The Best Electronic Music of 2018

Throughout this decade, Nicolas Jaar has cultivated a brand of shadowy electronic music that aims to subvert, challenge, and disrupt everything we know about electronic music. These brainy exercises are great at poking at our preconceptions, but by consciously avoiding repetition, sticky melodies, and cresting dynamics, they can also come across as impenetrable, distant. In this context, 2012 – 2017, a compilation of tracks under Jaar’s A.A.L (Against All Logic) moniker, plays like a dancefloor-filling complement to all those head games—a record for the body. It’s one of the most accessible things he’s ever released, a contemporary house album stuffed with bass that thumps where you expect it to and glorious soul samples that wail to the heavens. And yet, no one would confuse this album with something by, say, Disclosure. Jaar still manages to work in some of his offbeat moves, like the pointillistic drums on “I Never Dream,” or the subterranean clatter that shades the ebullient piano chords of “Cityfade.” Jaar is a genius when it comes to upending dance music traditions, but here, he’s just as masterful at honoring them. –Ryan Dombal