Who has the best melodies in electronic music? Eight masters of the overlooked art
What unites the top 20 songs in Resident Advisor’s recent guide to the best electronics tracks of 2000 to 2025?
Melody.
Not just that, obviously: they have inspired production and many of them are ground-breaking, too. But when you look at the top songs in the RA list, it is almost always the melodies that make them stand out.
The Other People Place’s Let Me Be Me, which tops the poll, has, as RA’s Rachel Grace Almeida points out, “a colourful palette of melody, each occupying their own space to create a bigger picture”.
Mala’s Anti-War Dub, at two, has melody at its “beating heart”, according to Tom Gledhill. Villalobos’ Que Belle Epoque has “knife-edged chord stabs”, “sing-song voices” and “fillipping flutes” for Philip Sherburne. And rounding out the top four, Kelela’s Rewind has a stunning, sticky vocal melody that Gabriel Szatan reckons could pass for Destiny’s Child.
Further down the top 20 you have Clara Intelecto’s Peace of Mind, Rui Da Silva & Cassandra Fox’s Touch Me and Joy Orbison’s Hyph Mngo, all tunes that stand out precisely because of their melodies.
It’s a similar tale on The Quietus’ recent list of the 25 Best Dancefloor Bangers of the 21st Century So Far. Hyph Mngo and Anti-War Dub take the top two slots, while melody-heavy songs like James Holden’s remix of The Sky Was Pink, Laurent Garnier’s The Man With The Red Face and Mosca’s Bax all appear.
We can all think of great electronic music songs that have little or no melody - Plastikman’s Spastik and Musical Mob’s Pulse X spring to mind - and both drums and production are hugely important in dance music. But melody is undoubtedly dance music’s undervalued weapon.
Looking down the RA list, within the top 40 we have Peverelist’s Roll With The Punches; Donato Dozzy & Bee Mask’s Vaporware 07; SOPHIE’s Just Like We Never Said Goodbye; Underworld’s Two Months Off; Todd Terje’s Snooze 4 Love; and Josh One’s Contemplation (King Britt mix) - great melodies all: some simple; some complicated; some moving; some just catchy - but great melodies across the board.
What distinguishes Two Months Off from anything else on Underworld’s A Hundred Days Off album? The song’s stunning central melody, a perfect two-note riff of wild optimism.
Why Roll With The Punches in the RA list rather than Peverelist’s Dance Til The Police Come? It’s those melodies again. As Tom Gledhill notes in his RA review of Roll With The Punches: “Most producers would be lucky to write one iconic melody in a career, much less two in the same record.” Amen.
The importance of melody really hit me, though, when listening to Clara Intelecto’s Peace of Mind (Electrosoul), which is number seven in RA’s list. It is a fantastic track - but it’s not particularly original in its electro-inspired production and Claro Intelecto (aka Manchester producer Mark Stewart) isn’t the biggest name in dance music.
So why has the song endured?
The answer lies in the Peace of Mind’s exquisite melodies, a perfectly melancholic mixture of searing synth chords, a jazzy Rhodes line that is questioning its own existence and - best of all - a descending riff that runs through the song like tears down the cheek.
It’s not a lot. But the effect is a classic song that never gets old or goes cold. RA’s Henry Ivry calls Peace of Mind “the ultimate tears-in-the-club anthem” and it is hard to argue.
The importance of melody in electronic music should, perhaps, be obvious. Human beings have responded to melody for thousands of years, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that great melody makes great dance music.
And yet I think the importance of melody in electronic music is largely overlooked. We all know the great innovators - but who are the great melody writers in electronic music?
No one is talking about this. Looking online for the best melodies in electronic music all I can find is an EDM Subreddit that talks about Avicii, Kygo and more. Now what I had in mind.
So who are the great melody writers in electronic music?
I’ll start off with eight names, in no particular order: Kevin Saunderson, Underworld, Mike Banks, Daft Punk, Aphex Twin, Kraftwerk, James Stinson and Boards of Canada.
But who else? There are far, far more.
So let me know, both your best melody writers and your best melodies. If I get enough responses I may do a follow up.
And if you’re thinking of my choices, ‘Well they’re a bit obvious’, perhaps that shows that great melodies always rise to the top…
Kevin Saunderson
Techno was melodic at its roots, inspired by the likes of George Clinton, Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode. Of the Detroit innovators, Kevin Saunderson was the king of melody, though, from the lip-trembling synth sweeps on Ahnongay to Uptempo's menacingly rave riffs and Inner City's sunshine chart hits, with Paris Grey.
Listen to:
Inner City - Good Life
Inner City - Pennies From Heaven
Tronikhouse - Uptempo
Underworld
There's a reason why Underworld have smuggled dark stream-of-consciousness lyrics and eight-hour improv jams into the pop charts, time and again. And it's the British band’s big, BIG melodies, which are normally simple to the point of I-could-have-done-that (but you didn't) and deathly sticky. (See Dark & Long (Dark Train), as recently sampled by PinkPantheress.)
