How do you rank a decade’s worth of music? The truth is, you can’t. An album that meant the world to you might make someone else’s blood boil. The tracks that take you back to your most important moments of 2014 won’t even tickle the memories of others. And yet, it’s fun to look back on the sounds and styles that shaped a year; to revisit the albums and artists you might have forgotten, and to reignite relationships you had with tracks as if they were old friends. Charting the evolution of a musical landscape is a valuable cultural exercise, too — especially if we want to understand where it’s going.

Looking at the evolution of electronic music over the past ten years, it’s incredible to see its broadening cultural prominence, particularly in the aftermath of the noughties’ indie boom. From the indie-electronic crossovers that whet global appetites for synths and drum machines in 2010, to the inventive club styles that erupted and reached wider audiences, the early years of the decade were defined by a sense of aesthetic flux, with genre tribalism changing rapidly.

Everything from hip-hop, ambient and pop, to dubstep, jungle and techno weaved into one another, launching new scenes and trends with albums of forward-thinking sounds. It gave rise to landscape where electronic DJs — the interesting ones, at least — could more comfortably and confidently switch up their sets without running the risk of losing the dancefloor.

The sounds of the Global South have reinvigorated electronic music throughout the 2010s, with progressive scenes merging traditional styles with more mainstream club sounds to become vital global forces. Through turbulent times, some artists have made increasingly vigorous political work, while others have found new ways of making introspective works with electronic instruments, and even Artificial Intelligence.

Scenes come and go, some are reinvigorated, and sometimes it’s only with the benefit of hindsight that we realise the impact an album had on the electronic and dance music landscape at large. DJ Mag’s Albums Of The Decade round up doesn’t rank any music in numerical order, but instead hopes to provide a context for the ways our scene has been re-shaped over the past ten years. We have done that by choosing ten albums per year that represent key moments in the world of electronic music — either in their representation of trends and changes, or in their championing of styles that would go on to influence the global dance environment.

Below, you will find albums from 2010 - 2018, with our 2019 round up to land later in December.