A selection byThe Waxonia Desk
A general selection
Every genre we rank, distilled to a hundred records and ordered best first. If you only ever play one list from this site, play this one.
- Picks
- 100
- Years
- 1964–2023
- Curator
- The Waxonia Desk
- Updated
- 2026-08-29
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The picks — selected, not ranked
Rhythim Is Rhythim / Strings of Life
1987 · Transmat
No bassline, barely a kick, and it still empties a bar into a dancefloor faster than anything made since. The one record on this site nobody in thirty-eight years has argued with.
Also on Detroit Techno, The Eighties, The Waxonia Desk — A Way In, The Waxonia Desk — Detroit, Heard in Europe
Marvin Gaye / What's Going On
1971 · Tamla
A protest record that sounds like a conversation at a party. Its label tried to stop it, which is usually the sign.
Also on Soul, The Waxonia Desk — One Subject
Donna Summer / I Feel Love
1977 · Casablanca
The moment a machine takes over the rhythm section of popular music and nobody notices they have crossed a line. Everything electronic below here is downstream of it.
James Brown / Cold Sweat
1967 · King
The accent moves to the first beat and the chord stops changing. Eight bars that reorganise the next sixty years.
Also on Funk, Roots, The Waxonia Desk — Where the Accent Moved
Mr. Fingers / Can You Feel It
1986 · Trax
A bassline, a hi-hat and an enormous amount of patience. House music explained in one record, and never bettered by the ten thousand that copied it.
Also on Chicago House, The Eighties, The Waxonia Desk — A Way In, The Waxonia Desk — In the Room, The Waxonia Desk — Looped and Filtered
Sam Cooke / A Change Is Gonna Come
1964 · RCA Victor
More weight per bar than anything else in this list. The strings are almost unbearable and the restraint in the vocal is the reason.
Also on Soul
Massive Attack / Unfinished Sympathy
1991 · Wild Bunch / Circa
A full string section over a hip-hop break, in 1991, made by people from Bristol with no permission to attempt it. Still sounds like it cost a fortune and meant it.
Also on Trip-Hop, The Waxonia Desk — A Way In, The Waxonia Desk — Sounds Like a Single
Afrika Bambaataa & The Soulsonic Force / Planet Rock
1982 · Tommy Boy
Two German records, an 808 and a Bronx park. The most generative four minutes in this entire corpus — techno, electro and half of pop start here.
Also on Electro
Augustus Pablo / King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown
1976 · Yard Music
The record that proves an engineer is a composer. Everything on this list built from the bass upward is quoting it, usually without knowing.
Also on Dub, 1976, Roots, The Waxonia Desk — Ghosts
Public Enemy / Fight the Power
1989 · Motown / Def Jam
The densest production in rap attached to the least negotiable lyric. Thirty-six years on, no record has managed to be this loud and this precise at once.
Also on Golden Age Hip-Hop
Chic / Good Times
1979 · Atlantic
A bassline so useful that hip-hop, post-punk and pop all took it within eighteen months. Rodgers leaves gaps, and other people's careers fit inside them.
Joy Division / Love Will Tear Us Apart
1980 · Factory
The bass carries the melody, a cheap synth carries the weather, and the lyric refuses every available metaphor. Guitar music's most perfect three minutes.
Also on Post-Punk, The Eighties
Kraftwerk / Autobahn
1974 · Philips
Twenty-two minutes about a car journey that Detroit heard as the future and Britain heard as a pop tune. Both readings were correct and both built genres.
Also on Krautrock, The Waxonia Desk — Krautrock
My Bloody Valentine / Only Shallow
1991 · Creation
Four snare hits and then a guitar sound nobody has satisfactorily explained since. The loudest record here, and the most delicate.
Also on Shoegaze, The Waxonia Desk — A Way In
Aretha Franklin / Respect
1967 · Atlantic
Otis Redding wrote it and then conceded it was hers. The most complete act of reinterpretation in recorded music.
Also on Soul
Goldie / Inner City Life
1994 · FFRR / Metalheadz
Time-stretched breaks, a Diane Charlemagne vocal and an emotional register jungle was not supposed to have. The record that made an entire genre legible to outsiders.
Also on Drum and Bass, 1994, The Waxonia Desk — A Way In
Fela Kuti & Africa 70 / Zombie
1976 · Coconut
Twelve minutes calling the army a column of unthinking bodies, answered by the state burning his compound down. Few records have been taken this seriously by their subject.
Also on Afrobeat, 1976, Dancing to Bad News
Steve Reich / Music for 18 Musicians
1978 · ECM
An hour of pulsing marimbas that converts people with no patience for the theory behind it. The most seductive thing minimalism produced.
