Top Techno Tracks of the Last Decade

Get ready to do a quantum leap through time and space as we bring you this huge playlist featuring a carefully-curated selection of some of the best techno releases from the last 10 years. It’s been an insane decade for techno music with some sectors of the music becoming almost mainstream, Berghain luring tourists from all over the world to Berlin, black deep Vs seen as the new ‘techno uniform’ and entire festivals dedicated to the sound. Whether the purists like it or not, techno has entered the limelight and picked up an insane following all over the world. Platforms like Soundcloud and Instagram have techno only accounts that are picking up hundreds of thousands of followers and the whole thing has become big business. Labels like Drumcode and CLR have become international powerhouses, dominating festivals and making superstars of their core family of artists.

Elsewhere, the underground has remained strong with a broad cross section of artists taking the genre is all directions, from brain pulping extremism to leftfield weirdness, straight up dance floor pumpers, ambience and everything in between. For every large-scale festivals (Awakenings, Dekmantel, Junction 2, Dimensions and so on) there have been twice as many small intimate, off-the-radar raves by small independent promoters pushing the raw techno sound for a committed diehard following. Both ends of the spectrum can co-exist of course, neither is wrong or right.

A seriously amazing decade and this selection represents a small fraction of the stunning array of releases that came out during the 2010s.

Joy Orbison and Boddika’s excellent collabs were so on point. The British duo getting it spot on with dark, yet playful productions. ‘Mercy’ crushed dance floors, as did ‘Dun Dun’ and the megaton bomb ‘Froth’. Joy O features several times thanks to his uncanny ability to bide his time and smash everyone over the head with something fresh and unexpected. A modern-day day hero.

Dark vocals seemed to get the decade off to a flying start, with Midland’s killer ‘Trace’ and its macabre, narcotic vocal clip – totally indecipherable but highly effective. Similarly Blawan did a lot of damage with the stupendous ‘Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage?’, sampling The Fugees for a stormer of a track. Techno is often portrayed as serious, po-faced but ‘Why They Hide Their Bodies…’ encouraged people to singalong, to act a bit silly and loosen up, which can only be a good thing. Funnily enough, Blawan was overwhelmed with the reception it got and found it all a bit disconcerting.

Donato Dozzy has had constant bursts of genius throughout the 2010s. A genius of our time, his electronic experimentations sometimes go way beyond the techno framework and into unchartered territory as he uses his equipment to fully express himself regardless of genre labels. ‘Cleo’ is a track that many consider to be one of very few actual ‘anthems’ the producer has created – no bad thing at all, and proof that he is capable of putting his hand to anything and doing it exceptionally.

Daniel Avery was one of the stars of the decade, thanks to a couple of brilliant albums – ‘Drone Logic’ his first showcasing his ability to imbue his music with soul, while also keeping things tough and often quite visceral. Quite a skill. Along with the albums, he recorded a classic mix for fabric’s compilation series and appeared at many of the world’s most influential and creative festivals, plus a long long list of club spaces.

Not forgetting Patrice Baumel’s dance floor destroyer ‘Surge’ and a myriad other releases including Paula Temple’s insane ‘Colonized’ and the ubiquitous ‘Colt’ by Dense & Pika.

Strap yourself for a high-octane, sometimes ambient, ride through the last 10 years of techno mastery…