bit of a mirage. Many were narrow, padded with filler for CD runtimes, or generally a little undercooked. That, perhaps, is why electronic music has been given such short thrift in all-genre critics lists so far.

This side of the year 2000, the format lies transformed. Democratisation of production tools and 24/7 connectivity have given rise to records that resonate just as strongly on the big, bad internet as they would rattling through a sub or on a pair of high-end headphones. The floodgates opened as curious virtuosos had more to say and more modes of expression.

One key trend has been the absorption of musicians who traditionally work outside of electronic music. This inspired cross-pollination, but also for us, a quandary: if everyone uses hardware and modern production, can they all get in? On balance, we decided that if the record was majority electronic or couldn't have existed without a digital pulse, it was good to go, but a rock act working within a pop music structure with a layered bank of synths probably wasn't. Is it arbitrary? Sure. But isn't everything?

(For more information on how we made the lists, including what did or didn't make the cut, head to the Editors' Letter here and full contributors at the foot of the page.)

What binds the artists on this list together is the simple fact that they wanted to push themselves and the culture forward. Whatever the medium, they've been able to telegraph their intent, conjure and perfect a sound that didn't exist before, lay the groundwork for an underground movement to be built on top—or sometimes all three. These are the 100 records that stayed with us.

1 Burial
Untrue

The quietus one is funny to me, so much post dubstep bleh

Pretty amazed the 200 songs didn’t have a single kompakt release. Someone is a hater!!

then total 3 is on the albums list behind Jane remover haha. Ok man

Dizzee Rascal in the top 5?

xpost: Aha, I kind of hated FACT’s lists, which to me felt like they were trying to flex a kind of underground cred, or were enamoured with how cool and cutting edge they were.

But a not disagreeing - I think this boils down to different tastes in editorial approaches. I think it sucks RA isn’t promoting new releases like it used to, but I also imagine coverage of niche new music has largely departed from traditional mid/long form journalism. Like, where do 20-something DJs find new music? Tiktok? IG? RA features and reviews???? I honestly don’t know because I’ve stopped trying to keep up, which is also why I appreciate seeing these features.

As someone mentioned on X mentioned, why is this on the list:

Grouper – Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill (2008)

I can't imagine that be played down FABRIC ! ever

Pretty amazed the 200 songs didn’t have a single kompakt release. Someone is a hater!!

RA decolonising its past obviously.

It seems like the new music RA is promoting is the same new music every other pub is so what’s the point
to

Dead Deer is a guitar record!

FTR Dead Deer is one of my favorite albums of all time.

Very happy to see Skee Mask at #13!

D40 otm. It's just this monolith now, like the Vatican City of bland "respect" criticism. A smaller more nimble publication even if it had a specific or myopic focus on one or two genres would have so much more energy.

Had not heard the Powder mix they put at number 1. Really cool mix that I got lost in this afternoon.

Tbh if decolonizing their past was really the point the albums list wouldn’t be one two three white people and a larry heard 12” at the number for spot from his 3rd decade in music.

Burial is almost on the nose emblematic at number one — ghostly memories of hearing black dance music from ten years earlier on the radio. Also curious if they think ball’r (Madonna free zone) was actually about poptimism or what

*number four

The editors letter does go into a bit more detail about how the lists were pulled together (and there is a list of contributors) - Michaelangelo Matos has published his submissions here: https://michaelangelo.substack.com/p/bc151-michaelangelo-matoss-ra-2000 - it'd be interesting to see other peoples lists too...