Jubilee’s FACT mix from 2014 demonstrated the Mixpak mainstay’s party-primed ear for Miami bass, Jersey club and anything else that gets the club turnt. This dancehall-inspired, marimba-laced track from her long-awaited debut album After Hours hires Bronx vocalist HoodCelebrityy to really bring the heat. ACW

As the much-delayed Konnichiwa lingered in the wings, 'Man’ turned up as a reminder of Skepta’s endurance. It’s no surprise he chose to perform it after winning the Mercury Prize, delivering takedowns of hangers-on and rallying cries to the Boy Better Know family over a Queens Of The Stone Age riff – there wasn’t a better anthem for the MC this year. The track’s placement on Konnichiwa is fitting, leading into 2015’s ‘Shutdown’ and 2014’s ‘That’s Not Me’. Three years, three classics. MB

Tinashe does best when she’s toiling in her own world. Her mixtape muscle memory never diminished despite her blockbuster breakout ‘2 On’, and her 2015 modern G-funk freebie Amethyst featured some of her best work to date. Within the collection of singles slated for an absent sophomore effort called Joyride, she maintained a free spirit that isn’t afraid of trend-hopping but never strays from her own voice (‘SuperLove’ perhaps the only exception). ‘Ride of Your Life’ exemplifies this attitude at its peak: getting big producers (in this case, Metro Boomin) to go subdued, dark and sexy and putting a stamp on it that can only be hers. CL

We could have picked his Rihanna remix, his Tinashe remix, or his D∆WN remix –really, the name Murlo is an automatic stamp of quality at this point. But, partly as a nod to the stellar year AJ Tracey has had, it’s the Mixpak affiliate’s version of ‘Naila’ that makes the grade. Murlo's playful contrast between sugared vocals and whiplash snares turns Trace’s breakout track into a Janus-faced creature, all sweetness and light on the hook and screwface silliness the next. A perfect balance. CR

There was a lot of Peder Mannerfelt material to get excited about this year. His self-released album Controlling Body (one of our 50 best albums of the year) was the tip of the iceberg, with 12”s for Numbers and Hinge Finger serving the more challenging end of the house and techno spectrum. ‘Public Images’, however, was his most effective dancefloor transmission, channeling abrasive hardcore and analog techno into a virulent potion for the rave. OW

Berlin-based DJ and producer Soda Plains routinely fuses the requisite contemporary club tropes (distorted digital beats; elements of grime, dancehall and rap; cloudy pads and melodies), but on ‘Rodeo’ he emerges with a sound that’s startlingly unique. A basic dancehall template - steel drums, booming kicks and rattling snares - exists as a skeleton behind a fuzzy mist of haunted YouTube drones and collapsing static. It’s narcotic and escapist, the perfect remedy for the year’s ills. JT

‘Work From Home’ is 2016’s proof that lyrics do not have to make any sense for a song to be an indelible pop hit. Seriously, is this guy working the night shift? Or does he not have to go to work? Is the “work, work, work” just that good that his paramour cannot keep the everyday details of her life straight? Who knows! But Fifth Harmony’s song is one of the most fun of the year, the lead-off to an incredible collection of 2016 guest efforts from Ty Dolla $ign and a perfect example of why the tradition of the girl group should last long into the future. So who cares if it doesn’t make any sense? CL

From Galcher Lustwerk’s label came one of our favourite new finds of 2016, the curiously perfumed rap-house haze of Florida’s Quavius. On ‘Love The Way’, the time-stranded introduction to his self-titled first EP, he acknowledges his girl’s dancefloor talents over a spare boom-chkk beat and trembling guitar lick; simple pleasures, but it’s the way it congeals into something soft and spectral, like a postcard from a long-forgotten holiday romance, that makes it so special. CR

Prior to ‘Problem’, Alexandria had been ethereal, sensual, but never playful. This witty flip of ‘99 Problems’ changes that: she half-sings, half-speaks the first verse as though talking to herself in her bedroom, but her switch into a smirking rap on the second verse is one of the most unexpected and delightful things the Awful Records player has done to date. AM

