1. Holly Herndon Platform
The best electronic album of 2015 is also perhaps the genre's most political (alongside Apocalypse, Girl). Holly Herndon's Platform is the most experimental and "now" sounding album released this year, primarily because of the fact that she is utterly keyed into the posthuman relationship that people retain with their electronic devices today and is focused on the problems that this relationship can potentially cause. It is rare to find an album of this style (electronic, with an overarching concept) that hangs together so meticulously from start to finish. The first clues that Herndon was producing something special came with the album's preceding singles, Chorus, Home and Interference. Chorus is formed from sounds sampled from Herndon's browsing activity, and it is a deeply intimate - but wholly digital - insight into the cyborgian connection that she maintains with her personal technologies. Effectively, the track itself is a representational image of Herndon herself. Home takes these themes further, exploring the genuine sadness and fears that she (and, by extension, others) felt after revelations surrounding the NSA spying on the online activities of web users. She refers to the track as a "break up" song for her laptop in recognition of just how sensual relationships with these devices actually are - and how the eavesdropping of government agencies is like a genuine penetration of one's personal space. Interference, meanwhile, is an abstract take on club music, taking it apart and piecing it back together in a collagic way. Its video is accompanied by a manifesto that demands that people begin to unite under their new technologies and use it as a tool through which political and sociological change can be wrought. These are themes that recur across the record. New Ways To Love is more discordant than the aforementioned tracks, with Herndon's disembodied cut-up vocals floating through a mix of aggressive static and flashing digital sounds. This is deliberate - a song about an emotion as organic as love is treated as arguably the most hyper-digital composition on the record. An Exit features weirdly robotic multi-layered vocals, a watery beat and creaking synths at its beginning, before ascending into a percussion-driven ballad that would sound celebratory (almost like a track by Liars or someone of that ilk) if not for its continuing use of abstract sampled interjections. Lonely At The Top is scarily intimate, a softly spoken consumerist parody speaking directly into the listener's ears with only the most minimal sonic backing. It would be easy for this album to have become something pretentious, unanchored or simply too abstruse given the themes and sounds highlighted. That it actually comes across as stunningly emotive and, at times, genuinely danceable is testament not only to Herndon's abilities as a composer/producer, but also to both the pertinence of the themes that she is exploring and the foregrounding of the techno influences that she has previously admitted a fondness for. The ideas put forward by Herndon are terrifying, and they are genuinely worth taking note of. That the concept-heavy album itself is also spellbinding from start to finish is just as miraculous.