Also on Minimalism
A Guy Called Gerald / Voodoo Ray
1988 · Rham!
A Manchester bedroom, borrowed equipment and a sample cut short because the sampler ran out of memory. British dance music's most beautiful accident.
Also on Acid House, The Waxonia Desk — Both Rooms
Eric B. & Rakim / Paid in Full
1987 · 4th & Broadway
Rakim changes what a rap verse can do — internal rhyme, conversational delivery, no shouting — and every MC after him is working from this template.
Model 500 / No UFO's
1985 · Metroplex
The first record that is unambiguously techno rather than something approaching it. Cold, distant, and completely certain of itself.
Also on Detroit Techno, The Eighties, The Waxonia Desk — Detroit Techno
Brian Eno / An Ending (Ascent)
1983 · Editions EG
Four minutes that have been used to sell everything and still cannot be cheapened. The purest demonstration that music can be a place rather than an event.
Also on Ambient, The Waxonia Desk — A Way In
Portishead / Glory Box
1994 · Go! Beat
An Isaac Hayes loop, a broken-theremin guitar and the most desolate vocal of the decade. Grim, gorgeous, and nobody has repeated it.
Sister Nancy / Bam Bam
1982 · Techniques
The most sampled record in this list by a distance, and its author was paid nothing for decades. Effortless in a way that cannot be manufactured.
Also on Dancehall
Stardust / Music Sounds Better with You
1998 · Roulé
One guitar figure, one filter, one line repeated until it becomes a mantra. The most perfect single-idea record dance music has, and the trio never made another.
Talking Heads / Once in a Lifetime
1980 · Sire
A looped Afro-funk bed and a man having a public breakdown on top of it. Post-punk's most joyful record is also its most panicked, which is why it lasts.
Also on Post-Punk
Stevie Wonder / Superstition
1972 · Tamla
A clavinet riff so complete the arrangement is almost optional. One man playing nearly everything, at the exact moment that became possible.
MJ Cole / Sincere
1998 · Talkin' Loud
The most musically ambitious record UK garage produced, by a classically trained producer who could have done anything and chose two-step.
Also on UK Garage, The Waxonia Desk — A Way In, The Waxonia Desk — Garage on the Mix
D'Angelo / Untitled (How Does It Feel)
2000 · Virgin
Seven minutes played so far behind the beat that the track feels like it might stop. A masterclass in how much tension a band can hold by simply not hurrying.
Neu! / Hallogallo
1972 · Brain
Ten minutes of one beat played perfectly. The idea that rhythm can drive without swinging is Europe's single largest export to this list.
Also on Krautrock, Roots, The Waxonia Desk — Krautrock
Burial / Archangel
2007 · Hyperdub
Rain, vinyl crackle and a pitched vocal grieving over percussion that never lands on the grid. The record that made club music legible to people who never go to clubs.
Also on Dubstep, The Waxonia Desk — Ghosts, The Waxonia Desk — The Night It Went National
Frankie Knuckles & Jamie Principle / Your Love
1987 · Trax
It circulated on cassette for years before anyone pressed it, which tells you what it did to a room. Still the most romantic record house has.
Also on Chicago House, Sung to Someone, The Waxonia Desk — In the Room
Dr. Dre featuring Snoop Doggy Dogg / Nuthin' but a "G" Thang
1992 · Death Row
A loop, a synth whine and two people sounding entirely untroubled. Delivered so completely on the first attempt that the genre spent five years elaborating it.
Also on G-Funk
Bob Marley & The Wailers / No Woman, No Cry
1975 · Island
Seven minutes of a man consoling a room by describing a yard. The most widely loved record here, and it earns every bit of that.
Also on Reggae, Sung to Someone
Shy FX & UK Apache / Original Nuttah
1994 · SOUR
A ragga vocal over an Amen break at 170 BPM, with nobody involved thinking the combination needed explaining. Britain's two inheritances, fused without ceremony.
Also on Drum and Bass, 1994, Bass Weight, The Waxonia Desk — 160, The Waxonia Desk — Ghosts
This Mortal Coil / Song to the Siren
1983 · 4AD
Almost nothing behind the voice but a treated guitar, and it is still overwhelming. A cover version that has effectively replaced the original.
Also on Dream Pop
James Brown / Funky Drummer
1970 · King
Twenty seconds of Clyde Stubblefield alone, and then thirty years of other people's records. The most consequential drum break in existence.