A medley of three songs cut over three years, ‘Untitled 07’ begins as one of the most urgent cuts on Kendrick Lamar's untitled unmastered. collection of To Pimp A Butterfly offcuts. The message - that the pleasures of these worldly things aren't all they're cut out to be - isn't a new one, but Lamar raps breathlessly as though racing the clock, and the way his "Levitate, levitate, levitate, levitate" command repeatedly interrupts him and disrupts the song's flow is a master stroke. The plateau comes with the second section, one of those captivating stretches where Lamar revels in the richness of his language, casually evoking fire-and-brimstone preachers and apocalyptic zombie scenes within a few lines of each other. Four minutes of aimlessly ad-libbing over rudimentary acoustic guitar is perhaps an underwhelming outro, but the relaxed demos are still an interesting contrast to the detail and layers of To Pimp A Butterfly. AM

On her debut EP for Workshop, Willow more than delivered on the promise of last year’s head-turning label compilation track ‘Feel Me’. Maintaining the sultry mood while widening the scope of her sound, the Manchester-based artist interrupted her beguiling house concoctions with ‘A2’, a haunting variation on dubstep populated by soft, soul-stirring vocals and bone-rattling sub bass. OW

‘Panda’ may have been the first Future song to ever hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, but Desiigner still doesn’t quite rank as Brooklyn’s young gun of the year. That honor belongs to Young M.A for her summer anthem ‘OOOUUU’. It’s just so damn regular. While other songs of the summer are aspirational, even down to what you can afford from the liquor store, Young M.A is keeping it real in the most honest way.  And sure, it may be packed with the overdone “where the hoes, though?” lyrics and vows of “the bro code”, but here it is enacted by one of the first queer voices to dominate legitimate top 40 radio. This is how you do Brooklyn in 2016 — keeping it current, both on trend and on your block. CL

At its transcendent best, house music is a simply a portal between two ends of the infinitesimal, from the pin-prickle hairs on your forearms to the cosmic depths of space and time. They don’t call it deep for nothing. And when you’re the guy who invented it, a return to your most revered alias for the first time in a decade is cause for notice. ‘Qwazars’ is as supermassive as it sounds; deceptive in its simplicity, as Larry Heard is apt to be, but humming with invisible energy, from the spasming lead line to the pent-up, sucked-in, trebly percussion. And when that soft piano floats in, more earthly than anything before it, you’re transported to somewhere way, way up. Our invisible narrator is equally mystified: “What’s going on?” Ah, yes: “Qwazars.” CR

When Radiohead returned in a hail of throbbing bass and gnarled orchestral tension this summer, we called ‘Burn The Witch’ “as concussive and disturbing a return as could be imagined, delving into new territory just as, nine albums in, you might have wondered what new territory they have left to explore.” The world events that followed the song’s release have only made the track more horrifying – the wailed chorus line about shadowy figures who “know where you live” feels even more grim and upsetting now the most powerful man in western politics is a demagogue pledging to put Muslims on a registry. The world gets worse and worse, but Radiohead remain steadily capable of pulling incredible songs out of the bag. AH

One of Abra's most distinctive features is her knack for delivering richly poetic songs so casually that it feels as though she's inventing them as she goes along. ‘Crybaby’ takes that skill to a new level. Its endoskeleton is a sharply convulsing beat worthy of prime Jam & Lewis, but it's the way Abra gradually fleshes it out that makes it so engrossing: the addition of background chorales, then a tingling synth harp, then bringing all the elements together in glorious, unashamedly big fashion. Her delivery, too, is as supple as ever: the sudden elongation of the phrase "ocean of emotion" is particularly delicious, and almost overshadows the casual evocation of an ancient deity in the next line: "I am not Poseidon, but I ride him in the riptide." AM

Norway’s brand of nu-disco has weathered every storm and outlasted all of dance music’s flash-in-the-pan trends over the past decade, despite only really being made by a handful of producers. On ‘Closing Shot’, Hans-Peter Lindstrøm demonstrates why. A soaring epic that combines the synth-prog of his 2005 classic ‘I Feel Space’ with the hum-along feel of Todd Terje’s ‘Inspector Norse’, it shows that you don’t need a vocal hook to make one of the year’s biggest dance anthems. SW

