If ever there were a year that you could feel a seismic shift taking place in electronic music, it was 2019. Almost literally, as a rumbling under your feet. The truth is, the past few years in the genre had been slow: Despite the commercial explosion of EDM at the top of the decade, and the wave of opprobrium it generated from various corners of the underground and middleground, broad swaths of the dance-music scene didn’t offer much in the way of a counterargument—they just kept on doing what they’d been doing for years. And in many cases, that meant familiar, frequently retro-oriented house and techno, much of it indistinguishable from its inspirations from 20 years prior.

But in 2019, the status quo began to crumble, not just in terms of sound but also the people behind it. Much of the most exciting music came from relative newcomers, and many of them were women, trans, nonbinary, or queer, or artists of color, or some combination of the above—a far cry from the hegemony of straight, white dudes that had set dance music’s terms for far too long. The geographical center of power seemed to be shifting, too: London, New York, and Berlin remained key hubs, but some of the most unexpected sounds came via Kenya (Slikback), Uganda (MC Yallah), China (33EMYBW), or the Afro-Lusophone diaspora (DJ Nigga Fox), or from America-based musicians who incorporated their roots into their music (DJ Haram, 8ULENTINA, Debit).

In place of a dominant style, the sound of 2019 mirrored this radical openness. Four-to-the-floor rhythms gave way to the breakbeats and shifting syncopations of AMAZONDOTCOM, AceMoMa, and CCL x Flora FM. Peak-time requisites yielded to ambient instincts in the work of Barker, Leif, and Topdown Dialectic. Tempos swung wildly, from Dj Python’s dembow cadences to the breakneck rhythms of Jay Mitta’s singeli. And even in all this flux, dancers still clustered around a few enormous anthems, like Joy Overmono’s “Bromley” and Schacke’s “Kisloty People.”

These aren’t necessarily the 40 best songs of 2019—to make a list like that would be a fool’s errand. But they all represent chinks in the armor of dance music’s status quo; each one might be its own rabbit hole.

Photo Credit: Jase Cooper

A caveat: This is a personal list, not a purportedly objective overview of electronic music in 2017. Would such a thing even be possible? It’s doubtful, if only because there is no single overarching scene that unites all electronic music. It’s not just about the divide between commercial EDM and everything else; even within the underground, electronic music’s fans are fragmented into innumerable overlapping niches according to subgenres, stylistic quirks, cities, clubs, and cliques. Fortunately, one of the perks of my job—and one of the perks of going out a lot less than I once did, if I’m honest—is that I feel less compunction to pledge fealty to any single tribe. As a critic, I get to eavesdrop on them all. So while I can’t promise that this list is comprehensive, it does encompass a broad array of sounds, from Mark Barrott’s Balearic ambient to Jlin’s flickering post-footwork to Demen’s claustrophobic goth.Given that range, I’ve sequenced the list with listenability in mind, not in any sort of ranked fashion. There are a few principal threads. The first is the strain of jewel-toned, bittersweet house music heard in tracks by DJ Koze, Project Pablo, and Young Marco; for daydreaming dancers, 2017 has delivered in spades. Then there’s a range of heavier, beat-oriented fare, like Proc Fiskal’s brittle, fidgety grime, or Sinjin Hawke’s choral trap. And finally, I couldn’t resist fleshing out my list with ambient tracks like Visible Cloaks’ “Mask” and Kara-lis Coverdale’s “Grafts.” Ever since the disappearance of chillout rooms, ambient has tended to remain at arms’ length from dance music, but with incredible records coming along at an unprecedented clip, there’s never been a better time to close the gap.

