Looking for some kind of evolution or progression in the work of William Basinski is to miss the point entirely of his approach to composition. Take Cascade, the 40-minute piano loop that makes up his latest album. It simply exists for a period of time, shimmering like so many ripples in a pool of water before gradually dying out. It’s a profoundly beautiful record, but don’t overlook its strength as a piece of ambient music. Put it on in the background and let it subtly influence your state of mind.

After earning an army of fans with two albums of playfully eccentric, phaser-heavy psych-rock, one-man-band and studio dervish Kevin Parker had a Bee Gees epiphany and ended up writing his most perfect pop songs to date, each shined to mirrorball-like perfection and quite obviously the product of lengthy graft in his home studio. Essentially a break-up album, Currents stoically moves through each stage of grief to alight on the realisation that he “feels like a brand new person, but makes the same old mistakes”. Still, it’s hard to feel miserable when life sounds this lustrous.

Chicago’s machine-music torchbearer Jamal Moss stepped outside his comfort zone as a solitary worker to make his most ambitious record to date this year, collaborating with a live ensemble including Arkestra leader Marshall Allen, Liturgy/Guardian Alien drummer Greg Fox and vocal improviser Shelley Hirsch, among many other talents from the jazz and experimental scenes. We Are Not The First is an hour-long journey through Moss’ less obvious influences, weaving sax skronk wig-outs, Afrofuturist mantras, punishing drum machine jams and fluttering electronics into an eccentric epic for cosmic travellers.

Katie Dey’s asdfasdf is everything great about bedroom electronica, Bandcamp and indie rock compressed into a 21-minute sugar-rush slammed straight into your chest. Her debut melted our hearts, from the squeaked and fuzzed-out vocals of opener ‘Don’t Be Scared’ to the 90-second rush of ‘Unkillable’ to the chirpy send-off of ‘You Gotta Get Up To Get Up’. All year, Katie Dey made us smile without fail.

While Chicago’s bop sound is yet to quite achieve the international attention it deserves, its influence is alive and well in the Windy City. My Last Days is one of the year’s most enjoyable rap records, filled to the brim with earworm Auto-Tune hooks, major-key melodies and booming bass. It doesn’t attempt to reinvent the wheel - instead, Young Chop turns in some of his best beats to date, and his most poppy. It’s just big tunes from beginning to end: to deny it is to deny fun.

Jóhann Jóhannsson was robbed last year when he narrowly missed winning an Oscar for The Theory of Everything, but his score for Sicario is even better. Ominous but visceral, it avoids the usual contemporary cinematic tropes and is as invigorating off screen as it is in theaters. Let’s hope Oscar doesn’t make the same mistake twice.

Fifth Harmony is the perfect girl group for the millennial age, with the zeitgeist mastery of Destiny’s Child, En Vogue's harmonies and the Spice Girls' diversity checkmarks, but engineered to avoid a Beyoncé breakout or a Danity Kane implosion. Reflection is non-stop pop-R&B perfection in three-and-a-half minute bursts of hooks, horns and homage (to Mariah, 2pac and Beyoncé, naturally). Girl power hasn't been this fun in years.

Dominick Fernow’s last album as Prurient, Bermuda Drain, opened with a blood-curdling scream; the roughly triple-length Frozen Niagara Falls reaches the same point but with a stretched-out, slow burning approach. Over 90 minutes of bloody outbursts and bleak comedowns, Fernow digs deeper into himself than ever before. The result is dissonant, chaotic, exhausting and upsetting, sure – but you’d be hard-pressed to find a more passionate performance in his entire career.

 Leave it to a Portugese schoolgirl to come up with one of the best club records of the year. With Danger, Lisbon-via-Bordeaux producer Minaj adds a giddy sense of awe to Príncipe’s clatter, giving her hiccuping rhythms a sly pop slant almost without trying. Danger is a defiant call to the dancefloor, yet never panders to anyone. It feels like the beginning of something very special.

