These are the albums that defined the sound of experimental music in 2019.

The list, sorted alphabetically, includes albums found on Pitchfork’s main year-end tallies as well as additional records that did not make those lists but are just as worth your time.

Listen to selections from this list on our Spotify playlist and Apple Music playlist.

Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2019 wrap-up coverage here.

(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)

Thin Wrist

75 Dollar Bill: I Was Real

Evoking the heady buzz of the Velvet Underground, I Was Real expanded 75 Dollar Bill’s vision beyond the coarse textures of Che Chen’s guitar and Rick Brown’s amplified wooden box. Swelling to upwards of ten players, the NYC duo generated a focused, ecstatic din with viola, baritone sax, and more. But their mission remained unchanged: churn a handful of notes atop an elemental rhythm and doggedly ascend towards sublime frequencies.—Andy Beta

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal

Dog Show

100 gecs: 1000 gecs

The thrill of 1000 gecs isn’t just the post-Internet omnivorousness with which it connects its various reference points, but how profoundly dumb it is. These are the kinds of songs you might make up in the shower, or to your pet, conjugations of ad jingles and half-phrased absurdities too embarrassing to let out of your own head, let alone broadcast to an audience. For as fragmented as it can feel—a carousel of mall punk, trap-pop, video-game soundtracks and melodramatic Euro-trance running at dangerous speed—the lingering mood is one of intimacy, of inner children mashing the pleasure button without boundaries or shame. That Dylan Brady and Laura Les recorded most of it through remote collaboration makes sense: 1000 gecs taps into a kind of communication predicated on separateness, mining the difference between what you can say aloud in your imperfect human body and what you can express in a boundless cyberspace. –Mike Powell

Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal

Various

Acronym / Kali Malone: The Torrid Eye / The Sacrificial Code

Stockholm-based composer Kali Malone released two memorable records this year: the first was The Torrid Eye, a collaborative outing with Acronym on which the pair conjure a churning mix of earthen depth and pure electricity from a Buchla 200 synthesizer. While both artists tend more towards drone pacing, the surprise on this concise EP is how it slowly blossoms into a proper, if heady, techno outing. “A Sunspot,” in particular, is one of the most euphoric tracks of the year, with its ascendant knife-edge tones glancing off bundles of warm static. Energy circulates a little differently on Malone’s double-LP The Sacrificial Code, which sticks to somber pipe organ drones for its two-hour duration. Here—if you slow yourself to the record’s pace—mind and body can get lost in a different way: as time slows with Malone’s subtle melodic landscapes, a tempered ecstasy emerges. —Thea Ballard

Listen/Buy: Acronym / Kali Malone, The Torrid Eye | Kali Malone, The Sacrificial Code

Hyperdub

Angel-Ho: Death Becomes Her

Angel-Ho's first full-length album is a document of transition, an expression of the joys and confusions of deciding to be a girl in public for the first time. Death Becomes Her brims with glittering pop songs, such as “Like a Girl” and “Like That,” but the majority of the album lurks in an electronic miasma, in liquid shapes with no borders. With her debut LP, the South African producer captures the strangeness inherent in becoming, the moments when the self no longer recognizes the self, right alongside its hard-earned pleasures.—Sasha Geffen