Deep in the heart of Nicolas Jaars latest album, theres an extended domestic vignette: Jaar, a small boy, at home with his father, the Chilean visual artist Alfredo Jaar. Their talk, in Spanish, is playful and perhaps inconsequential; its actual content matters less than the way their voices charge the music with a special aura. Here is a tape, the snippet seems to say, rescued from a box long forgotten in the back of a closet; here is a memory brought to the light of day.It signals the extent to which Sirens—depending on how you count, either his second or third or fourth proper album—is the young electronic musicians most personal recording yet. As he explained to Pitchfork, with his previous records, he had taken aspects of his own identity for granted. "But in the months leading up to Sirens," he says, "there was a lot of change in my life—when you come back from a long tour, you really have to pick up the pieces in a way."And the album really does feel like a process of unpacking. It takes stock of the elements that have long characterized his work—the slow tempos, freeform arrangements, and shadowy atmospheres—while confidently pushing into a number of new directions at once. The pensive piano and effects of the opening "Killing Times" give way to a fairly rocking vocal number that sounds for all the world like a cover of the Bauhaus side-project Tones on Tail. "Leaves" incorporates a plucked string instrument—koto, perhaps—with ambient textures in a way that suggests an ambient musician like Biosphere. "No," the song that features his childhood home tape, taps into a spongy reggaeton beat faintly reminiscent of the Berlin producer Poles scratchy ambient dub—though the songs examination of his multi-national identity (Jaar, whose Chilean parents fled their home country after Pinochets coup in 1973, grew up between Chile, Paris, and the United States) also recalls the Ecuadorian-American musician Helado Negros own multi-lingual self-portraits.There are further surprises along the way: "Three Sides of Nazareth" hints at New York proto-punks Suicide as well as the contemporary UK musician Powell—which is pretty funny, because in most respects youd never think to mention Jaar and Powell in the same sentence. And it ends with a gorgeous, airy doo-wop song that cant help but bring to mind the Beach Boys weightless harmonies. Whatever else Nicolas Jaar may intend with his choice of title, theres no denying the seductive power of the final songs ethereal web of harmonies. Like everything on the album, it draws you in.

Subscribe to the Spotify playlist here.It was, by many metrics, a terrible, terrible year. But it happened to be an excellent year for ambient music—and that turned out to be incredibly fortuitous, since nothing works better than ambient music when youre in the mood to close the blinds and crawl under the covers for the next four (or, God help us, eight) years.There was so much great ambient music this year that it inspired a number of commentators to ask whether we were in the midst of a comeback. Id venture that ambient music never went away, assuming you knew where to look for it. But its certainly true that this years crop of quality ambient music amply proved just how varied the form can be. Huerco S. gave us lo-fi ambient techno slathered in tape hiss. Former Emeralds member Steve Hauschildt kept perfecting his blissed-out Tangerine Dreamscapes. Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith paired burbling arpeggios with wild vocal processing, while Julianna Barwick looped her own voice into a soft, tenebrous web.There was a surprising amount of guitar-based music that fit an ambient sensibility this year: Christian Naujoks paid tribute to Durutti Column on a lovely LP for Hamburgs Dial label; Tortoise member Jeff Parker explored skeletal atmospheres on his solo album Slight Freedom; and super-producer Daniel Lanois spun pure gossamer out of pedal steel on the masterful Goodbye to Language.One of the years most interesting developments in ambient music may have been the return of what Jon Hassel termed "Fourth World" music. Motion Graphics, Visible Cloaks, and the New York duo Georgia all paid tribute to the digital synthesizers and rippling textures of Japanese ambient and new age music of the 1980s; an artist named Slow Attack Ensemble even covered the Japanese duo Inoyama Lands 1983 song "Mizue" on a beautiful album called Soundscapes for the Emotional-Type Listener. And both Andrew Pekler and the duo of Jan Jelinek and Masayoshi Fujita delved into ideas of otherness and exoticism on their respective albums for Jelineks Faitiche label this year.Thats just scratching the surface; I havent even mentioned the ambient-leaning techno from Studio OST (White Materials Galcher Lustwerk and Alvin Aronson), or the broken-down synthesizer experiments from Kassem Mosses Honest Jons LP, or the jewel-toned clouds of tone Tim Hecker whipped up, or the spirit-channeling mysticism of Anna Homler and Steve Moshiers Breadwoman, an early-80s cassette that the deep-digging RVNG label rescued for contemporary ears. And special mention goes to Sarah Davachi, who is responsible for not one but two of the years finest ambient albums: Dominions and Vergers, both of them examples of drone music at its most meditatively breathtaking. If its respite youre craving, youll find plenty of escape routes on this two-and-a-half-hour playlist.

Its not entirely surprising that the British artist Powell once sampled Big Blacks Steve Albini; the Chicago noise-rockers volume and in-your-face attitude go to the heart of what Powell does in his own music and with his label, Diagonal Records. Co-founded with fellow Brit Jaime Williams in 2011, Diagonal pulls together an unlikely mix of sounds: the lurching rhythms of rockabilly, the clang of post-punk, and the eviscerating feedback of the contemporary noise scene, all of which get hammered into a lumpy approximation of techno. (Youll also find Hall and Oates samples, Autechre remixes, and reissues of early avant-rappers Death Comet Crew in the mix; Diagonals vectors are nothing if not far-reaching.) The overall effect is a little like gargling broken glass with a manic grin on your face.