"I got a man, but ain’t got no manners," cracks Teyana Taylor on K.T.S.E. opener 'No Manners' — a smart, swift assertion of her unwavering sex positivity. Taylor's a mother, a wife and a TV star as well as being one of the country's most alluring R&B voices, but she isn't willing to compromise her sexuality, or, most importantly, her power. Sure, we have to mention Kanye, as his fingerprints are all over the album but this is Teyana’s space, whether she's extolling the virtues of slipping into intimate submission on ‘3way’ or standing firm with Mykki Blanco on ballroom-flecked closer 'WTP'. JT

The follow-up to Dust, last year’s jittery, experimental pop triumph, is a noticeably calmer affair. Raw Silk Uncut Wood is a bucolic instrumental adventure that hints at babbling brooks, wind flurries and shady forest clearings full of chirping birds. However, as we’ve come to expect from Halo, restless energy abounds. ‘Quietude’ and ‘The Sick Mind’ are both nausea-inducing in their use of swirling synths, while ‘Nahbarkeit’ swells with dramatic, life-giving drama. Halo is the true embodiment of an experimental musician — one who continuously pushes her sound in new directions — and we’re excited to see where she heads next. ACW

George HW Bush died and criticism was flung across my feeds toward anyone who celebrated him — a chunk of it from people who want to tweet Barack Obama back into the White House. Meg Remy, the intrepid and fearless force behind U.S. Girls isn't here for that kind of bullshit. In a Poem Unlimited was rolled out with a lead single lambasting Obama for being a war criminal in the same way as so many (all?) of his forebears. But it's not just Remy's truth-telling that has always drawn us to her music, it's the toothsome avant-pop and Poem features some of her finest. CL

Made using an iPhone during his commutes into the urban frenzy of Tokyo, Takahashi described to FACT the compositional process behind Low Power as “a ceremony to calm myself”, constructing his microtonal creations as a form of respite from his daily grind. The finished product bears these same healing qualities, providing a space of serenity for those bent out of shape by quotidian stress. HBJ

Bruce is one of the UK’s most consistently surprising young producers; over a rich discography for labels including Hessle Audio and Timedance he’s flitted unpredictably between four to the floor bangers and tricksy electronic oddities alike. On his debut album, Sonder Somatic, he covers the full spectrum, deploying sludgy, slo-mo tracks like ‘Ore’ alongside panic-inducing numbers like ‘What’. Bruce, much like contemporaries Actress, Autechre and Andy Stott, has a knack for rich, inventive sound design and ingenious rhythms. On this exceptional album, he imbues these building blocks with a devilish streak that's all his own. SW

If you thought Playboi Carti and Pi’erre Bourne had perfected their psychedelic take on Atlanta rap with ‘Magnolia’, think again. Die Lit sees the return of Carti’s off-the-wall lexicon of adlibs and sound effects, yet here the rapper approaches a kind of lysergic intimacy with his delivery, twisting his slurred raps around Bourne’s mangled beats. Indeed, the producer seems to have fallen even further down the rabbit hole with his production, transforming Carti’s endlessly repeated hooks into club-ready magic spells with blown-out bass, stuttering hi-hats and ricocheting synths. HBJ

From Steve Lacy and The Dap-Kings to Bootsy Collins and Tame Impala's Kevin Parker, every detail of Kali Uchis's long-awaited debut album is an expression of both her taste and patience for getting it right. Isolation is a polyglot party that oscillates from reggaeton to soul to girl-group nostalgia and that genre-shirking never once descends into mud. It's an album of romantic heartbreaks ('Feel Like a Fool'), as well as institutional heartbreaks ('Your Teeth in My Neck'), a perfect preamble for a long career of R&B invention. CL

On Silk Eternity, Montréal producer Jason Voltaire, aka Martyn Bootyspoon, serves up a collection of whip-smart tracks that engage with contemporary club styles from ballroom (‘Spread That Kat’) to Jersey Club (‘The Grid’), injecting personality into the mix with a flirty monologue about internet browsing. “People have John Waters for queer camp humor, but shit that was DJ Assault and Puff Daddy for us,” he told FACT earlier in the year. Informed largely by Bootyspoon’s love of bootyhouse and ghettotech, Silk Eternity is a retro-futurist dispatch that’s bursting full of life. ACW

Over the past few years, New York's techno underground has become a hotbed for artists creating unusual genre hybrids and distinct sonic universes. 2018's most compelling album from this scene was Beta Librae's Sanguine Bond, a deep trip through ambient music, dub techno and jungle full of dubby grooves and fuzzy moods that evoke the feeling of waking up in a neon-lit sensory deprivation tank. Many other producers experimented with similar sounds this year, but none arranged them into anything with half the depth or imagination as Sanguine Bond. SW