Wonderland’s sprawling centerpiece, ‘Hardnoise’ is the perfect representation of Demdike Stare in 2016. Gone is the occult ambience and ethno-sampling that characterized their early work, replaced by bare, ragged beats, rumbling jungle basslines and very little else. If you're left wanting a pretty melody, don’t despair - there’s one about eight minutes in. Bish bash bosh. JT

Drake’s been after a grime-adjacent British break-out since he first copped Top Boy, and with ‘Wanna Know’ he finally struck gold. Santan Dave’s original does everything right: it’s unshakably British (right down to the #ladsontour video) but wears its open-hearted Drake influences on its sleeve. Those lilting, half-sung bars and molasses-slow, Houston-influenced beats are nothing if not reminiscent of the Toronto superstar’s biggest moments, but what we didn’t really need was an extra verse from Drake himself on the remix. We get it, mate - you’re just adding salt to the ocean. JT

Robert Hood and his daughter Lyric built a bulletproof chassis for their fifth-gear ascension on Victorious, an album of devotional house-techno hybrids that saw the minimal godfather’s austere constructions embellished and enlivened by faint touches of disco, ghetto-house and even hip-hop. Alongside the sensational ‘Music’ and ‘Tell You No Lie’, released on a 12” before the album dropped, nearly every track offers major dancefloor firepower – but for our money it’s the relentless metallic rush of ‘Mmm Hmm Hmm’ and its genius Missy Elliott vocal sample that lifts our feet off the ground. CR

Islah is no Luca Brasi tape, but it is one of the most pitch-perfect major label debuts we’ve seen from a rapper in a long time. Part of that has to do with the vitality of Kevin Gates’ radio efforts, particularly the indelible ‘2 Phones’. It’s catchy and easily memeable, but missing none of the grit we’ve come to expect from the Baton Rouge rapper — it’s no wonder he went platinum with no features. CL

’Topper Top’ was the most highly prized dancefloor weapon in the land this year, starting life as a fabled dubplate from grime veteran Sir Spyro before getting a full release on Mala’s label. Ripping the roof off the rave like King Kong on the warpath, Spyro throws foundation-damaging bass under a cluster of stink-eye brass, automatic weapons and not a lot else. It’s the perfect platform for three of the rudest MCs in the game to go apeshit over. “Top ah top” for sure. CR

Pop-punk has predominantly been the preserve of white American man-childs since its mid ‘90s heyday. ‘Your Best American Girl’ saw New York songwriter Mitski “ham up the tropes” of the genre in a raw, affecting song that touches on visibility and western ideals of beauty. “Your mother wouldn’t approve of how my mother raised me, but I do, I think I do,” she sings over big crunchy power chords, looking on forlornly in the video as the object of her affections makes out with a blonde white woman. The entirety of her Puberty 2 album was powerful – a collection of defiant guitar-driven torch songs about loving yourself to love others. ‘Your Best American Girl’ was that album’s standout – and one of 2016’s standout tracks too. AH

The saying goes, if you’re a Kanye West fan, you’re really a fan of yourself. Never has the underlying meaning of that Kanyeism — that if you love Kanye’s will to greatness, you too can foster that will — been clearer than in Chance the Rapper’s verse on ‘Ultralight Beam’. He puts Nicki Minaj’s ‘Monster’ elbow grease into writing these bars — his are the most potent and the most uniquely prayerful; adoring without a sacrifice of self. After a year in which the outlook of ‘Ultralight Beam’ felt more necessary than ever, it’s easy to look back at it as Chance’s cotillion. “I’m just having fun with it,” he raps as his verse reaches its zenith. We know, Chance. And we were, too, even though it seems like one of the hardest things to do. CL

Has there been a more immediately enjoyable track this year? We don’t think so, but we’re happy to admit this one plays into FACT’s core interests shamelessly. It’s bassline deity DJ Q’s ode to Sega mascot Sonic The Hedgehog, and it’s constructed exclusively from familiar samples chopped from the game itself. If that doesn’t scream “club destroyer” to you, we don’t know what will. When you’ve heard this at peak time on a system big enough to blow your eardrums out, you won’t be able to hold back your emotions. To pilfer the rallying cry of another popular, brightly colored cartoon animal: “Huge!” JT