"Are you willing to feel straaange for a while?" That's what Junglepussy wonders aloud at the beginning of Pregnant With Success, an album that’s really only strange compared to its contemporaries. Junglepussy raps and sings with the velvety precision of generations past, updating neo-soul and boom-bap traditions without ever sounding throwback. And as you'd guess from someone named Junglepussy, her sexuality is on full display; the intimate is made public as a weapon, a reward or a taunt ("If your face ain't a sitting place, fuck up out my face"). Junglepussy is fearless - and funny - in the way that the best new rapper in New York has to be.

Kode9’s third album (and his first solo) comes in bleak circumstances: the death of his long-term collaborator The Spaceape lingers over the record both in mood and content (his vocals are present on ‘Ear Transmission’), while musically Nothing is clearly indebted to the footwork of DJ Rashad, a key member of Kode’s Hyperdub stable who also died too young. Nothing lingers, maybe even wallows, in emptiness, and it’s hard not to feel like you’ve been winded when it closes on nine minutes of silence. It feels disrespectful to turn it off early.

M.E.S.H. and Rabit may have commanded more column inches, but Fis’s The Blue Quicksand Is Coming Now was one of the most invigorating “post-club” exercises of the year. Anyone who’s been following the New Zealand producer would know he left the club long ago, but here the atmosphere is still vaguely present: oppressive, smoke-filled and dimly lit. Fis takes this shell and injects a hit of dissolved futurism - the result is post-apocalyptic.

If Durban’s gqom was the club sound of 2015, then all praise to Italian label Gqom Oh! for trawling through the masses of tracks floating around the web to put together a selection of the absolute best. We’re dragged through the fledgling South African scene in a flurry of staccato horns, gut-punching kicks and ominous drones, and it raises more questions than it answers. Whether we’ll see more from the individual artists on the compilation, who knows, but for now you can get a headstart on a sound that’s likely to be heard more and more in the coming year.

Murlo has spent the last few years honing a sound that’s distinctly Murlo, and although he’s been grouped in with grime by association, it’s always been as much to do with bassline, dancehall, R&B and ridiculous fantasy worlds (you’ve seen his illustrations, right?) as anything else. On Odyssey he sets out his stall like never before: it’s one of the most complete EPs of the year, darting between tempos without ever feeling incoherent, and it keeps Murlo’s tried-and-tested flutes and synth sounds centre-stage without feeling like it’s retreading old ground. Listen to ‘Hunter’ and tell us you don’t want to live in Murlo’s world.

In a year dominated by Big Statement rap albums, Father's Who's Gonna Get Fucked First? says deuces to all that high-minded shit. The album's 12 tracks detail drug-heavy debauchery, music industry bullshit and violent fantasies; no two songs sound alike, and the sonic references bound from 'Tipsy' to 'Oye Mi Canto'. It's an Awful party, and everyone's either gonna get shot or commit suicide - what else did you expect?

‘Deconstructed’ may have been one of 2015’s most maligned buzzwords, but on Ecologies, J.G. Biberkopf showed us how a formless collage of club music and field recordings can still be hugely evocative. Rather than going the well-trodden route of pairing his music with meaningless images of a 3D rendered object, Biberkopf uses Ecologies to explore how nature is represented in the digital realm, creating a record influenced by “traumas of the present and of crumbling futures.” The EP isn’t always quite as green as its verdant artwork suggests, but there are enough pockets of natural beauty reflected in its chrome surfaces to put it in a category of its own.

Julio Bashmore seemed to be heading in several directions at once after infiltrating the mainstream with his 2012 taps-aff anthem ‘Au Seve’, going from glitterball dance-pop with Jessie Ware on ‘Peppermint’ to beefy club collaborations with Kowton to the head-scratching misstep of ‘Duccy’. So it’s fair to say we didn’t expect the Bristol-born producer to come up with one of 2015’s best dance albums in Knockin’ Boots, a debut that packs every spare corner of its 12 tracks with hooks upon hooks, all gilded with a distinct French touch. From the euphoric loops of ‘Holding On’ to the steroid-pumped 90s nostalgia of ‘She Ain’t’ to the giddy disco of the lovestruck title track, it’s all charm and no filler.

