Here Are the 25 Best Dancefloor Bangers of the 21st Century So Far…

Released in 2009, ‘Narst’ was a remarkably accomplished debut on Hyperdub by Cooly G. With its propulsive drums and teasing, dramatic strings, the track showed a snarling, tougher edge to the UK funky sound that was, by then, taking hold of UK underground dance music circles. Complete with bursts of prickly, sub-rattling bass, it was an early pinnacle of the genre, and still stands as one of Hyperdub’s best releases today.

Released via Metalheadz only a year after he left the drum & bass collective Bad Company, dBridge produced ‘True Romance’ after a night at London club The End for Fabio’s residency. Having been inspired by someone he met there’s use of the term “aggressively beautiful”, he felt that perfectly summed his sound up, and he set out to make something that precisely reflected that. With its buzzsaw riffs, rolling drums and subtle, jazzy nods to the “intelligent” drum & bass of labels like Good Looking Records, it’s rightly held up as a classic of its genre today.

Making his name early on through UK garage-nodding club bangers before leaning into a decidedly more techno direction over the course of much of the 10s, Pangaea material of recent years has veered off into a bolder, more outright fun path via tracks such as ‘Like This’ and ‘Manía’. Perhaps his finest moment in this mode though is ‘Installation’, which dominated 2023 festival dancefloors from Dekmantel to Love International. Based around a typically grimy bassline, irresistible synth line and the most unusual of vocal hooks – chopped-up samples lifted from Dufcat’s 2021 Latin rap track ‘Rat Tat Ta!’ – ‘Installation’ is the archetype of The Sound Of The Summer ™.

Released just over a year before his all-too premature passing, DJ Rashad’s plaintively beautiful showpiece was a high-point in the sample-happy, rhythmically knotty world of Chicago footwork. Centred around and mournful vocal samples lifted from Sinnamon’s 1983 boogie cut ‘I Need You Now’  and 1993 garage house track ‘Nothing Better’ by Colourblind, its soaring, heart-rending strings have triggered many a tear on the dancefloor since it first dropped 12 years ago.

The classics within the Underground Resistance catalogue – ‘Timeline’, ‘Jupiter Jazz’, ‘The Final Frontier’ – are bountiful, but none of them leave you feeling imbued with quite as much can-do, positive energy as the marriage of techno and spiritual gospel that is ‘Transition’. “Point yourself in the direction of your dreams, find your strength in the sound, and make your transition,” beckons Cornelius Harris over a bed of joyfully driving keyboard riffs, and in that moment, it’s hard not to feel like you can achieve anything.

Though most of the tracks on this list follow a certain kick drum-aided breakdown-drop formula in one way or another, SOPHIE’s ‘BIPP’ doesn’t require such trickery to galvanise a dancefloor. Released amid a generational run of productions that also included ‘Nothing More To Say’, ‘Lemonade’ and ‘Hard’, it’s fair to say that we didn’t fully know the revolutionary star quality that we had on our hands in SOPHIE when this one first came out. What is undeniable is that its sugary-sweet, chirrupy vocals and helium synth melodies stood out all on their own. Nobody did it quite like SOPHIE.

Though rinsed to death owing to its near-ubiquity in the sets of various UK garage DJs – not least the greatest of them all, DJ EZ – Wookie’s remix of Sia’s ‘Little Man’, produced under his Exemen alias, still continues to garner wild reactions today. Having been a fixture in club sets amid the peak initial UK garage boom at the turn of the century, it went on to reach different generations of club audiences a decade later, popping up in the Boiler Room mixes of DJs such as Ben UFO, Oneman and the late Jackmaster. Combining Sia’s smoky vocal with snappy steel pan melodies and an incendiary bassline, it’s impossible to deny its bangers status.

More than two decades on from his very earliest releases, Robert Hood proved he’s still very much got it when he let this Aretha Franklin-sampling diva techno bomb loose on dancefloors in 2013. Hammered by everyone from Carl Cox to Ricardo Villalobos, Ben Sims to Seth Troxler, it’s primed for hair-raising, peak-time dancefloor moments, its bombastic lead vocal merging joyously with Hood’s characteristically funky synth melodies.

Though Blawan is making an all-out more head-spinning, experimental take on techno these days, ‘Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage?’ marked one of his earliest evaluations of the genre, coming off the back of 2011’s Brandy-sampling post-dubstep hit ‘Getting Me Down’ and releases for Hessle Audio. Twisting a Fugees vocal sample almost beyond recognition, Blawan’s haunted house techno classic, with its shrieking sound effects and brutish kicks, saw it earn support from a cast of DJs as wide as Jeff Mills and Skrillex upon its release via Joy Orbison’s Hinge Finger label in 2012.