Avalon Emerson’s paean to Arizona captures her homeland’s sublime desert geography. Stark, arid percussion rolls along like a rocky boulder careering down a mountain, while the sweet melody recalls the beauty of what the producer has called the “extraterrestrial landscapes” of the state. ‘The Frontier’ is one of the best examples of Whities’ reliable output this year, including another from this list, Reckonwrong's 'The Passions of Pez'. ACW

Fame is presented as a burden by many in the rap game, but not Lil Uzi Vert. ‘Money Longer’, from the Philly rapper’s Scott Pilgrim-inspired Vs The World tape, sees him list off the ways life has changed for the better since rising to the brink of the hip-hop elite. “Haters got sadder, money got longer, speaker got louder, car got faster,” he brags over a bright Maaly Raw beat, full of rattling trap hi-hats and rising synth melodies. If you needed evidence of the charisma that’s carrying Uzi to even greater excesses of stardom, ‘Money Longer’ is it. AH

Appropriately for an artist preoccupied with mythology and world-building, Dawn Richard's colour-themed trilogy is its own interconnected universe. This year's Red Era found her Kingdom-produced Infrared EP function as the Redemption album's prologue and flipside, much as 2012's Whiteout EP preceded Goldenheart the following year. Lead single ‘Honest’ is fragile, ambiguous and tactile, Richard thinking herself in circles as Kingdom divebombs her with bass. His production has tended towards the airless in recent years, and it's a testament to Richard's songwriting and grasp of melody that she brings ‘Honest’ alive in such an environment. AM

On the lead single from his Chapa Quente EP, Lisbon producer and batida pioneer DJ Marfox shows off the deft hybridity of his work by slapping an undulating flute melody over a hard-hitting slab of ‘90s techno. A dizzying polyrhythmic assault, it’s one of the highest points on an already vertigo-inducing record, securing Marfox’s status as the overlord of Príncipe. ACW

New York often gets treated as rap’s old folks’ home, but ‘All The Way Up’ is proof that not all vets lose their juice. Fat Joe has always been good for an ascending club anthem — ‘Lean Back’, ‘Make it Rain’ — but it’s his Terror Squad pal Remy Ma who does most of the heavy lifting. “Just left the big house to a bigger house / Ain’t have a girlfriend, but the bitch is out” is a contender for both best bars of the year and best lyrics about being released from jail of all time. ‘All the Way Up’ isn’t just a killer comeback, it’s a reminder that as much as people want to keep the home of hip-hop six feet under, NYC has always got another trick up its sleeve. CL

Don’t DJ broke through to a wider audience this year with his cyclical, polyrhythmic meditations on the connections between electronic music and otherworldly folk and classical. There may be a 4/4 pulse beating away inside ‘Gammelan’, but it’s the non-linear motion of the bells and chimes that shifts the Indonesian tradition into a contemporary club context, feeling earthy and exotic in equal measure. OW

Views mega hit ‘One Dance’ saw Drake pleading over a Crazy Cousinz sample for one fleeting moment on a dancefloor with the same female archetype he’s been doing emotional battle with for years: a smoky, beautiful but unruly temptress whose affection exists just out of reach for the lovelorn Canadian. The song’s success, however, was anything but fleeting – since its April release, it’s rampaged to 990 million streams on Spotify alone and this summer was the only thing more all-conquering than Pokémon Go. From a narrative point of view, ‘One Dance’ is same old Drake: a late night tangle with a girl in possession of “powers taking ahold of me.” In terms of the rapper’s musical evolution, though, it’s another clever plundering of an underground sound – in this case UK funky – for a template to a pop behemoth. Whether Drizzy is appropriating or merely appreciating the UK scenes he’s increasingly borrowed from since dipping into a Wiley show in 2012 is up for debate. His ability to fashion those borrowed sounds into impossibly infectious club hits, however, is unquestionable – on ‘One Dance’ more than ever. AH

