Music News

Saltburn’s soundtrack did more than enhance the film’s thrilling tale of privilege and desire. While the film was released in November of 2023, 2024 saw its ‘00s dance hits get pushed back into the spotlight, and in some cases, onto the charts. In January, Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s 2001 disco-pop gem “Murder on the Dancefloor” entered the Hot 100 in a first for the artist and also returned to the U.K. Official Singles Chart’s Top 10 after 22 years. Meanwhile, Mason vs. Princess Superstar’s cheeky 2007 mashup “Perfect (Exceeder)” flooded DJ sets and TikTok feeds, on its way to revisiting the U.K. Top 40. — KRYSTAL RODRIGUEZ

Aussie icon Kylie Minogue made history at the 2024 Grammys when her viral smash “Padam Padam” won the inaugural award for best pop dance recording. It’s a running start for the newly expanded dance category, and for voters. For years, the dance community has called for a greater separation between “traditional” dance/electronic music and more pop-centric dance songs – a debate which ballooned following Beyoncé’s 2023 category sweep over producers such as Bonobo, Odesza and Kaytranada. With both sides given their respective and rightful space, the Grammys have officially widened the field, offering more inclusive recognition for dance music in all its forms. — K.R.

When Charli XCX headed to Ibiza to tape her edition of Boiler Room in mid-July, Brat, which had been released the month prior, was still in something of a nascent phase. But the viral success of the performance — along with a hyped February Boiler Room in Brooklyn that preceded the album’s release — highlighted what the subsequent movement was about to become: messy, chaotic and heaps of fun. Eventually the word and ideal entered the public lexicon, even elbowing its way into the U.S. Presidential race with Charli’s July endorsement: “Kamala IS brat.” The slime-green aesthetic and unashamedly party-focused mindset resonated across generations and proved to be a defining moment in 2024’s release calendar, with Brat currently in its 26th week at No. 1 on Top Dance/Electronic Albums after hitting No. 3 on the Billboard 200 in July, spawning an equally brilliant remix album and making club queen Charli one of the biggest pop success stories of 2024. — THOMAS SMITH 

You know what makes a show truly unique? Inventing entirely new stage production equipment. This is the bar French electronic duo Justice set in 2024, when the pair and their talented team of light designers, stage producers and mechanical engineers pulled off an absolute spectacle during their comeback show at Coachella 2024.

Here, it was genuinely shocking to watch this behemoth of a light show unfold, and wilder still how the French producers appeared seemingly unphased while 11 tons of custom-built moving light fixtures whipped up, down and around them while they tore through much of what was then their still forthcoming fourth album, Hyperdrama, in sharp suits and head-nodding from exciting start to blinding finish. The music also melted two decades and four albums of sweet Justice melodies and assaultive breakdowns into an hour-plus performance that explored most every human emotion without ever once feeling dull. And it altogether set the stage for an extended run behind the album that included major festivals and arena shows. Meanwhile, Hyperdrama collected a pair of 2025 Grammy nods for best dance/electronic album and best dance recording for the slinky “Neverender”

This year, some may have thought going to see Justice would be an exercise in nostalgia. It was actually a glimpse into the future. — KAT BEIN 

The producer’s weekend one performance at Coachella’s giant Sahara Stage on April 13 was plagued by technical issues, with Grimes stopping the performance multiple times to update the audience on what was going wrong in real time. From the crowd, things initially seemed to be going just fine, until about 30 minutes into the show, when Grimes stopped the music entirely and announced that “this s— always f—ing happens, all my tracks are twice as fast so I’m not mixing very well, so I’m going to keep trying, and I appreciate you being here. There has never been a Grimes show without a major technical difficulty. But yes, it will continue.” 

It did continue, with the producer ultimately screaming out of frustration into the mic while stop/starting her performance show multiple times. It was an interesting situation to witness, and one that blew up on the internet as dance music experts and navel gazers alike analyzed the meaning of it all.

After, Grimes tweeted an explanation, writing: “I want to apologize for the technical issues with the show tonight. I wanted to come back rly strong and usually I always handle every aspect of my show myself – to save time this was one of the first times I’ve outsourced essential things like rekordbox bpm’s and letting someone else organize the tracks on the sd card etc. i had a bad feeling beforehand not having run everything thru the cdjs myself and tho I flagged it I wasn’t insistent… I will personally organize all the files next week. I will not let such a thing happen again.”