Few rappers are as uncompromising as Vince Staples, so it makes sense that he found a kindred spirit in the similarly contradictory Earl Sweatshirt - both are extreme yet measured, experimental but somehow traditional. Staples is more than just a few smart words on Twitter, he’s a force of nature, and Summertime ’06 is as ambitious (and sometimes as flawed) as a prog rock opus. His words twist and turn through a suite of unsettling, often minimal backdrops, and it’s hard not to feel like Staples is living up to the promise of cloud rap. Summertime ’06 is more psychedelic than anything A$AP Rocky has had a hand in, and it doesn’t need to shout about it.

Systemic inequality, electronic surveillance, neo-feudalism: it’s fair to say that no album explored contemporary malaise quite like Holly Herndon’s Platform in 2015. Despite its lofty themes, Platform is a pop record at its core, one that collects some of the year’s most tactile, heart-wrenching songs and futuristic club tracks, as well as an interlude that offers a genuine taste of the spine-tingling ASMR phenomenon. Herndon has always maintained that the laptop is an instrument, and Platform furthers her argument; the album’s computer coded guts might be visible underneath its translucent veneer, but it embraces the humanising possibilities of technology like nothing else.

Levon Vincent has given us plenty of jaw-dropping moments before (‘Man Or Mistress’ for one), but there’s a moment in ‘Launch Ramp To The Sky’ where you’d swear he’s trying to open up a wormhole in the dancefloor. There are plenty of wall-shaking kicks across his debut album for those who want them, but this 11-minute centrepiece encapsulates its delicate touch, letting his melody ascend to the ceiling before dropping like a precarious stack of plates. Vincent himself described his debut LP as a collection of “blue synth pop-rooted disco-technoid, smart club anthems” - an apt encapsulation of its breadth of ambition and universal appeal.

Boogie's The Reach is rap's version of Ta-Nehisi Coates' book Between the World and Me: a letter to his son about the struggle of being black in America, illustrated in heartbreaking detail and clear-eyed intensity. The SoCal rapper unveils tales of gangbanging, child-rearing, eviction, addiction and (as on Thirst 48) social media over soul-punching beats by newcomer Keyel, who samples everything from Jill Scott to Route 94. The standout, though, is the triumphant 'Oh My', on which Boogie raps, "You heard about my pain before you heard about my glory." The Reach has plenty of both.

Jack Latham’s second album takes a wrecking ball to the steel-and-glass structures of his influential 2012 debut Classical Curves, only to rebuild his world from the rubble, turning the same toolbox of processed guitars and drums into a set of soft-focus, open-hearted pop songs that manage find a shred of optimism in a landscape of apathy and disillusionment. On album highlights ‘Unhappy’, ‘Crisis’ and ‘Today’, Latham somehow finds the sweet spot between Prince’s funk pomp, The Cure’s melancholy melodies and the Cocteau Twins’ starry-eyed romance, with his newly debuted vocals submerged in a fog of reverb and shuddering bass. It’s one of the most remarkable reinventions we’ve heard in years.

Touring has been good to Luke Younger. Writing a record while hopping from state to state supporting a popular Danish hardcore act probably wasn’t easy, but it brought the best out of Younger, pushing him to reconsider his entire sound. It wasn’t that he worked out exactly what he wanted to do while on tour (as Oneohtrix Point Never has said of Garden Of Delete, for example), but that he worked out what he didn’t want to do. Olympic Mess is a rhythmic album without beats, and an ambient album that’s miles from being merely background music. It’s absorbing, rewarding and incredibly memorable.

Awful Records affiliate Abra kicked off 2015 with BLQ VELVET, an EP that served as a teaser for the astounding ROSE. The album follows a relationship from infatuation to devotion to heartbreak to rebirth, with Abra — who self-produced this collection of drum-machine electro-R&B — proving that "Darkwave Duchess" is more than a cute nickname. In a year where some of the year's best albums came from artists taking full control of their art, Abra's lyrics and layered vocals cut the deepest; when she sings "I’m young and I’ll waste you away," we still shudder.

If 2011’s Severant felt like it could go on forever, its long-awaited follow-up is tighter, tenser and entirely less pleasant. Inspired by Geinoh Yamashirogumi’s Akira soundtrack and video game dystopias  (as well as Jlin, whose Dark Energy was aided by Kuedo and appears to have fed into this EP), Surrounding Presence is a tour de force of airlocks, blood-red billboards and the world’s most ominous gamelan. Forget rattlesnakes, these hi-hats moved like hydras.