Little known fact: ‘Black Beatles’ was being hailed as one of the year’s best rap tracks long before the #MannequinChallenge took over social media – and we’re not going to begrudge it for turning into this year’s ‘Harlem Shake’ by accident. ‘Black Beatles’ is the year’s most unashamedly fun pop-rap collision, and even OG White Beatle Paul McCartney is a fan. What more do you want? JT

While Drake brought dancehall rhythms to the masses with 'One Dance', Manchester’s Swing Ting collective ensured it was also the most exciting sound bubbling in the UK underground. One of the label’s standout tracks of the year, 'Vacio’ wasn’t heard much on the radio but it was one of the genre’s best, pitching Florentino’s minimalist, reggaeton-leaning groove against the infectious flow of Swing Ting’s resident MC Fox. Dancehall was inescapable in 2016, but Fox’s delivery on ‘Vacio’ is enough to refresh even the most jaded of ears. SW

Once Lil Yachty and D.R.A.M.’s infectious little earworm had escaped into the atmosphere, it wasn’t a song you needed to seek out. Those cheery piano chords pulsed out of radios and car speakers with the repetitive enthusiasm of the music video’s ridiculous and plentiful gifs. That beat, with its playfully dumb flute chirp, was the perfect stage for the year’s most appealing goofballs to let loose their charisma in a tsunami of good vibes. In 2016, it didn’t matter what was happening – if you heard ‘Broccoli’ booming from a passing car, your day got a fraction better. MB

‘Bubble’ isn’t just proof of Manchester label Swing Ting’s devotion to staying at the forefront of all things dancehall, it’s a testament to Equiknoxx’s ability to inhabit every corner of the genre. The track carries the same dark weight as the Jamaican duo’s DDS-released album Bird Sound Power, but with their own pop flair carried in kind by Devin Di Dakta, who goes from calm “ra-ta-ta”-ing in the hook to spewing completely unhinged vocals in the verse. CL

To appreciate ‘Formation’ anew on a purely sonic level, listen to the instrumental that plays over the end credits of Beyoncé's Lemonade film and marvel at how she even heard a catchy pop song in that beat. Bar the occasional flash of brass, it's a harsh and prickly canvas: rubbery synths bark into a void, punctuated by sinister chirrups and held together by weighty low-end. But Beyoncé uses its disjointed strangeness as a playground to essay a plethora of playful vocals: "I got hot sauce in my bag, swag" as a nasal aside, as if she's trying to stifle a giggling fit; the smack of the lips as she pronounces "Cuervo with no chas-ahhh," truly savouring her pleasure; the triumph of "I just might be a black Bill Gates in the making," declaimed from the mountaintop with a dictator's certitude. (With these qualities, it's little surprise that Rae Sremmurd's impish Swae Lee was one of the song's writers.) There’s a meta playfulness, too, with its hidden Easter eggs about Lemonade: the plot twist that “hot sauce” was the baseball bat of ‘Hold Up’, the declaration that "they'll never take the country out me" pointing straight to ‘Daddy Lessons’.

‘Formation’ functioned as both prologue and epilogue to Lemonade, preceding the album and introducing us to Beyoncé as political radical (together with its video, ‘Formation’ stands as one of 2016's key protest songs) - but ultimately ending it, pointing to a way forward from heartbreak and anger. When Beyoncé sings "Slay, trick, or you get eliminated," it's an important shout-out to black queer culture - but in 2016, it felt less like a challenge and more a necessity to survive. AM

With a decade-long run of strong singles behind him, Pangaea was always going to be under pressure to deliver the goods on his debut album. Happily, the Hessle Audio co-pilot stepped up to the challenge, fusing his more recent taste for militant techno structures with his instinct for playful sampling, and while there are plenty of standout moments on In Drum Play, ‘Skips Desk’ comes bowling in at the last minute to snatch the lead. That drunken kick stutter could easily tunnel into a techno loop, but instead Kevin McAuley throws one of his perfect curveballs with a lead line that cuts through the darkness like a strobe. When so much modern dance music is concerned with being moody, ‘Skips Desk’ cuts through the murk in a boisterous, irresistibly weird rush of positivity. OW

