Billboard's 10 Best Dance/Electronic Albums of 2018

Australian electronic trio RÜFÜS DU SOL imbues each of their albums with a sense of place: Their melodic dance-pop debut, *Atlas*, was written in sunny Sydney, and their deep, club-minded follow-up, *Bloom*, was produced in Berlin. In 2016, the band uprooted for Venice Beach to record album number three, expecting to find a laidback hub for hippies, artists, and surfers. Instead, they were swept up in the music industry grind—touring, starting a label, collaborating in writing sessions, and finding themselves desperate for sleep. *Solace*, their most introspective record yet, finds them dancing on the edge of sanity. “There’s a real sense of chaos on this record,” keyboardist Jon George told Beats 1 host Zane Lowe. “Darker, more chaotic feels…like being lost in the abyss a little bit.” There was also a consciousness-expanding trip to Joshua Tree that inspired \"Lost in My Mind,” a spacious, meditative cut about embracing the unknown. “We went for a few little wanders \[out in the desert\] and it’s scary, man,” George said. \"But that\'s what the song is about… You lose your friends and you’ve got to just be like, ‘You know what, I’m sweet.’”

Building on his background as a classical pianist and composer, British producer Jon Hopkins uses vast electronic soundscapes to explore other worlds. Here, on his fifth album, he contemplates our own. Inspired by adventures with meditation and psychedelics, *Singularity* aims to evoke the magical awe of heightened consciousness. It’s a theme that could easily feel affected or clichéd, but Hopkins does it phenomenal justice with imaginative, mind-bending songs that feel both spontaneous and rigorously structured. Floating from industrial, polyrhythmic techno (“Emerald Rush\") to celestial, ambient atmospheres (“Feel First Life”), it’s a transcendent headphone vision quest you’ll want to go on again.

Please note: Digital files are 16bit. Singularity marks the fifth album from the UK electronic producer and composer and the follow up to 2013’s Mercury Prize nominated Immunity. Where Immunity charted the dark alternative reality of an epic night out, Singularity explores the dissonance between dystopian urbanity and the green forest. It is a journey that returns to where it began – from the opening note of foreboding to the final sound of acceptance. Shaped by his experiences with meditation and trance states, the album flows seamlessly from rugged techno to transcendent choral music, from solo acoustic piano to psychedelic ambient.

Inspired by their time playing raves and rock clubs all over the globe, Battle Lines—a dynamic yet delicately textured album that finds Bob Moses fully embracing their most inventive instincts while imbuing their lyrics with a deeper meaning and message.

German electronic producer DJ Koze has always been a self-selecting outsider, the kind of artist who sits blissfully on the sidelines of the big picture while the world passes him by. His third proper studio album unfolds like a daydream: breezy, sunny, and strangely beautiful, filled with ideas that don’t make sense until they suddenly—thrillingly—do. As with 2013’s *Amygdala* (as well as his endlessly inventive DJ sets and remixes), the style here is curiously out of time, touching on house (“Pick Up”), hip-hop (“Colors of Autum”), and downtempo soul (“Scratch That”), all with a slightly psychedelic twist that keeps everything hovering an inch or two off the floor. Fashion is fine, but it’s no match for a muse.

As an addendum to their 2016 album, *Woman*, this release summarises Justice’s decade of electro-house dominance—the duo reworking their biggest cuts into a studio version of their concert act. “Waters of Nazereth x We Are Your Friends x Phantom 2 (WWW)” blends the hands-in-the-air revelry of their disco-house hit “We Are Your Friends” with the distorted synthesisers and vocoder of “Waters of Nazareth” and “Phantom”. The disco-pop smash “D.A.N.C.E.” shows up twice, first as a breezy disco-funk rework and then as a triumphant closer—chopped, filtered and looped through hard-driving electro-house and progressive rock.