MFSB / Love Is the Message
1973 · Philadelphia International
Not a song so much as a structure that DJs spent a decade learning to use. The Paradise Garage closed on it, which is the highest recommendation available.
Dizzee Rascal / I Luv U
2002 · XL
Made at sixteen on a school computer, and nothing in British music had sounded that unmediated before. A row between two teenagers, and the beat sounds like the row.
Also on Grime
Jeff Mills / The Bells
1996 · Purpose Maker
Four elements, no development, total inevitability. The most recognisable DJ tool in techno, built out of very nearly nothing.
Also on Detroit Techno, The Waxonia Desk — Detroit Techno, The Waxonia Desk — Detroit, Heard in Europe
Basic Channel / Phylyps Trak
1993 · Basic Channel
One chord, a filter and eleven minutes, and it establishes that a techno record can consist almost entirely of the space around its own decay.
Also on Dub Techno
Aphex Twin / Windowlicker
1999 · Warp
An R&B pastiche processed into something inhuman and sold as a pop single. Proof that he could do the thing he spent a career refusing to do.
Public Image Ltd / Public Image
1978 · Virgin
A resignation letter from punk delivered as a single: dub bass, ringing guitar, and no interest whatsoever in the audience that came for the last band.
Nas / N.Y. State of Mind
1994 · Columbia
A twenty-year-old writing at a level most novelists never reach, over a piano loop that never resolves. The best-written record in this list.
Also on Golden Age Hip-Hop, 1994
The Stone Roses / Fools Gold
1989 · Silvertone
An indie band's biggest single is a groove with some singing on it, and a whole country followed them across the floor. The hinge record of British music.
Also on Madchester, The Waxonia Desk — Both Rooms
Kraftwerk / Trans-Europe Express
1977 · Kling Klang
A wistful song about trains that Bambaataa turned into hip-hop and Detroit turned into techno. No other record here has been quite so productive for people who misheard it.
Also on Krautrock
Lauryn Hill / Ex-Factor
1998 · Ruffhouse
A Wu-Tang sample, a gospel structure, and a lyric with no interest in protecting anyone's dignity. The most covered song of its era and nobody has improved on it.
Skream / Midnight Request Line
2005 · Tempa
A riff simple enough to hum over a bassline that only fully exists on a large rig. That combination is why an entire scene got out of South London.
Also on Dubstep, Bass Weight, The Waxonia Desk — The Night It Went National
Phuture / Acid Trax
1987 · Trax
A misused bass synth, released because Ron Hardy would not stop playing the tape. One record invents a genre and names it in the title.
Steve Reich / Come Out
1966 · Odyssey
One phrase from riot testimony, looped on two tapes drifting apart until the words become rhythm. Devastating, and the origin of phasing.
Also on Minimalism
Sly & the Family Stone / Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)
1969 · Epic
A bass technique invented to cover for a missing drummer, and the most cheerful record ever written about being ground down.
Omni Trio / Renegade Snares
1993 · Moving Shadow
Jungle's prettiest record and its most technically alarming, at the same time. The breaks are chopped past the point of sense and the piano does not care.
Also on Drum and Bass
Double Exposure / Ten Percent
1976 · Salsoul
Walter Gibbons invents the job of remixer on the first commercially released twelve-inch. Extend, strip, delay the payoff — all of it is already here.
My Bloody Valentine / Soon
1990 · Creation
A dance beat under a guitar sound that will not hold still. Eno called it the vaguest music ever to have been a hit, approvingly.
Also on Shoegaze
Fela Kuti & Africa 70 / Water No Get Enemy
1975 · Coconut
A proverb, a horn line, and Tony Allen playing the most relaxed complicated drum part imaginable. The way in for anyone who finds the politics forbidding.
Also on Afrobeat
New Order / Blue Monday
1983 · Factory
A guitar band making a club twelve-inch on sequencers, in packaging that lost money per copy. Five years early and the reason so much else was possible.
Also on Madchester, The Waxonia Desk — Both Rooms
Daft Punk / Da Funk
1995 · Soma
A deliberately ugly lead over a hip-hop tempo, released on a Glasgow techno label. Two Parisians arriving already refusing to do the expected thing.
Cajmere / Percolator
1992 · Cajual
One bleeping figure repeated until it became a city's shared vocabulary. Thirty years of Chicago records quote it and a whole category is named after it.
Also on Juke and Footwork
Burning Spear / Marcus Garvey
1975 · Island
History lessons delivered over a rhythm that barely moves, and they land like prophecy. The most severe great record in this tradition.
Also on Reggae
Aphex Twin / Xtal
1992 · Apollo / R&S
A wordless vocal over a break that has been degraded until it sounds remembered rather than played. Ambient's most-loved record by someone who denies making ambient.