Limiting David Kennedy to just one entry in this list feels like an impossible task. From the percussive trickery of early bangers like ‘WAD’ and ‘Blanked’ to equally deadly later club hits in ‘XLB’ and ‘Alien Mode’, his work – and that more widely of Hessle Audio – has been a fixture of adventurous dancefloors over the past two decades. Standing in stark contrast to the more austere, overtly dubstep-indebted material that preceded it in his back catalogue, ‘Don’t Change For Me’ introduced a more heartfelt edge to the Ramadanman sound in 2010. Its contrast of ruffneck breakbeats with airy pads and a gorgeous vocal sample set Kennedy firmly on course for the next stage in his career as he turned in the Ramadanman alias for the Pearson Sound moniker he still holds today not long after.

By the time he released ‘The Sun Can’t Compare’ in 2006, Larry Heard’s name already had its place firmly among the Chicago house greats. This soulfully smooth masterpiece, though, with its squiggly TB-303 acid lines, bursts of shuffling hand claps and dazzling, besotted vocals courtesy of Memphis-based vocalist Chad White, only enhanced his reputation further. Few can compare.

Named in part after Steve Baxendale, the man behind pioneering Sheffield bassline club Niche, Mosca’s cheeky homage to UK garage still retains all of its goofy brilliance today. When that growling baseline and earworm of an organ melody hit the dancefloor, how could you not be hooked? My DJ is live in the place!

Andrés was already an established Detroit house music figure when he put out ‘New For U’ in 2012, having released previously records on Moodymann’s Mahogani Music and Mike Grant’s Moods & Grooves. The first release on his own La Vida label, though, firmly established his name with a whole new generation of house music lovers, thanks to its sumptuous jazzy groove, ravishing string riff – from Dexter Wansel’s ‘Time Is The Teacher’ – and unfussy drum loop. The formula was simple, but it still sounds as warming as ever in 2025.

As adept at soundtracking spaced-out peak-time dancefloor moments as it is wigged-out after-hours parties, the standout cut from Ricardo Villalobos’ first studio album sums up the unique enigmatic appeal of the Chilean-German DJ and producer. Centred around a crooning, vocoder-aided vocal and subtly rolling kicks, it’s deeply hypnotic and was an early insight into the sparsity that would come within Villalobos’ sound. An unlikely dancefloor anthem, it could perhaps be considered the pinnacle of 00s minimal techno.

The roots of Laurent Garnier’s 2000 jazz-techno masterpiece lay in a 1998 invitation he received to play at Switzerland’s Montreux Jazz Festival. After deciding he wanted to meet the event on its own terms, he invited jazz musicians to join him on stage for his live performance, playing that night with a saxophonist, Finn Martin, that he scarcely knew. When it came to producing his next album, Unreasonable Behaviour, he ultimately decided he wanted to commit this sound to record and invited another saxophonist, Philippe Nadaud, who he had been touring with to lay down the iconic squealing brass sounds of ‘The Man With The Red Face’. Combined with the track’s herculean breakdown and intoxicating melodies, it became a hit on dancefloors from the fabric main room in London to the Space terrace in Ibiza.

Released amid a formative run of superbly soulful house tunes that also took in ‘Footsteppin’’ and ‘Au Seve’, Julio Bashmore’s crowning moment, ‘Battle For Middle You’, followed up on the early promise of his debut on Dirtybird, bringing together splashes of house, UK funky and post-dubstep to devastating effect. With its earworm melodies, shuffling drums and singalong vocal sample lifted from Mass Production’s 1977 soul cut ‘People Get Up’, it did the damage on dancefloors across underground and less discerning student circles.

While the electroclash scene eventually grew to become a parody of itself as the 00s developed, not many acts epitomised the best of the sound more than French duo Miss Kittin & The Hacker. ‘You And Us’, with its wiggly acid synth line and mantra-like lyrics (“This is what our music is about, you and us”) delivered with an effortlessly cool spoken word swagger by Miss Kittin, was the highlight of perhaps the ultimate electroclash album, First Album.