PC Music has been threatening to break into the real world since ‘Hey QT’ caught the attention of the mainstream media a couple of years ago – and in 2016 it properly happened. Many would have expected label founder A.G. Cook to be the one to make the transition overground first, but it was Danny L Harle’s team-up with Carly Rae Jepsen that delivered PC Music’s first bonafide pop song, equalling much of last year’s brilliant Emotion album by attaching Jepsen’s heartfelt tale of true love to a soaring blast of bubblegum trance. So much of PC Music is filtered through a layer of irony that it can be hard to connect with it in anything other than the most fleeting of ways; ‘Super Natural’ proves their larger-than-life aesthetic has the power to resonate emotionally too. SW

Rihanna knows a thing or two about work – in the eight years between 2005 and 2012, she famously dropped eight albums, none of which had a single quite like the imperious ‘Work’. It’s hard to know where to begin with what’s so utterly fucking brilliant about the dancehall slinker, dropped in January after a relative eternity of waiting. The fact it takes the undeniable melodies of the Barbadian’s biggest singles but strips out all the bombast, leaving a sophisticated smoulder? Or maybe the fact that, in tandem with Beyonce’s ‘Formation’, released a few weeks later, it features one of the biggest stars on the planet embracing her culture by dipping in and out of Creole and Patois, and thundering to hundreds of millions of streams anyway? Perhaps it’s the message of ‘Work’ that makes it so work so well – unlike the wild romantic fantasy of ‘We Found Love’, it presents relationships not as passionate, sweep-you-off-your-feet whirlwinds, but as a grind, a hustle, constantly in danger of falling into neglect. Rihanna has never sounded as real, nor as vital. AH

In hindsight, you could argue that Popcaan was the architect of the whole musical year. His Mixpak album Where We Come From, released late in 2014, barely came off our system during 2015, and this year it felt like his style percolated into the mainstream almost by necessity: incessantly catchy hooks, bubbling synth splashes, and the sudden, obvious brilliance of shoving a dembow rhythm under any given pop tune meant that nearly all of the biggest hits of the year owed a debt to dancehall, and Popcaan’s laid-back polish set the tone. Drake borrowed him for a verse on ‘Controlla’ but booted him off the Views version, then stole his steez for ‘One Dance’ and ended up with the biggest-selling song of the year. No one said life was fair.

But Popcaan himself treated 2016 as a vigorous victory lap – aside from that missing guest verse, he had a handful of hits on the island (including one dedicated to the West Indies’ World Cup cricket victory) and popped up on dancehall-style singles by Alunageorge and Naughty Boy (alongside Kyla, whose voice was sampled for the hook of ‘One Dance’ – the pop universe is small right now). He led the Mixpak team to surprise victory at the Red Bull Culture Clash and, most importantly, released the irresistible ‘Ova Dweet’.

Picked up from Kingston to Brooklyn to Manchester, as played over here in sets by Murlo, Swing Ting and Hipster’s Don’t Dance, not to mention Mixpak boss Dre Skull’s essential FACT mix, ‘Ova Dweet’ bubbled its way into our faves with ease. Anyone with a passing ear for dancehall got ensnared in the riddim and Popcaan’s endless stream of melodic nuggets, hook after hook after hook. ‘Ova Dweet’ might not be on mainstream pop radio, but its weightless synth bursts and hefty dembow adaptation are the bones of every Xeroxed “tropical pop” jam of the year (and fuck, there were a lot of those). The riddim is a futuristic fantasy – trance synths bubble into the stratosphere over a dinky spaceship’s worth of bleeps and chirps while moody pads swirl below. Even the filter twists applied to Popcaan’s vocal as he preens and poses (“Them smell mi cologne from a mile”) add to the forward-thrust, making every second slippery, dynamic and pleasingly weird. We could listen to the riddim alone forever.

It’s not the most profound song of the year, it’s not a protest song for this wretched age. It’s not a statement – unless you count Popcaan’s definitive claim to looking so goddamn fresh all the time. But we love it, and it never gets old. In 2016, the dancefloor was a great place to be. CR

Written by Miles Bowe, Al Horner, Claire Lobenfeld, Alex Macpherson, Chal Ravens, John Twells, April Clare Welsh, Oli Warwick and Scott Wilson.