“Bitch, don’t make me put my wig in a rubber band,” Yung Miami threatens just seconds into her debut album. She and JT, the other half of Miami duo City Girls, carry energy throughout the next 15 tracks, packing bars with hilarious punchlines and capsules of quotables. They trade off outlining their manifesto: demanding their man’s credit card and the world’s respect. After dropping two projects this year and providing vocal adornment to Drake’s viral smash ‘In My Feelings’ (“Fuck that Netflix and chill, what’s your net-net-net worth?”), the only thing that can stand in the City Girls’ way is JT’s incarceration. Full prison abolition now. LC

Tess Roby’s debut album, Beacon, is a vespertine synth fantasia that swims through pools of ’80s dream-pop and trebly guitar lines. Tracks like ‘Catalyst’ and the Tangerine Dream-tinged ‘Borders’ platform the velveteen vocal operatics acquired by Roby during her time as a member of the Canadian Children’s Opera Company and find their perfect fit on Italians Do It Better. A joint effort with her brother Eric Roby, Beacon was inspired by the titular Lancashire landmark they used to visit as children and is both a mournful meditation on the grief of losing their and a shining beacon of hope from a bright new voice. ACW

"I wanted to do some shit different," Young Nudy told The FADER on the release of Slimeball 3, "all the way down with my beat swag." It's an impressive move from a rapper who's inexorably linked with one of the hottest producers in recent years: Pi'erre Bourne. While plenty of Nudy's peers this year were desperately playing catch-up with endless ‘Magnolia’ revisions, the young Atlanta rapper looked elsewhere. Slimeball 3 opens with a Bourne beat, but aside from that highlights a swatch-book of diverse beatmakers that allow Nudy to not only assert his originality but his keen ear. All this without a single guest verse. JT

The first full-length release on Riobamba’s Apocalipsis label, 13th Month is an idiosyncratic deconstruction of reggaetón rhythms and rap techniques from producer and DJ Kelman Duran. Influenced by time spent on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, the album is made up of fragments of songs, interviews, choirs and field recordings and sounds like nothing else this year. Burial is an apt comparison, but Duran has just as much in common with William S. Burroughs, DJ Screw or Coil and fizzes with an energy that drags us into the future, whether we like it or not. JT

Mood changes frequent Astrid Sonne’s exquisite debut album, from the glitchy, nervous torrents of LP opener ‘Also’ and the lacerating breakcore of ‘Real’ to the pastoral bliss of ‘0000’. “I really wanted to experiment with what happens when you take a choir sample and put it together with a dubstep synth,” she told FACT earlier this year. Human Lines proves that when it comes to electronic sound learning, perseverance and an adventurous mind can go a long way. ACW

“I’d say my heart belongs to writing songs and I’m devoted to that," Sacred Bones artist Hilary Woods told FACT earlier this year. Her debut album Colt is saturated with that devotion; punctuated with delicate melodrama that comes from experiencing a lot of life. There is so much intimacy and embracing, at times reminiscent of the fabulist world of Twin Peaks. If this first full-length is what's in store for the future, we know Wood's heart is in the right place. CL

The title of Space Afrika's second album, Somewhere Decent to Live, is immediately evocative. You already know the Manchester-based duo's mentality: access, respect, environment and scope. And their alchemical distillation of UK 'ardkore history and dub trickery isn't striking for its uniqueness, rather its laser focus. Elements of El-B, Lee Gamble, Vladislav Delay, Burial and Porter Ricks are reformed into murky meditations on place and purpose. It's the soundtrack to post-Brexit Britain, with all the stifled emotion and concrete realism that entails, and all the resistance. JT

Guglielmo Barzacchini is a leading light of London’s rave underground, as a co-founder of the Nervous Horizon label and a creator of the funky-related “hard drum” sound. But on his debut album he digs right down the foundations to create an intoxicating and unabashedly spiritual set of percussion-heavy rave tracks. Inspired by his Hindu upbringing, his recent exposure to mystical Islam and his love of belly dance music and Afro-Portuguese rhythms, it’s a raucous and razor-sharp debut designed to get your prana moving. CR

SOPHIE’s hyperkinetic pop style has always felt like cultural commentary and Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides introduces a new layer of self-expression. Starting boldly with her first vocal performance, ‘It’s Okay To Cry’ serves as a permission slip amidst sweeping synths to embrace yourself past and all. With this open sentiment in mind listeners are plunged into an expansive sonic world, from the blaring maximalism of ‘Whole New World / Pretend World’ to the cinematic ‘Pretending’ whose slowed vocals and background ambience take on the aesthetic of whalesong. SOPHIE has changed the pop game, and we are better for it. MRS