Arriving in 2006 off the back of the dancefloor destruction wreaked by tracks like ‘Kisses’ and ‘The Pong’, Matthew Dear didn’t ease off one bit when he unleashed ‘Mouth To Mouth’. While those previous tracks relied on febrile, synapse-twitching techno synths, though, ‘Mouth To Mouth’ saw him take the Audion sound into much deeper, trance-inducing territory across its 13-minute runtime. Becoming a fixture of the sets of some of Europe’s biggest DJs, its screeching bursts of synth melodies and crazed breakdowns sent clubs into a frenzy the world over.

Released amid the 00s German minimal boom, James Holden’s remix of ‘The Sky Was Pink’ by Nathan Fake married the best elements of the stripped-back sound associated with labels like Kompakt and Minus, with the vivid, driving melodies of progressive house. Perhaps one of the best instances this century of a remix outshining its original, it was a sound firmly of its time, but one that also still retains all of its power to this day.

Channeling 90s hardcore and rave music, Tessela’s breakbeat masterpiece ‘Hackney Parrot’ was as ubiquitous as dancefloor bangers come when it was released in 2013, and has been edited and sampled a million times over since then – including by Tessela himself in 2017. As the press notes for that edit said that year, “over the past few years [the original] has been played by nearly all the DJs”. When you saw the deadly effect it had on dancefloors as soon as those manically chopped-up drums and vocal samples dropped though, it was hard to argue why so many people were drawing for it.

The list of outstanding Carl Craig remixes – from his polished takes on Rhythm & Sound’s ‘Poor People Must Work’ and Junior Boys’ ‘Like A Child’, to his heavenly reworks of Maurizio’s ‘Domina’ and E-Dancer’s ‘World Of Deep’ – is long, but his take on Theo Parrish’s ‘Falling Up’ stands right up there with the best. Across eight minutes, he transforms the minor key machine funk of Parrish’s original into a sublimely simple, head-spinning dancefloor tool. Centred around an addictively arpeggiated organ loop and the jazzy Rhodes guitar licks of the original cut, it was the standout release of Third Ear’s Detroit Beatdown series.

Never did dubstep sound quite as apocalyptic as it did on ‘Skeng’. Released in 2007, it was one of Kevin Martin’s earliest experiments with the genre, having spent a decade prior putting out records rooted in ragga and dub. Speaking to RA in 2020, he revealed that the track’s knockout final form came about almost as a happy accident, after Roll Deep’s Killa P – visiting Martin’s studio alongside Flowdan for a late-night recording session – asked to hear more beats whilst in the zone having already finished recording one other cut. The two also had to encourage Flowdan to stick around and record even deeper into the night. We can all be thankful for their powers of persuasion, because ‘Skeng’’s killer synthesis of dubstep, grime and Jamaican dancehall still endures today.

Having established himself as a key player in the drum & bass scene from the mid-90s onwards, DJ Zinc’s decision to drop the tempo significantly and experiment with UK garage for the first time on ‘138 Trek’ surprised many a keen follower at the time of its release. It was no less menacing and screwface-inducing than the records that had come before it, though, and its meaty bassline and galloping breakbeats can still be heard doing the damage in the sets of many a DJ today. Here, Zinc had introduced the UK club scene to a new hybrid sound, breakstep, that would dominate dancefloors for a number of years before giving way to dubstep.

The Holy Grail of dubstep records, it’s no surprise that original vinyl copies of ‘Anti War Dub’ backed by another DMZ classic in ‘Haunted’ still fetch hundreds of pounds on Discogs to this day. Though vocal tracks were fairly rare in dubstep, Mala’s ode to peace and love – aided by Spen G’s benevolent vocals – resonated immensely with dancers at parties such as DMZ and FWD>> at the rousing peak of dubstep’s popularity. Released just one month after Mary Anne Hobbs’ landmark Dubstep Warz show was broadcast on BBC Radio 1 – ‘Anti War Dub’ closed Mala’s section of the programme – it’s an anthem in every sense of the word.

So assured of its place in UK dance music lore, it’s easy to forget that ‘Hyph Mngo’ was Joy Orbison’s release debut, emerging on Scuba’s Hotflush label in 2009. As club audiences splintered from the dubstep wave of the mid-to-late 00s and tempos began to slow down to birth what would become known as the post-dubstep movement, the timing of the track’s release couldn’t have been better. Building patiently in its first minute or so via a bed of elegant pads, those organ notes eventually hit like a particularly sweet summer’s morning before that almighty drop inflicts all-out dancefloor destruction. Post-dubstep, garage, UK bass, whatever you wanted to call it, underground dance music never sounded more addictive.