Also on Ambient
Wu-Tang Clan / C.R.E.A.M.
1993 · Loud
A four-bar piano loop, two verses, and a hook that became a proverb. RZA proved that the cheapest possible production could carry the heaviest possible writing.
Also on Golden Age Hip-Hop
Artful Dodger featuring Craig David / Re-Rewind (The Crowd Say Bo Selecta)
1999 · Public Demand
A pop record about a DJ's device, sung by a teenager who then became the biggest star in Britain. Garage's moment of complete confidence.
DJ Rolando / Underground Resistance / Jaguar
1999 · Underground Resistance
The riff a major label tried to buy and the Detroit underground refused to sell. Politics aside, the most physical string line techno has.
Also on Detroit Techno, The Waxonia Desk — Detroit, Heard in Europe
Ice Cube / It Was a Good Day
1992 · Priority
A list of ordinary things not going wrong, over an Isley Brothers loop. Rap's most affecting record achieves it entirely by describing an absence.
Also on G-Funk
Klein + M.B.O. / Dirty Talk
1982 · Zanza
Italians make a record that Chicago plays until the grooves go, and house music turns out to have been specified in Milan. Stark, cold and enormously influential.
Also on Italo Disco, The Eighties
Massive Attack / Teardrop
1998 · Virgin
A harpsichord, a heartbeat and Elizabeth Fraser singing about grief. Proof the Bristol formula was a language rather than a trick.
Also on Trip-Hop
Metalheads / Terminator
1992 · Synthetic
Time-stretching discovered and immediately weaponised. The technical leap that turned hardcore into jungle, audible as it happens.
Also on Breakbeat Hardcore, The Waxonia Desk — 160
Marshall Jefferson / Move Your Body
1986 · Trax
Subtitled the house music anthem, and it earned the definite article. The piano that opened the genre up to everybody who was not already in the room.
Also on Chicago House, The Waxonia Desk — In the Room, The Waxonia Desk — Looped and Filtered
Otis Redding / Try a Little Tenderness
1966 · Volt
Two minutes of restraint and then the roof comes off. The best available argument that soul is a technique for controlling release rather than avoiding it.
Also on Soul
Wiley / Eskimo
2002 · Wiley Kat
Cold, hollow and deliberately unwelcoming. An entire scene's emotional temperature set by one instrumental in ninety seconds.
Also on Grime, The Waxonia Desk — Ghosts
DJ Rashad / Feelin
2013 · Hyperdub
Soul samples and drum-and-bass warmth over patterns that refuse to resolve. The record that made the hardest rhythm in America hospitable without slowing it down.
Also on Juke and Footwork, The Waxonia Desk — 160, The Waxonia Desk — Footwork Travels, The Waxonia Desk — Ghosts
Slowdive / Alison
1993 · Creation
Shoegaze with the songwriting left in. Everything blurred except the melody, which is why this one survived the backlash that buried the rest.
Also on Shoegaze
Arthur Mafokate / Kaffir
1995
A dance record built around a plea not to be called a slur, and the first real argument of the new South Africa. Half a million copies, and a genre given its subject.
Also on Kwaito, Dancing to Bad News, The Waxonia Desk — Out of Durban
Boards of Canada / Roygbiv
1998 · Warp
Two minutes of detuned warmth imitated for twenty-five years without once being equalled. An entire strand of electronic music descends from this tape hiss.
Mandoza / Nkalakatha
2000
A kwaito record adopted by rugby crowds and townships alike, which nothing else in the country's music had managed. The closest post-apartheid South Africa came to a shared anthem.
Also on Kwaito
Gang of Four / Damaged Goods
1978 · Fast Product
A guitar used as a percussion instrument that mostly stays silent. The politics are in the arrangement, which is what separates this band from everyone who copied them.
Also on Post-Punk
D'Angelo / Brown Sugar
1995 · EMI
A Rhodes, a hip-hop drum feel and a vocal arrangement borrowed from Marvin Gaye. Nothing on radio in 1995 sounded this unhurried, and a movement followed it.
Also on Neo-Soul
Curtis Mayfield / Move On Up
1970 · Curtom
Nine minutes of unbroken forward motion. Optimism is the harder thing to write and this is the most durable example anyone has managed.
Also on Soul, The Waxonia Desk — One Subject
SL2 / On a Ragga Tip
1992 · XL
Number two in the national charts with a Jamaican vocal sample and a hoover bass. British pop has rarely been this directly a dispatch from a field off the M25.