Unabashed and unashamed, with a mind for metaphor and simile, CupcakKe has nothing to prove: she brings her brilliance to any subject she chooses to set her sights on. The Chicago firebrand might choose to sequence a tracks where she explores the relationship of poverty to consumerism (‘Wisdom Teeth’) directly after ‘Duck Duck Goose’, a song with a video that finds her playing the titular children’s game with a rainbow array of silicone dildos. But the most colorful track on the album is ‘Crayons’, a tropical anthem pledging allegiance to her multitudinous young queer fans. LC

Sarah Davachi is a synthesis scientist — seriously, she's a Ph.D. candidate in the musicology department at UCLA — and Gave in Rest is a deft demonstration of her study of instruments. Meaty and investigative of the possibilities of sound, even its juxtaposition to intentional and testing silence, the album is one of this year's most evocative of live performance. Paired with her earlier release of the year, Let Night Come On Bells End The Day, it's clear Davachi is on her way to being one of this generation's most important composers. CL

Cardi B is Gen Z's first perfect rock star: she'll post a handful of videos on Instagram to air out her shit and she's afraid of genre-hopping without the pretense of having to make full-on pop records. Invasion of Privacy is full of sneering street rap ('Bartier Cardi', 'She Bad'), loopy trap ('Drip'), romantic malaise ('Be Careful', 'Ring'), and the snarliest song to ever mention read receipts ('I Do'). She can emulate Chance the Rapper and make a boogaloo sample the Song of the Summer. Now, just imagine what she can do when they give her beats from big name producers? CL

Renick Bell is the most notable members of the “algorave” movement, a scene made up of artists that write club music with code in real time. Ableton Live this is not: Bell writes tracks by the seat of his pants, manipulating samples with simple text-based editing software. Although some of this tension is diminished when you hear this music outside of a live setting, the way in which Bell keeps elastic kicks, rubber synths and rattling kickdrums spinning around an unstable center of gravity makes Turning Points one of the year's most thrilling club albums. SW

When Yves Tumor included the phrase how-i-learned-to-love-the-indiestry in the URL for his big beat-baiting surprise sucker-punch of a single ‘Noid’, we should have known how high his sights were set. Every detail of his swaggering rockstar cosplay, amped-up onstage sexuality and buzz-courting album rollout seemed geared towards not only moving away from his earlier work but surpassing it. With Safe In The Hands Of Love, he’s done just that, combining arresting, enigmatic lyricism with avant-garde production to produce an album that’s the closest thing we’ve had this year to an experimental blockbuster. HBJ

In a year that marked the 30th anniversary of the second summer of love, it’s appropriate that one of 2018’s best house and techno albums should come from acid house lifer Neville Watson. The UK's rave heritage is a big influence on The Midnight Orchard, yet none of its 12 tracks are slavish replicas of times gone by; instead Watson uses its spirit to create a half-remembered journey through free raves in overgrown thickets and after parties in abandoned bunkers, deploying corroded kicks and screwface basslines throughout. All vibes, no bullshit. SW

On Another Life, daring Berlin duo Amnesia Scanner birth a dystopian vision that considers technology’s role in the impending global apocalypse, while plumping up and taking a knife to club-pop tropes. The record’s primary mouthpiece is non-human, taking on the form of a “disembodied voice called Oracle, which represents the sentience that has emerged from Amnesia Scanner”. This hideously processed voice peppers the album with its helium squeals and cavernous growls, encapsulating twitchy, technoparanoia. It’s an avant-EDM nightmare, a piece of cultural commentary on our disintegrating world. ACW

Some Rap Songs is a title similar to the rapper himself: articulate and unassuming. As such, it’s an album densely packed with ingenious samples, intricate production and devastatingly potent bars — this is not just a collection of some rap songs, but the most accomplished and refined work of his career. It also stands as a statement of intent from a young artist who, after a year he has described as the toughest of his life, seems to have found solace in redefining himself. When Earl tells you “I only get better with time”, you’d better believe him. HBJ

Animus is DEBIT’s artistic interpretation of Carl Jung’s principle pertaining to a woman's unconscious masculine energy. “A strong animus helps us travel between an underworld and top-side world. The album provides sounds that facilitate this journey,” explains the Mexico City-born, New York-based producer. DEBIT marries the ambient and Latin club music, swaying from pointillist heater ‘Matriz’ — featuring labelmate Wasted Fates — to esoteric closer 'Epigone'. It may be only the first full-length release for Mexico City label N.A.A.F.I., but it's already a classic. ACW