If you’re sick of people teasing you about liking vaporwave, give them this album and watch how quickly they change their mind. Orange Milk founder Keith Rankin and James Webster make it nearly impossible not to be seduced with these dozen gleefully chopped ’n’ screwed homunculi. DDS.wmv takes music you probably thought you hated and processes it through a gamut of different feelings; we get silly pop on ‘Loving Is Easy’, romance two ways with the back-to-back ‘혼자 남은 지금 꼴이 (hot ’n’ heavy)’ and ‘이보다 좋을 수는 없겠어 (shy ’n’ vulnerable)’ before knocking us down with the wondrous centerpiece of ‘시원한 파도소리 좋아요’. It’s one of the strangest albums of 2015, and one of the most fun.

“I’ve always been interested in the idea of music as a diary or a catalogue of what’s happening in your life,” Jefre Cantu-Ledesma told FACT earlier this year, and listening to A Year With 13 Moons is indeed like browsing through someone’s most intimate memories. Using just an electric guitar, modular synth, drum machine and reel-to-reel tape, Grouper collaborator Cantu-Ledesma creates an album of brief, shoegazey vignettes that are as emotionally candid as any hushed acoustic confessionals. There’s not a vocal to be found, but his “bookend to the end of a relationship” is one of the year’s most brutal break-up albums.

We didn’t see this one coming. Manchester up-and-comer Acre’s singles on Tectonic and (formerly Lost) Codes were perfectly good, but Better Strangers is surely one of the most original and distinctive albums to come from the UK’s post-dubstep (not Post-Dubstep) landscape. There are comparisons to make - a touch of Actress here, a sprinkle of Yamaneko or Zomby there - but it’s hard to imagine Acre looking outwards much while making it. Instead it feels shut off, a series of barely-there memories of barely-awake nights. It’s dreary and half-dead, in the best way.

It takes an understanding of the club environment to craft an album that turns dance music concepts completely on their head. Autechre understood this, but for the majority of producers who made what became known as IDM, the club was a mystery. Thanks to his tenure running parties as a member of Janus, M.E.S.H. knows what it takes to make successful dance music, and yet Piteous Gate is anything but, taking familiar sounds and pushing them through auditory wormholes to leave only faint traces. It’s not pretty, but it’s one of the most invigorating listening experiences of the year.

Or: the record where Rustie stopped worrying and remembered to believe. The Glasgow producer’s last album Green Language was torn between two personalities (he’s since commented that it was “too A&Red”), but on EVENIFUDONTBELIEVE Rustie drills his agenda down to the things that make him tick: happy hardcore and trance, dolphins and pills, Coral Castlez and Big Catzz. It’s so much fucking fun.

Alexandra Drewchin simply got psychedelic music better than anyone this year on RIP Chrysalis. Rather than offering easy hooks, it’s the kind of album you gradually sink into, like a dream or an acid trip. Once you’re under that spell, anything and everything can happen across these 10 sci-fi spirituals. Field recordings, hip-hop beats, classical arrangements, choral chants, kosmische and surreal poetry are all flattened out in a sort of everything-is-equal grandeur, yet in the midst of all its complexity, Drewchin sits at the center with zen focus, guiding us to the other side with warmth and grace.

Grind doesn’t sound much like the DJ Richard who debuted on White Material a few years ago with a clutch of ghetto house-influenced bangers, but it’s better for it. On his debut album, the New York-Berlin producer uses his steely structures to support a more evocative palette of sounds, combining US grit with Dial’s melodic charm. Grind is how vintage Detroit techno might sound through a nostalgic, sepia filter; a neon sheen muddied with the colours and textures of crushed autumn leaves. It’s not just the best album Dial has released for years - it has all the makings of a timeless classic.

Kelela only gives us 25 minutes of music on Hallucinogen, but across these six tracks of diamond-hard, deeply sensual, thoroughly modern r&b she doesn’t put a foot wrong. Showing off her sharpened songwriting throughout, Kelela reunites with Nguzunguzu, Kingdom and Girl Unit on ‘Gomenasai’ and ‘Rewind’, her coolly controlled vocals and endlessly catchy hooks urging comparisons with Janet Jackson and Aaliyah, while the considerable talents of DJ Dahi result in one of the best quiet storm smoulderers of the decade in ‘All The Way Down’, a love song as meticulously crafted as a Japanese puzzle box.