Listen to:
Born Slippy
Dark & Long (Dark Train)
Two Months Off
Mike Banks
It is often hard to know who has done what in the Underground Resistance catalogue. So let Mad Mike Banks, the former George Clinton guitarist now techno grandpa, stand for it all. And what an all it is, with UR offering everything from crystalline jazz riffs to stomping house piano and epically melodic techno over four decades of life.
Listen to:
Galaxy to Galaxy - Hi-Tech Jazz
Yolanda Reynolds - Children Of The World
Galaxy to Galaxy - Jupiter Jazz
Daft Punk
Get Lucky. Digital Love. Face to Face. All Daft Punk songs with globe-conquering melodies. And all sung and written with an external collaborator. But it would take a fool to listen to the digital heartbreak of Something About Us, the astral epic of Voyager or the crunching ear-worm riff that drives Da Funk and not realise that Daft Punk represent melody in excelsis, solo or with friends.
Listen to:
Discovery (the whole album)
Around the World
Human After All (the song)
Aphex Twin
Of course Richard D James is a brilliant producer. But the reason he is sometimes compared to Mozart is because of the mixture of innovation and sky-scraping tunes that he brings to his music, his melodies sometimes as unusual as the production itself (see: Windowlicker's melted pop), sometimes entirely classical (Avril 14th).
Listen to:
Analogue Bubblebath
Laughable Butane Bob
Ageispolis
Kraftwerk
I got into Kraftwerk about the age of 12 and they were almost the first band I saw live. The reason they were so palatable to the uneducated pre-teene mind was the group’s unbelievable way with a melody and vast pop hooks, which they allied to a futuristic sheen. I would quite happily have Neon Lights played at my funeral. Which I don’t think you can't say for many Einstürzende Neubauten tunes.
Listen to:
Neon Lights
The Telephone Call
The Model
James Stinson
Drexciya had some unbelievable aquatic melodies. So why is James Stinson and not Gerald Donald in the list? Largely because of The Other People Place's Lifestyles of the Laptop Café, Stinson's classic solo album for Warp, which includes the brilliantly uplifting heartbreak of Let Me Be Me, the ghostly surge of Eye Contact and the genuinely desolate You Said You Want Me, creating one of the most melodically rewarding electronic music albums since Kraftwerk's imperial phase.
Listen to:
The Other People Place - Let Me Be Me
The Other People Place - Eye Contact
Elektroids - Midnight Drive.
(And obviously hundreds of Drexciya songs, with an especial shout out to Sea Snake.)
Boards of Canada
Has there ever been a band whose melodies are filled with more mystery and nostalgia than Boards of Canada? Has there ever been electronic music as illogically sad as the output of the enigmatic Scottish brothers? Any music as capable of freaking you out and simultaneously making you wonder at its improbably beauty? I doubt it.
Listen to:
In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country
ROYGBIV
An Eagle In Your Mind
Some listening
I’m sure loads of great music has been released this week. I am equally sure I haven’t had much time to check it out. Noël oblige, or something like that. Sorry.
Things I’ve done
I wrote about Barker’s Stochastic Drift for DJ Mag’s albums of the year. Yes, I love lists. And particularly when they feature Barker.
DJ Mag Top Compilations of 2025
Keeping it list-y, I wrote about Jon E Cash’s Sublow for DJ Mag’s comps of the year.
Nuestros discos favoritos del 2025 | Ranking + Tertulia | RPS MUSIC
Look, I told you I love a list - and this is Radio Primavera Sound’s own take on the records of the year, in glorious Spanish for you. We were meant to do 30 minutes; we did an hour and a half. But how else would we include numerous anecdotes about Lily Allen’s romantic life AND me going on about Rosalía not being that big in the UK. (Please correct me if I’m wrong.) And, yes, more Barker!
Line Noise podcast with Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith
I spoke to Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith about loss, love, death and more as she prepared for the release of her new album Thoughts on the Future. Also on the agenda: body music, the most romantic song in the world, farming, yoga and silence, in 40 illuminating minutes.
A history of the mix CD that I wrote for Disco Pogo, now available online.
“In 2025, mixes are more prominent than ever. SoundCloud, Mixcloud, YouTube and Apple Music are heaving with them. Mixes.db, the self-proclaimed “database for DJ sets, podcasts, radio shows and more”, has 301,000-plus mix pages and the number is rising every day.
“For the commercially released DJ mix album, though, 2025 tells a different story. Journeys by DJ is but a memory; and, while DJ-Kicks and fabric presents keep faithfully on, there hasn’t been a mix album that has gone really mainstream since Caspa and Rusko’s ‘FABRICLIVE.37’ in 2007.”
PS shout out to Michaelangelo Matos for his excellent Substack piece comparing the DJ Pogo list to RA’s Top 50 mixes of the quarter century.
The playlists
Available via Apple Music: The newest and the bestest and The newest and bestest 2025.
And Spotify (for the moment): The newest and bestest 2025 and The newest and the bestest.
Paid subscribers get bonus podcasts, you know.