On ‘Devotion’, the heart-wrenching centrepiece of Tirzah Mastin’s stunning debut, the first we hear of her is an anxious giggle. Moments later, she levels: “I just want your attention”. It’s this disarming vulnerability that lends such weight to Tirzah’s delivery, which over the course of 11 tracks acts as a continual incitement to emotional honesty and directness. Mica Levi’s production only serves to accentuate this, as sparse percussion on ‘Gladly’ and looping piano lines on ‘Affection’ lend the songs an incantatory quality, leaving room for Tirzah’s words to reverberate. When she sings: “You can come to me with honesty / You can to me with tenderness”, we are in no doubt that she is telling us the truth. HBJ

A former Pentecostal choir boy with a pentagram tattooed on his forehead, idiosyncratic artist Josiah Wise took dramatic steps out of the underground with an album that mourns the departure of a lover, a grandiose display of grief created in the vacuum left behind. Magic and melismatic, Wise’s classically-trained voice flutters like a dove over the spare architecture of trodding beats and organ. It’s celestial music that celebrates worldly experiences: the musk of a man, the bereavement of a relationship. The leftover matter of emotional excavation results in songs of devotion that don’t shy away from darkness. LC

The ripples from LSDXOXO’s surprise release of the explosive Body Mods at the beginning of 2018 have been felt throughout the year, with the Mr. Vegas-sampling drum ‘n’ bass anthem ‘Death Rattle’ and the Missy Elliott-meets-Soho Baltimore club stomper ‘Burn The Witch’ rearing their filthy heads in sets from reputed taste-makers Joy Orbison, Objekt and Night Slugs’ Bok Bok. The collection of edits serves as a “moodscape” to his forthcoming debut album, which, if his pummelling FACT mix is anything to go by, should make us all very, very excited. HBJ

Miro Tape maps out a sprawling global network of musicians from Bristol to California and Jamaica. Kicking off with an urgent lyrical double-header of ‘Love Di People’ and ‘Mad’, the tape stitches together 23 largely unreleased tracks, reviving the trusted mixtape format and pummelling dancehall into mutant shapes that come spliced with weird and wonderful psychedelic dub innovations. Mixed by Velkro and recorded in Duppy Gun’s new I Jahbar-run Jamaican HQ, Miro Tape is a forward-thinking monument to collaboration that brings the Californian duo of Cameron “Sun Araw” Stallones and M. Geddes Gengras closer to their spiritual sonic homeland — and it's been on heavy rotation all year. ACW

For the follow-up to 2014’s salacious Punish, Honey, Vessel has made an about-turn, crafting a shimmering leftfield masterpiece inspired by the Spanish Surrealist Remedios Varo and the soul-excavating writing of Maggie Nelson. It is also an album that, for the large part, sounds like Oneohtrix Point Never and Lorenzo Senni having a fight with a chamber orchestra. Singed strings, clattering percussion and frazzled electronics spark up against each other as the album hurtles towards its staggering climax, ‘Paplu Love That Moves The Sun’ — surely a contender for the most ecstatic track of the year. HBJ

Industry bigwigs these days are obsessed with making things smaller and more easily consumable to appeal to the attention deficit millennial masses. 23-year-old rapper Tierra Whack answered this call for concise content her own way with Whack World, a self-released record where every song is one minute long and has a visual accompaniment. Short as they are, no track feels undercooked and Whack seamlessly shifts genres from hip-hop to country to pop all while balancing perfect levels of silly and sincere lyricism. It’s one of the most cleverly executed conceptual albums to bless our Instagram feeds, complete with eye-wateringly earnest lyrics like “Takin’ bubble baths / Love to see my mother laugh” delivered with brag rap bravado. MRS

Few dance records in 2018 were as innovative as Gábor Lázár’s Unfold. Lázár’s earlier records were clinical exercises in synthetic minimalism, a style he switches for in-your-face digital maximalism on a phenomenal record that evokes both the clean, white curves of an imagined future and face-melting low end of Sheffield bassline. Unfold also rejects the notion that 'forward-thinking' club music has to be angular and rigid; nothing this year was as funky or full of swing, especially the standout title track and 'Steady', whose filtered chords are enough to make any raver go weak at the knees. SW

On DNA Feelings, Swiss-Nepalese artist Aïsha Devi draws on her dual heritage, her newfound commitment to meditation and her broad rave vocabulary to present herself as a mountain dweller exploring the edges of conscious experience. Shimmering trance synths take us to high altitudes while heavy bass rumbles below like shifting tectonic plates. It all comes together to frame her astonishing soprano, as she processes her melismatic trills and guttural throat-drones into unique and unearthly sounds. Backed by her jaw-dropping live performance, it’s a truly personal statement. CR

Tired: Repeating the "[artist] is the punk response to rap" because their music invokes mosh pits but never investigating how said rapper rebukes the status quo.