Also on Breakbeat Hardcore
DJ Lag / Ice Drop
2016 · Goon Club Allstars
Written at seventeen. Three elements, no resolution, and a low end that argues for a whole genre in ninety seconds.
Also on Gqom
Can / Halleluhwah
1971 · United Artists
Jaki Liebezeit holds one figure for eighteen minutes while the band comes apart around him. The strongest case that repetition is drama's cheapest fuel.
Also on Krautrock
Warren G & Nate Dogg / Regulate
1994 · Death Row
A Michael McDonald sample, a story told in alternating verses, and hooks nobody else could have sold. Perfect construction, beginning to end.
The Orb / Little Fluffy Clouds
1990 · Big Life
A Rickie Lee Jones interview, a Steve Reich pulse and a Pat Metheny sample, assembled into something oddly moving. Ambient house begins and mostly ends here.
Focalistic featuring Vigro Deep / Ke Star
2020
Sepedi rap over a piano loop, and the record that made amapiano continental. The bassline does almost nothing, which is exactly why it works.
Also on Amapiano
The Bug featuring Killa P & Flowdan / Skeng
2007 · Ninja Tune
Dancehall toasting welded to a bassline that sounds actively corroded. The point where British bass music stops being polite about its inheritance.
Also on Dubstep, Bass Weight
Sweet Female Attitude / Flowers (Sunship Remix)
2000 · WEA
The remix, not the original, and everybody knows it. Two-step's warmest record, and a reminder that garage's canon is largely other people's rebuilds.
Wayne Smith / Under Me Sleng Teng
1985 · Jammy's
A Casio preset becomes a rhythm hundreds of records are built on. The moment Jamaican music goes digital, and the template for every riddim scene since.
Also on Dub
Skepta / Shutdown
2015 · Boy Better Know
Thirteen years after grime began, its commercial peak is still built from almost nothing. Total confidence with no additional ingredients.
Also on Grime
Alan Braxe & Fred Falke / Intro
2000 · Vulture
Six minutes that only go upwards, with a string line that never resolves down. The record DJs still reach for when a room needs lifting off the floor.
808 State / Pacific State
1989 · ZTT
A saxophone and birdsong over an acid bassline, which should not work. Proof that this music could be pretty without becoming polite.
Also on Acid House
The Jesus and Mary Chain / Just Like Honey
1985 · Blanco y Negro
A Ronettes drum pattern buried in feedback, with a love song underneath that nobody expected these people to have written. The template for the decade that followed.
Also on Shoegaze
Sueño Latino / Sueño Latino
1989 · DFC
An entire record built by looping somebody else's hour-long guitar improvisation and adding birdsong. Absurd, beautiful, and the bridge from kosmische to the dancefloor.
Also on Balearic, Italo Disco
Roni Size / Reprazent / Brown Paper Bag
1997 · Talkin' Loud
A double bass line, a breakbeat and a Mercury Prize. Drum and bass at its most musical without giving up an inch of its rhythmic difficulty.
Also on Drum and Bass
Yellowman / Zungguzungguguzungguzeng
1983 · Greensleeves
A melody so contagious that half of hip-hop borrowed it without discussion. An unpronounceable title attached to dancehall's most recognisable hook.
Also on Dancehall
Slum Village / Guess Who
2000 · Barak
J Dilla programming drums audibly out of time and grooving harder for it. The single most imitated piece of programming of the last thirty years.
Incredible Bongo Band / Apache
1973 · Pride
A session-band cover of a Shadows instrumental, and the break on which hip-hop was physically assembled. Included for consequences rather than for intentions.
Also on Funk
Basic Channel / Quadrant Dub
1994 · Basic Channel
The rhythm dissolves into delay returns and never quite reassembles. Thirty years on it still sounds mastered underwater, deliberately.
Also on Dub Techno, 1994
Tyler ICU & Tumelo ZA / Mnike
2023
Number one at home and unavoidable everywhere else within a month. A loop, a chant and a bending bass note — the oldest recipe in this list, working again.
Also on Amapiano
DJ Shadow / Midnight in a Perfect World
1996 · Mo' Wax
Built entirely from other people's records and yet unmistakably one person's. The high point of sampling as a compositional discipline rather than a shortcut.
Also on Trip-Hop
Manuel Göttsching / E2-E4
1984 · Inteam
One hour, one sequence, one guitarist, one take. Ends this list because it is where half of it accidentally began.
Also on Krautrock, The Waxonia Desk — Krautrock
About the curator
The people who write the rankings on this site. We keep the lists honest, we argue about the order, and we get asked the same question more than any other: where should someone actually start. These are our answers.