THUMP UK's 20 Tracks of the Year So Far

Sorry if we're a bit of bummer sometimes. Whether we are complaining about which way you face when you dance, or all the reasons you should stop clubbing before you hit 40, we can be prone to moan. Well, put those worries aside. The year has reached its sun-kissed peak, and team THUMP UK is in the mood for some positive thinking. More specifically, celebrating how much jaw-dropping, room-slaying music we've heard already.

Given that we're halfway through the year, it seemed like a perfect time to run through the twenty records we've turned to time and time again. In compiling this list, we've been struck by what a bountiful year 2015 has been so far. Everyone, from the producers with more tracks than they've got likes on Facebook, all the way through to the headline-slot-bound big guns, have pulled it out of the bag. Some are custom built club jams, others are bliss-out Balearic swishers — all of them are fucking great.

20) Levon Vincent - "The Beginning" (Novel Sound)

For an album that Vincent himself nonchalantly leaked over Twitter, opening track "The Beginning" is appropriately playful; Eurythmics-via-Blade-Runner, only to end on a spooky twinkling trill. (Angus Harrison)

19) Jessy Lanza - "You Never Show Your Love Ft. DJ Spinn, Taso" (Hyperdub)

Lanza's tripped out, blissed out vocals were a perfect match for the Teklife boys sombre, slow, hazy, gauzy footwork chirrups. Total late night, smoke-out sensual seduction shit. (JB)

18) Daribow - "Eclipses" (Dystopian)

We still don't know who Daribow is, but there's something relentless about this track that makes it unbreakable. It begins with eerie chirping, then grows and grows before plummeting down into the underbelly of a thudding kick drum. A real dark-room stomach churner. (AH)

17) Jose Padilla - "Day One" (International Feel)

The gorgeous rattles at the start of "Day One" are so breezily laid back it's as if the track started completely by accident, as though a cool ocean wind startled some bells, shook some percussion, and eight minutes of blushing balearic house followed in pursuit. (AH)

**16) *Sound Stream - "Sweep Magic" (Sound Stream)***

By now we know what Frank Timm's all about: gorgeously simple disco extensions that turn snippets into masterpieces through incredible EQ'ing and an ear for just the right bit of a track. "Sweep Magic" takes the strutting melody of Kerri Chandler's remix of "Get Out" by Matrix and works/reworks it into an infectiously catchy groove that sounds like it could go on forever. Six minutes of this simply isn't enough. (JB)

15) Legowelt - "Evaporate With Me 2 Infinity" (Technicolour)

Typically warped acid-melted, brain-fried, cosmically attuned oddball house-not-house from everyone's favourite Dutch synth-mangling hardwear fiend. (JB)

14) Shanti Celeste - "Moods" (Brstl)

There's an intangible quality to "Moods". The sort of quality that leaves you flapping around for the right words, and normally leads to saying "vibe" about 15 times in every sentence. Perhaps its title sums it up best, the sort of outwardly dance-ready track that actually comes pre-loaded with plenty of suggested feeling. It is the sound of fighting your way out of the smoking area, pushing past clusters and crowds, before falling back into the darkness of the dance-floor. (AH)

13) Tessela - "Bottom Out" (R&S)

Since their relaunch in 2008 there has been an untouchable air around R&S, and it's cuts like "Bottom Out" that are responsible for this. It is splintering, shocking, fizzing, and spitting techno from an artist and a label on their tightest and boldest form, finding perverse melodies in the racket. (AH)

12) Pender Street Steppers - "The Glass City" (Mood Hut)

We love Mood Hut here on THUMP, and a new Pender Street Steppers record is always cause for celebration. "The Glass City" is a suitably light and breezy bit of throwback jazzy house that makes us want to run the most bubble-infused bath imaginable. Total Radox ready relaxation. (JB)

11) Skrillex and Diplo ft. Justin Bieber - "Where Are Ü Now" (OWSLA and Mad Decent)

Do you want to have a chat about this? We're serious, we will chat to you about this if you are in any way questioning our decision making. (AH)

10) Percussions - "Digital Arpeggios" (No Label)

As is often the beguiling introduction to beautiful pieces of music, we had no idea who was responsible for "Digital Arpeggios" until long after listening to it. Because of this, the fact that it has since been revealed as the work of Kieran 'Four Tet' Hebden, under his Percussions moniker, is, for us, completely elementary. The elusive nature of the track (it still hasn't been released anywhere), along with its winding, spiralling melodies, all give it an ethereal quality. It is music that sounds to have emerged organically from technology. The very name, "Digital Arpeggios", almost speaks of a data pattern that coincidentally conspired to produce a blissful, blossoming trajectory. (AH)

9) Fatima Yamaha - "What's a Girl To Do (DJ Haus' 4/4 Edit)" (No label)

A few weeks back now, when we thought this track was by an anonymous producer called Troll Gaze, we said the Ibiza ready mix of a modern classic was, "an absolute fucking pumper," and now that we know the truth — that it's actually an edit by the ever-reliable DJ Haus — we love it even more. 2015's certified ultimate summer jam. (JB)

8) Julio Bashmore - "Holding On" (Broadwalk)