Wired: Rapping "You've been fuckin' mad dudes, why you fuckin' mad dude? / Is it 'cause I'm makin' money like your dad do?" — even though it's kinda slut-shamey — because you want to articulate your control outside of the line relentlessly towed in your genre (see also: bbymutha, CupcakKe).

Bonus points for a breakneck reinterpretation of Noreaga's 'Superthug'. CL

Cold, digital, precise, sharp, glossy: any of these words could be used to describe Sam Barker's Debiasing, or indeed Lorenzo Senni's game-changing 2012 full-length Quantum Jelly, the EP's most obvious touchstone. But the Leisure System boss and Panorama Bar resident has done something remarkable here, not replicating Senni's undulating "pointillistic trance", but replying to it instead. Barker's trained ear and technological competency assist him in assembling a devastatingly complex listening experience, but it's sickeningly economical too. There are four tracks on the record and not one lasts longer than seven minutes — take that Autechre. If Senni approached the sound as the upstart rave voyeur, Barker steps up to his role as the seasoned professional, distilling years of experience into four romantic, emotionally vulnerable explorations that sidestep the kick drum completely, instead platforming radical harmony and euphoria. JT

On 25-year-old Catalan singer Rosalía Vila Tobella's second album, she navigates the blurred boundary between tradition and progression masterfully, teaming up with FACT fave El Guincho (who contributed a FACT mix way back in 2010) and concocting a heady mix of flamenco music, Cassie-style R&B and dark, futuristic pop. Rosalía balances her tales of love's malaise on The Romance of Flamenca, a 13th century story about a woman trapped by her partner, literally. On El Mal Querer (loosely translated as "the bad desire"), she breaks down the prison of romance, using the flamenco's inherent melancholy to offer a 21st-century take on an ancient dilemma. Each track, from devastating opener 'Malamente' to achingly passionate high water mark 'Pienso en tu mirá' ("I think about your look") reframes something old and injects it with something startlingly new. As unrealistic expectations drown in reverb, Rosalía surfaces baptized, wary of love’s manipulative grasp. JT

As ambient, or more generally "beatless" music continues to surge in popularity, innovation has been remarkably thin on the ground. More often than not, templates are employed, whether it's Eno's wobbly Discreet Music phasing, Fennesz and Tim Hecker's ubiquitous "power ambient" moves or Hiroshi Yoshimura's popular FM nature sounds. And that's what makes Brian Leeds' debut as Pendant so impressive. Leeds has been circling the genre for a minute after spending half a decade crafting noisy dub techno as Huerco S., but Pendant is where he defines his own space completely. Make Me Know You Sweet is a gloriously psychedelic ambient album that submerges its bubbling rhythmic elements underneath layers of dense drone and gaseous tape hiss. Sequences dribble and disappear into each other with the viscosity of molten lava, but never overwhelm the mood. You can tune in and tune out at your leisure, sink into it completely or simply maintain the particular set and setting. It’s ambient, but it’s far from placid. JT

Since 2011, Lotic has been tearing the thin mesh between club subgenres, pushing the often rigid sound of Berlin - their current base - in a startlingly new direction. In fact, Lotic has already been so influential, it’s hard to believe they’re only now dropping their debut full-length. Power is part demonic symphony, part heavenly chorus. The record looks to deconstruct the dynamics of power – social, economic, patriarchal, capitalist – by encasing the dialog into a piece of music that is both oppressive in its tonality and forward-thinking in its message.

And as it turns out, that message is stark and biting. “I’m still alive / So I’m gon’ thrive / I’m a bulletproof nigga,” growls Lotic on ‘Bulletproof’, their voice chopping in and out of cut-and-paste beats and punishing feedback. It almost comes off as a threat, the idea that Lotic refuses to capitulate, using their blackness and their gender identity a weapon against the status quo. It’s a theme that permeates the album as a whole: danger lurks around every corner, but Lotic continually confronts it, both through their lyrics and genre-busting production. Power is a triumph, not only of what can be achieved in electronic music in 2018, but of whose voice can and should be elevated above the fray. CC

Written by April Clare Welsh, Cameron Cook, Chal Ravens, Claire Lobenfeld, Henry Bruce-Jones, John Twells, Lorena Cupcake, Maya-Roisin Slater, Scott Wilson. Cover image by Olivea Kelly.