The record’s weirdest moments emerge through collaborations with Arca on ‘The Message’ (also one of her best vocal performances yet) and the semi-improvised glossolalia thread ‘Hallucinogen’, a landscape of trash cans and broken glass rendered beautiful through rippling vocal FX and syrupy, pitch-bent synths. The final bow is a rewind for ‘The High’, a post-Weeknd, narcotically numbed sex jam originally produced with LA producer Gifted & Blessed, and in fact the first track Kelela ever recorded. Where Cut 4 Me introduced a raw talent with a taste for outer-limits production, Hallucinogen makes good on that promise, revealing an artist with a distinct voice and a deep understanding of how to get the best out of her collaborators. And it’s still just the EP before the proper debut album.

Footwork is bigger than ever now, but it was interesting to see Mike Paradinas - whose championing of the genre through his Planet Mu label has been so key to its worldwide recognition - commenting that he found the sound had become too hi-res and homogenized in recent years, with the weird, weightless (not Weightless) style pushed by artists like DJ Elmoe and Young Smoke (and Mu’s own  Bangs & Works compilations) sidelined in the press. It’s appropriate, then, that Mu’s standout record of 2015 comes from Jlin, an Indiana producer who featured on Bangs & Works and whose take on footwork exists in a permanent state of zero-gravity. Her debut album Dark Energy often consists of little more than clipped drums, reversed breathes and samples of machinery (no wonder Jlin found peership in Holly Herndon), and in the hands of the right DJs, is packed full of 2015’s smartest secret weapons.

Future circa Pluto was one of rap's most entertaining figures and one of its most influential; Future post- Honest added "most compelling" to his resume. What began with Monster and Beast Mode culminated with the one-two punch of 56 Nights and DS2. Taken together (with bonus tracks), these two records offer 90 minutes of lean-and-bar-addled misanthropy, where Future is unrepentant about drug use, street life or his treatment of women (including ex-fiancée Ciara). The lovey-dovey skin of  Pluto and Honest is flayed to reveal raw nerves and primal pain, and Future has never been more honest.

It’s already hard to remember how much the deck felt stacked against Claire Boucher before Art Angels. ‘Go’ split fans, entire album sessions were scrapped and delays stacked up over the years that saw Visions’ shadow grow longer. But Art Angels sees Grimes evolve, Pokemon-style, from the insular bedroom-pop of her breakthrough into a one-woman wrecking crew. Even the ideas that caused initial concern among fans left us floored – that song she talked about featuring a time-traveling, gender-swapping, vampire Al Pacino? Turns out ‘Kill V Maim’ is one of the bangers of the year. That obsession with “diss tracks”? It’s a modest way to describe ‘California’’s inspiring commentary on our pop star-consuming culture, delivered with the sunniness of someone who refuses to be a victim of it. Most of the time, though, Art Angels feels unconcerned with the outside world. It’s Boucher focusing inward and loving what she finds; incredible as it sounds after so much success, it feels like we’re only now getting to know her.

It’s well established that Arca crafts tracks that sound alien, both solo and as a producer for Björk and FKA Twigs, but his debut album Xen was unmemorable, failing to live up to the promise of his early EPs and his &&&&& mixtape. His second album Mutant not only recaptures those early moments but is Alejandro Ghersi’s best solo work yet, combining Xen’s impressive production gymnastics with the sort of genuinely haunting moments that it was missing. At 20 tracks, it feels somewhere between a new album and a beat tape, and although certain elements share the precise nature of his earlier records, it feels like more has been left to chance this time around: those delayed glitches that run through certain tracks; artefacts left in the mix. It’s unwieldy and confrontational - this is an Arca record, after all - but its twisted harmonics refused to let us go.

