What an absolutely bizarre summer. While most of the United States has been suffering from record-breaking heatwaves, other parts have been cool and overcast. The news headlines have been the usual nonstop litany of cynical apocalypticism, yet much of the world is just vibeing out to the World Cup and Taylor Swift‘s wedding. Suffice it to say, it’s harder than usual to get a bead on a general mood.
Despite the lack of a monoculture, a general mood of optimism radiates through much of the best electronic music of June 2026. Despite the pervasive sense of doom ‘n’ gloom from the culture industry, many of June’s best electronic music reflect the long days and sultry nights of early summer, becoming a kind of elevated new age/ambient hybrid. There are still some hard, dark sounds in here for those who like it darker, in case you’re looking for tracks for your next 3:00 am warehouse DJ set. No matter where you fall on the light/dark spectrum, there’s bound to be something that will catch your fancy.
Alleyway Dust – Toilet Rat (Independent)
Alleyway Dust is the electronic project of Seattle-based polymath Jax Sprague. A writer, musician, editor, model, and soon-to-be actor, Sprague infects her weird, woozy, detuned electropop with high style, an endless curiosity, and a wicked sense of humour, proving that music can be irreverent and funny without becoming obnoxious. The slightly gothy vocals, glitched-out production, and primitivist beats bring to mind vintage witch house like SALEM or White Ring but without the self-indulgence or self-destruction. Fans of everyone from Siouxsie & the Banshees to Fever Ray to early Crystal Castles should do themselves a favor and give this one a listen.
Basic Rhythm – 8 Bar Techno (Sneaker Social Club)
With its glock-rockin’ beats and broken 2-step beats, 8 Bar Techno might be read as a harder, more militant update on Burial‘s Untrue. Instead of providing a soundtrack for moodily staring out of fogged windows, 8 Bar Techno is music for brawling and starting fires, with hard, steely beats and chemical-tracer sub-bass that reflect our anxious, antisocial times. It’s ominous, aggressive, and at times a little unsettling, but it’s still a rush, a headlong swan dive into the void. At least we still get good tunes, living in a dystopia.
DJ Plead – Please (Smalltown Supersound)
Electronic music tends to evoke the inhuman and the artificial, conjuring images of Tron-like landscapes and cyberpunk cities, often entirely devoid of people. It’s music for machines, for systems; music by, for, and about technology. Technology is now a part of nearly every aspect of our lives, however, infiltrating every nook and cranny of God’s green Earth with its unblinking, technological gaze.
DJ Plead’s second full-length is a soundtrack for this cybernetic world. By turns warm and organic and coldly inhuman, Please uses a tangled skein of drum machines, synths and field recordings to realize his take on the Lebanese music he grew up hearing. It’s a delicious, addictive mix, warm and transfixing as sunlight playing against the back of your eyelids and hypnotic as a 3:00 am rave. It’s absolutely essential electronic summer listening, perfect for swaying in a hammock by a river or sipping mint tea at a sunny sidewalk cafe.
E.vax – Just Like Fire (Because Music)
In “Say”, Mike Stroud cops the vocal hook of the Cardigans’ “Love Me”, transforming the sugary radio pop of the original into a tie-dyed slurry of euphoric longing. It’s a good representation of what E.vax does best, blending the infectious immediacy of pop with spiky, sparkly academic beats and abstract, poetic synth textures. Not too far from Stroud’s day job with soft-focus electronic indie legends Ratatat, Fire finds a similar equilibrium of emotionality and craftsmanship that made Ratatat such a sensation. It’s perfect summer fare, bright enough for driving with the windows down yet soft and subdued enough for endless sunsets.
Ben Martens – Willamette River Swimmer (Heterodox)
Willamette River Swimmer radiates joy. From its whimsical, colorful album cover to its whirling, swirling beats, everything about Ben Martens’ first album for Portland’s Heterodox Records screams “art for the sheer, bloody-minded exultation of making something and sharing with the world”. The mixture of immersive, experimental sound design, intricate beats, raw lo-fi production values, and bleary-eyed rap brings to mind the glorious early days of indie rap, with a similar wide-eyed wonder and technical genius as early Four Tet or a more sedate Aesop Rock.