Julio Bashmore knows exactly what he is doing. That's the immediate and refreshing efficacy of "Holding On". There's no fucking about with tenuous buildups or unnecessary particulars. The track bolts off the starting block with surely the most infectious melody in dance music this year, courtesy of Sam Dew's gooey, yearning vocal turn, and barely relents until the end. At its core, "Holding On" is so victorious thanks to how brilliantly it blends huge groove with even huger heart-ache, the simple symbiosis that has been powering house music for decades. (AH)

7) Omar-S - "I Wanna Know" (FXHE)

For years now, Alex Smith has been ploughing his own furrow, dropping gritty techno and bombastic house on his own FXHE label, idiosyncratically tearing up the rulebook and seemingly never listening to anyone but Omar S. This was the joint it turned out that we'd all been waiting for: an over the top, lascivious, lewd, luscious paean to the sexual promises offered by nights in the club. It's a singalong classic and James Garcia's vocal is one of the best examples of the pleading male lead in house since Roland Clark wept all over Armand Van Helden's "Flowerz". One for all the wannabe lotharios out there. (JB)

6) Jlin - "Guantanamo" (Planet Mu)

Jerilyn Patton's Dark Energy is one of our favourite, but most confounding, records of the year so far. It's footwork but not as we know it: it's frantic and frenetic but imbued with a sense of spatiality that takes it far beyond the glut of post-Rashad dross that litters SoundCloud. "Guantanamo" was a highlight — a stuttering, deranged, deadly weapon. (JB)

5) Jamie xx - "Gosh" (XL)

Jamie xx, for better or for worse, has experienced a mild backlash of sorts. While Pitchfork gave his album one of the highest ratings of the year, Boomkat felt quite differently dubbing it "as seductive as a Waitrose fridge on a warm day". The danger with so much of the criticism, and for that matter praise, of In Colour is how little attention it has paid to the music – far more concerned with the producer's background or the album's cultural significance. Context in criticism is vital, but in this case it's smothering the content itself. Really, it's cuts like "Gosh" that strip the discussion down to its barest elements. Everything else aside, this is the sort of spooky, low-light break-beat that has an inimitably uplifting yet somehow spooky effect. Then the big cloud of that bass that arrives around the two minute mark? Oh my gosh. (AH)

4) Gonno - "A Life With Clarinet" (International Feel)

We were already sold when we read the title. "A Life With Clarinet" is somehow a poem in of itself, packing more potential meaning and imagery into four words than some short stories manage. While the track doesn't actually feature any clarinets, this sense of below-the-surface possibility runs through it beginning to end. It ripples into effect, like distracted water, before gradually growing from slender strokes into a full, frisson of warm-bodied wonder. Effectively, what starts as a tingle, soon breaks into something at once both soaring and aching. A truly arresting sound. (AH)

3) Hudson Mohawke - "Ryderz" (Warp)

We threw so many superlatives at "Ryderz" last time we wrote about it, we're worried HudMo will block us on Twitter if we say much more. Needless to say then, this lead cut from the producer's recently released album Lantern is huge. It is the lavish realisation of exactly what makes him such a powerful voice in modern electronic music; deploying every weapon in his armoury, the two-and-half minute long explosion has joy coursing through its lurid purple veins. The great achievement here is how HudMo retains the huge, rushing drops of his earlier work with TNGHT, but trades the mosh-pit aggression for a far more inclusive celebration, reaching genuinely higher ground. It is majestic, euphoric, and unmanageably entertaining. (AH)

2) Floorplan - "Ritual" (EPM Music)

Robert Hood doesn't so much make music as craft hulking, huge, ridiculously massive mechanisms that bolt relentlessly on and on, getting tighter and tighter to the point where implosion seems inevitable. His God-fearing releases under the gospel-influenced Floorplan moniker are absolutely fucking stratospheric, testaments and monuments to the power of dance music, unfuckwithable, timeless invocations of the power of potential transcendence. "Ritual" is no except. No other record from 2015 so far has made us want to lose our shit in quite the same way. (JB)

1) Bicep - "Just" (AUS)

We're not sure we knew how much "Just" was going to knock us out when we first heard it. In fact, the first listen probably sailed by with a gently engaged nod of the head, before moving on to listen to EP's accompanying tracks. It was after this point, that rattling punched in melody rolling around and around in our heads like a clockwork toy left wound in an attic, that we realised just how good it was. That's its quality though: inconspicuousness. It's the sort of track that is playing so deep into the heart of a night, your eyes shut so closely, you can't recall how long ago it started playing, only that it is existing with you in the room and lifting you out of it all at once. Bicep have done a lot of growing in recent years, for a DJing duo initially associated with floor-filling house and disco edits, they have made deliberate moves to elevate themselves to a status not only worthy of respect, but constant attention. Their recently announced XOYO residency is a sign of how far they have come in terms of prestige among their peers, and the scale of their popularity in the public eye, but it is "Just" that is the real victory of their development. Production-wise, the palette is strikingly non-specific, shades of tech-house in the rolling beat, a synth that sounds tactile without ever feeling retrofitted or nostalgic, and that swirling, sinister bass that never drops as much as it just broods before disappearing. In the most basic sense, this is a track that sucks the air out of the place, replacing whatever atmosphere was previously there with one of its own. Fascinating, mesmeric, and effortlessly cool. (AH)

We've even put the top 20 into a Youtube playlist for you.

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