It's difficult to judge To Pimp A Butterfly against other rap albums, because it isn't one: it's a jazz-soul-funk concept record, a black power treatise masquerading as the year's most anticipated rap album. It's dense, experimental and political, full of tangents and contradictions and generally as subtle as a Molotov cocktail. It's more poetry slam than cypher, more likely to be heard at Black Lives Matter protests than in clubs, and - to paraphrase 'u' - loving it is complicated.

"In this country a black man only have like five years we can exhibit maximum strength," the ghost of 2pac tells Lamar at the album's close. "'Cause once you turn 30 it’s like they take the heart and soul out of a man, out of a black man in this country." Lamar is staring down the barrel of the gun, and with To Pimp A Butterfly, he gives all his heart and soul. Everyone may have rushed to name it an instant classic, but that doesn't mean it isn't one.

Daniel Lopatin has never shied away from kitsch in his music, but Garden of Delete is his masterpiece of the grotesque. Taking inspiration from the hard rock radio he listened to while on tour with Nine Inch Nails, and his obsession with Vevo, Lopatin explores puberty through a teenage alien called Ezra and a fictional band called Kaoss Edge, creating an album he’s compared with inspecting a mucus-filled napkin before throwing it in the trash. Of course, Garden of Delete is anything but a throwaway album: it’s the most ambitious of Lopatin’s career to date, a vivid collection of power metal riffs, slime-covered synths and corrupted vocals. Over the course of his career, Lopatin has delivered delicate albums punctuated by incredible highs, but Garden of Delete is the one where he jacks your hippocampus right into the mains.

Dawn Richard has one hell of a story. Born in New Orleans to the ex-frontman of 70s soul group Chocolate Milk, the dancer and singer’s first taste of success came after auditioning for reality TV show Making the Band. She was picked by Diddy as one of the members of girl group Danity Kane, and also collaborated with the Bad Boy founder on Dirty Money’s faded cult classic Last Train to Paris. Although three of the five original Danity Kane members reunited for a self-titled album in 2014, Dawn’s main focus for the last five years has been her solo material, which in Blackheart’s case she describes as genderless, colourless and genreless. R&B might be at this album’s heart, but in both presentation and approach, Dawn is as comparable to Björk or Kate Bush as Janet Jackson.

Richard sets out her stall within the album’s first 15 minutes. ‘Calypso’ is a 100mph skydive of vocal processing, Balearic washes and rapid polyrhythms, before her cry of “like a calypso drum” leads quite literally into the marching drums of ‘Blow’. Forty seconds later, the 808s have kicked in: a reminder that no matter how experimental Richard gets, she’s still ready to throw the fuck down. Next, ‘Billie Jean’ sees her retell Michael Jackson’s story from the perspective of a groupie, pulling handbrake turns between understated, finger click-driven R&B verses and a sweeping chorus that fills up the grid. It’s like nothing else, and it flows seamlessly - both musically and lyrically - into ‘Adderal / Sold’, one of Blackheart’s most haunting and memorable moments.

Richard revels in fantasy: speaking to FACT in the lead-up to her 2012 album Goldenheart, she talked of “cyber-rainforests” and “putting on armour and fighting big-ass monsters”. But Blackheart is as driven by Richard’s personal life as her imagination: her grandmother died while making the record, and her father - who co-wrote its penultimate track ‘The Deep’ - was diagnosed with lymphoma. There’s also a cathartic conclusion of sorts to Danity Kane’s tempestuous story: Richard’s former bandmate in the group Aundrea Fimbres joins her for ‘Phoenix’, the album’s most outright poppy moment, and an outburst of emotion that feels more than earned after 10 tracks of slow-burning self-examination.

Although Blackheart tops this list because it’s the best album of the year, it’s worth noting the work Richard has done to create a visual world around it. She’s released some of the year’s most extraordinary videos and worn some of the year’s most extraordinary outfits (her press shots alone often feel like works of art) to accompany the album, and done so with no industry dark arts lurking in the background: Blackheart is the work of Richard, her small Our Dawn Ent. team, and some extraordinary production from Noisecastle III. It’s one hell of a story.

Photo credits:

William Basinski - Jasper Bernbaum
Kode9 - Philip Skoczkowski
Eartheater - Walter Wlodarczyk
Grimes - Maxwell Schiano
Dawn Richard - Pavel Ptak