Much of this music seems to have a slightly turbulent relationship with the club; with its shifting tempos, irregular beat patterns, and privileging of noise over melody, it's certainly not going to have bottle-service patrons wriggling around their jeroboams. That's not to say it can't work in a club setting—I've seen Lotic and Amnesia Scanner tear the roof off rooms. But it requires an audience willing to submit to a harrowing, white-knuckled ride. And while the Internet has supposedly shifted listeners' habits away from albums and toward single tracks, many of these artists are doing their best work in longform.

Amnesia Scanner: "AS Baltic Rim / Confission" (via SoundCloud)

Lotic presented Agitations as a seamless, 30-minute mixtape as well as an eight-track album, and Arca's Mutant plays out like one long, sidewinding piece. These cases suggest an interest in making music that requires the listener to meet it on its own terms, that resists the bite-sized consumption and quick-fix pleasures of modern popular music. At the same time, all those erratic energies—the explosions, the crashes, the stumbling cadences and malleable tempos—stand as a rebuke to the roller-coaster predictability of EDM, with its programmatic crescendos and drops, as well as to the never-ending horizontal pulse of mainstream techno and house, in which the unchanging beat lulls clubbers into a kind of autopilot.

And that's precisely what made the contributions of iconoclasts like Arca so exciting: Their innovations represent a shock to the system for a genre running on fumes. This year, electronic music's mainstream growth stalled as EDM's novelty faded; the big news in the sector was the collapse of would-be festival monolith SFX Entertainment, whose overreach symbolized commercial dance music's hubris. Elsewhere on the pop-dance front, Disclosure pumped out a pro forma second album that not even Disclosure fans could bring themselves to care about very much, while the insipid style known as tropical house was market-based aesthetic defeatism personified—complacency rebranded as "chill."

Middle-of-the-road techno and house kept doing its thing, and it was fine. At this point, middleground club music—not quite mainstream but not really underground—is a lot like indie rock: a self-sustaining community with relatively fixed aesthetic and social norms. The four-to-the-floor sound of clubs in hubs like Berlin, Ibiza, and London is essentially a niche subculture that occasionally overlaps with broader trends in pop culture, but only accidentally (and rarely in a catalyzing role). And that's OK! There's nothing wrong with musical conservatism, if the results are finely crafted. But even venturing further into the underground, there wasn't nearly enough weirdness.

Dance music doesn't belong to any one group; indeed, one utopian aspect of club culture has always been its possibility to bring together individuals from all walks of life. But it's not hard to see how house music, whose very origins are inextricable with black, gay, and Latino communities, has been whitewashed and straightened out in its latest wave of mainstreaming.

The refashioning of club aesthetics along more confrontational lines is a direct response to the way that many gay, lesbian, and trans individuals feel disenfranchised by the current state of dance music. In a text accompanying Agitations, Lotic explains that the record “was born out of the frustrations that come with touring, playing mainly festivals in Europe (which are largely populated by straight white men with narrow views on music), and feeling increasingly out of touch with club culture and with the music industry in general." He continues, "Agitations is… a reminder that there is great strength in having the outsider’s perspective."

Rabit: "Pandemic" (via SoundCloud)

It's an interesting choice of terms, given the brief rise, in recent years, of something called "outsider house," a style of grotty, lo-fi house and techno made mostly by straight, white men; the "outsider" tag, meant to signal these artists' roots in the noise scene or their disregard for commercial norms, is a relative term. And when you consider Lotic's perspective as a black, gay American man making radically uncategorizable music in the heart of post-gentrified Berlin—not to mention Eylsia Crampton crafting her "trans-evangelist" statements in rural Virginia, or from a farm in Bolivia—that outsider tag suddenly becomes much more salient.