Recorded in a home studio between 2022 and 2026 and refined at a series of funky, homespun venues in Eugene, Corvallis, and Portland, Oregon, Willamette River Swimmer is a fundamentally Pacific Northwest electronic record: “cool, refreshing, flowing, and kinda nasty”, as Martens puts it. The area is still known for its rockist grunge and sludge metal roots, with the electronic music scene remaining a bit of a buried secret. People’re missing out.
Tujiko Noriko – PON (Editions Mego)
For the last 25 years, Tujiko Noriko has been bringing a much-needed artful, subtle, personal, poetic touch to Editions Mego’s more academic fare. PON, the Osaka-based ambient composer’s sixth album for Editions Mego, is Noriko’s most subtle and personal effort to date. Dedicated to her cat, a deaf stray that she adopted as an infant whose life was tragically cut short due to an accident.
The backstory’s a tearjerker, but the music doesn’t sound it. There’s nothing melancholic or elegiac about PON. Instead, it comes off as a celebration of a shared life and a singular being, transporting you into quiet moments of sunny contentment and dreamy reverie, the ambient swirls of Noriko’s gorgeous vocals coming off like impressionist clouds in a Studio Ghibli sky. PON is incredibly moving, bringing a human, emotional element that ambient music sometimes lacks.
Richard Norris – 8mm (State of Mind)
Outdated technology can turn anything into sublime art. Even the most banal snippet of conversation can sound otherworldly when bursting out of a crackling AM radio. Innocent, whimsical cartoons become nightmare fuel when played on a snowy black and white television. Analog film transforms quotidian rituals into impressionistic works of timeless beauty.
On 8MM, Beyond the Wizards’ Sleeve’s Richard Norris cracks open the time capsule of old, blurry home movies to reveal the alien, otherworldly romance of bygone eras like a coral-pink pearl. Similar to Deru’s 1979, but less melancholic and heartbreaking, Norris seems legitimately in love and inspired by the past, falling into the pull-down screen to craft 12 delicate vignettes of turquoise, seafoam, flamingo pink, and orange sherbet, ambient aural impressionism.
Pye Corner Audio – More Songs About the Sun (Sonic Cathedral)
Martin Jenkins has been many things since he first started releasing music as the Head Technician of Pye Corner Audio 16 years ago. He’s been a hauntologist, unearthing faux archival recordings from the moldering earth of the collective unconscious. He’s been a techno-utopian shaman, gliding towards the future in a hovercraft of Detroit machine beats. He’s been a systems musician, channeling Cold War paranoia through byzantine modular electronics.
With his latest release for Sonic Cathedral, he’s evolved into an electronic shoegazer, creating widescreen electronica through a romantic, soft focus lens. Joined by Ride’s Andy Bell on roughly one-third of the tracks, More Songs About the Sun is an especially human addition to Pye Corner Audio’s restless discography. Electronic shoegaze’s never sounded so good.
Turn on the Sunlight – Iseo (Music From Memory)
Over the last 26 years, Jesse Peterson has done more to rehabilitate the reputation of the once-derided New Age music than perhaps Light in the Attic’s I Am the Center compilation has. An inveterate nomad, Peterson’s recordings as Turn on the Sunlight seem to carve fantastical landscapes out of thin air, realizing the armchair tourism of exotica but without the colonialism. Instead, Peterson’s collaborations feel more like futuristic rituals from some utopian civilization, where plants, animals, humans, and technology live in peaceful harmony. On Iseo, this is achieved with a beatific blend of folk instruments like ocarinas, primitive flutes, and handbells alongside vintage synthesizers and lush, tropical field recordings.
Various Artists – Rumble in the Jungle (20th Anniversary Edition) (Soul Jazz)
When Soul Jazz released Rumble in the Jungle in 2007, they were attempting to wrest electronic music away from Berlin’s death grip, tracing the throughline from dub to jungle to drum ‘n’ bass to the dubstep that would soon eradicate the 4/4 monoculture for the better part of a decade. Now re-released a year shy of its 20th Anniversary, Rumble in the Jungle is so much more than a museum piece.
It’s a compelling argument that jungle, drum ‘n’ bass and dubstep’s tropical futurism is more relevant than ever, with their militant riddims, politically-savvy toasting and built-in race consciousness helping to dispel electronic music’s ghastly pallor. Diggers and DJs who missed the original have much to celebrate with this lavish 2LP, now back in print, featuring underground reggae visionaries like Barrington Levy and the Ragga Twins.