Electronic
Here you'll find album stories, birthdays, and anniversaries from electronic artists, producers, and labels, plus vinyl reissue news as it appears. Electronic music and the 12-inch single grew up together: it was the format built for DJs, with extended mixes and white-label pressings that spread new tracks through clubs before anyone else heard them, and reissue labels keep working through that early club history. The stories here follow how specific tracks and albums were built — studio setups, drum machines, the rooms they were made for — and why a given pressing matters to collectors.
98 STORIES
How Coldplay Built a Solar System for Their Ninth Album
Coldplay's ninth album Music of the Spheres, released on 15 October 2021, unfolds inside a fictional planetary system. Every track corresponds to a different celestial body.
· 4 min read
Jessie Ware and the Heart-Shaped Record That Started It All
Jessie Ware was born in Hammersmith on 15 October 1984 and grew up in Clapham. She sang backing vocals on tour with Jack Peñate before her own records reached the UK top five.
· 4 min read
How David Bowie Made Heroes by the Berlin Wall
David Bowie recorded 'Heroes' at Hansa Studio 2 in Berlin in the summer of 1977, five hundred yards from the Berlin Wall. Producer Tony Visconti and a core band worked on the album there.
· 4 min read
Why Did Editors' In This Light and on This Evening Divide Everyone?
Editors released In This Light and on This Evening on 12 October 2009. The machine-driven album about London topped the UK chart and then vanished from it in three weeks.
· 3 min read
How The Orb Built Metallic Spheres Around David Gilmour
The Orb's Metallic Spheres grew out of a 2009 remix of David Gilmour's charity single. Youth helped turn it into a full album, released on Columbia Records on 12 October 2010.
· 4 min read
How Enhypen Turned a Dilemma Into a Million-Selling Debut
On 2 September 2021, five members of the South Korean group Enhypen tested positive for COVID-19. Heeseung, Jay, Jake, Sunghoon and Jungwon were all confirmed o…
· 3 min read
How Pikotaro's PPAP Became the Shortest Hot 100 Hit
Daimaou Kosaka released 'PPAP (Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen)' as Pikotaro on 7 October 2016. The 45-second track became the shortest song ever to chart on the Billboard Hot 100.
· 3 min read
How Thom Yorke's Bad Eye Shaped Radiohead's Strangest Leap
Thom Yorke was born with a paralysed left eye and wore a patch as a child. That refusal to fix what made him different shaped Radiohead's turn from Creep to Kid A.
· 3 min read
How Flying Lotus Turned a Cartoon Network Ad Into a Universe
Steven Ellison sent beats to an Adult Swim promo as Flying Lotus in 2006, and the reply launched a career spanning Warp Records, Brainfeeder and film.
· 3 min read
John Cage: The Inventor Who Turned Silence Into Music
In 1928, John Cage proposed a day of silence at the Hollywood Bowl, an idea that grew into '4′33″' and a lifetime of turning listening itself into music.
· 4 min read
How Depeche Mode Built Speak & Spell on a Toy and a Coin Toss
Depeche Mode's debut Speak & Spell was recorded on eight-track equipment with an ARP 2600 synthesizer. It remains the only Depeche Mode album to feature Vince Clarke.
· 4 min read
Harold Faltermeyer and the Banana Theme That Took Over the World
Harold Faltermeyer wrote 'Axel F' in a few hours as a throwaway cue for a banana scene in Beverly Hills Cop. It became one of the decade's defining instrumentals.
· 3 min read
Chris Lowe: The Architect Who Built Pet Shop Boys
Chris Lowe trained as an architect before meeting Neil Tennant in a King's Road hi-fi shop in 1981. That chance encounter redirected him toward Pet Shop Boys.
· 5 min read
Mikolas Josef: From Street Corners to Eurovision
Czech pop singer Mikolas Josef went from busking in Prague, Oslo and Vienna to finishing sixth at Eurovision with 'Lie to Me'. It remains the best result any Czech entry has achieved.
· 3 min read
Why Did Daft Punk Hide Alive 1997 on a Website?
Daft Punk's first live album, Alive 1997, was originally hidden behind a password on the Daft Club website. Virgin Records later gave the Birmingham recording a physical release in October 2001.
· 4 min read
Radiohead's Kid A: The Album That Almost Broke the Band
In a barn in Oxfordshire, the biggest guitar band of the late nineties sat surrounded by modular synthesizers and a growing pile of unfinished tape. Radiohead, …
· 4 min read
Kylie Minogue's Fever at 25
Kylie Minogue's eighth studio album Fever came out on 1 October 2001. Released by Parlophone, it turned a career in trouble into one of the biggest pop stories of the decade.
· 4 min read
Fossora at 4 and the Sound Björk Dug Up From Grief
Four years after its release, Björk's tenth studio album Fossora remains a deliberate descent into soil, roots, and the silence that follows loss. The record was shaped by lockdowns and grief.
· 4 min read
Tom Tom Club's 'Genius of Love': Why Hip-Hop Kept Sampling It
A bassline played by a man asleep under the mixing desk became the backbone of one of the most sampled hooks of the 1980s. Tom Tom Club released 'Genius of Love…
· 5 min read
Why did TAYANNA walk away from the accordion at eight?
TAYANNA, born Tetiana Reshetniak in Chernivtsi in 1984, abandoned the accordion at eight and built a career in electronic music, folk rock, and soft rock.
· 4 min read
New Order's Brotherhood: Why the Split-Personality Album Worked
New Order's 1986 album Brotherhood split itself between synth and guitar sides. The deliberate fracture produced a breakthrough single and a lasting cult reputation.
· 4 min read
Why Does the Prodigy Experience Still Sound Like 1992?
Liam Howlett's Experience, the 1992 debut by The Prodigy, still sounds like a hardcore set bolted to a jungle break, thirty-four years later.
· 4 min read
How Ani Lorak turned a TV character name into 4.5 octaves
Ani Lorak, born Karolina Kuiek in 1978, commands a 4.5-octave range and built a career from Ukrainian pop to Russian citizenship, ending with sanctions in 2022.
· 4 min read
Why Does Pure Heroine Still Sound Like a Warning?
Lorde's debut album Pure Heroine, released on September 27, 2013, outsold nearly everything on American radio. Its sound felt like it belonged to no major label at all.
· 4 min read