Reddit Has Chosen The 100 Best Dance Albums Of The 2010s, And The List Is Stacked
#1 is not surprising.
The last decade of dance music has seen some of the finest performers on the planet releasing their magnum opuses — masterpiece after masterpiece, amassing into a veritable pile of all-time great music.
That pile is so big, in fact, that sometimes it can feel overwhelming to know how to start sorting the thing. What’s the best dance album of the last decade? Who bloody knows, given the sheer amount of gold dropped by both established names and veritable newcomers.
But hey, though the sheer enormity of ranking ten years in dance music might have turned off some, it sure hasn’t turned off those over at the subreddit r/electronicmusic, who have spent the last little while creating a canon of dance music through a giant poll. As Pilerats reports, the massive sub-reddit has spent weeks assembling a 100 greatest dance records of the 2010s. And the result is pretty fascinating.
Topping the list is Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, the commercial powerhouse that spawned ‘Get Lucky’. That was perhaps to be expected — there might be no dance act more popular than Daft Punk, and their ascendency felt inevitable from the outset.
The rest of the top ten is more surprising, mind you. Porter Robinson’s Worlds snagged the second spot, Flume’s self-titled record the third, Jamie XX’s In Colour the fourth, and Jon Hopkins’ Immunity the fifth. All those albums were acclaimed on first release, but a record like Immunity was nothing like the commercial powerhouse of RAM, making its high position on the chart pleasantly surprising.
Disclosure’s Settle came sixth, Bonobo’s Black Sands seventh, Matt Zo’s Damage Control eighth, Odesza’s In Return ninth, and Tycho’s Awake rounded out the top ten.
Again, those are all acclaimed records, but not necessarily shoe-ins for the top ten of the decade, making it an eclectic and exciting list. The one downside is the noticeable absence of female acts, and artists of colour — a sad reflection of the mainstream dance industry as a whole.
Check out the full list below.