Her weekend two performance went off, it seemed, seamlessly. — K. Bain

Released in April, Luca Guadagnino’s wildly fun Challengers movie saw Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist engage in a lurid, testy throuple set against the backdrop of professional tennis. The Call Me By Your Name director enlisted Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross to provide the score and explicitly asked the pair for “very loud techno music” to soundtrack the scenes of betrayal and sexual tension – both on the courts and off. And they delivered: the 16-track collection was punishing, spritely and only upped the ante in the summer’s hottest serve. Even better, scene-leader Boys Noize released a remixed version that added some extra topspin to proceedings. — T.S.

To amp up excitement for his 2024 album In Waves – not that it was necessary, given the dance community’s near-decade obsession with the long-gestating follow-up to his 2015 masterpiece In Colour – Jamie xx staged small club residencies, dubbed The Floor, in London, Los Angeles and Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood in late spring and summer. The tiny gigs sold out in seconds and, beyond Jamie’s sets at them, featured surprise nightly lineups with huge names (Four Tet, Hudson Mohawke) and rising talents (Nourished By Time, Bambii) alike. The hugely well-received shows even impressed their own creator, with Jamie telling us “I don’t like to use the word life-changing, but it was up there,” of the Floor set François K played in New York.

Luckily, a larger audience will have the chance to enjoy Jamie in the months ahead: He’ll tour North America in January and Europe in March. — ERIC RENNER BROWN 

Dance music’s man of the moment has continued making each year bigger than the last, achieving milestones many artists can only dream of. On June 14, the British producer brought his emotion-driven electronica to the L.A. Memorial Coliseum in what was his first-ever stadium show. The booking itself was a feat, but Fred announced – and sold out – the show with only four days’ notice. (And only two weeks after he and Skrillex sold out a last-minute rave at San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza.) The overwhelming success of these seemingly-spontaneous pop-up shows, whether small or stadium-sized, showed that this year, wherever Fred went, the world followed. — K.R.

Las Vegas is a dance music town, so when Sphere opened in September of 2023, there was a lot of talk about which DJ would eventually become the first one to play the futuristic venue. While presumably any of the Strip’s regular residents would have been up for the job, the prestige play ultimately went to Italian producer Anyma, who reported selling 100,000 tickets for the residency in less than 24 hours after the shows went on sale in July. The chatter is that these performances by Anyma, whose live shows have long relied on next level visuals, are going to be simply bananas. We’ll find out for sure later this month.  — K. Bain

Ah, the Olympics. A time when the world can put politics aside (sort of) and come together under the universal flag of human excellence. This year, the summer Olympics came to Paris, and while it was incredible to see the many feats of athletic prowess, we screamed loudest when the Opening Ceremony suddenly became a French Touch freak-out. A parade through the streets set to Cassius? Athletes arriving to Cerrone? A breakdancer carrying the torch while DJ Mehdi’s “Signatune” blasted into televisions around the world? Um, oui!!

Suddenly, instead of counting all the flags, we were filling a bingo card of filter house favorites. Even cooler was the epic Closing Ceremony that featured a French music marathon, part of which saw Kavinsky perform his Drive soundtrack hit “Nightcall” — originally produced alongside Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and mixed by SebastiAn — with live vocals from Phoenix and Angèle. On the day of the performance (Aug. 11), the 14-year-old song set a new record for most Shazams in a single day and then saw an on-demand streaming surge. Doubling down on awesomeness, the Paralympics followed suit with a Closing Ceremony that included performances from Jean Michel-Jarre, Cassius (the group’s first performance since the tragic death of Philippe Zdar in 2019), Kitten, Busy P, Anetha, Chloe Caillet, Kavinsky, Kungs, Kiddy Smile, Etienne De Crecy, Martin Solveig and more. — K. Bein

When hyperpop innovator SOPHIE died at age 34 in January 2021, she left behind an ambitious album she was working on with her brother, music producer and engineer Benny Long. On Sept. 25, the world finally got to hear SOPHIE, which they’d started working on shortly after she dropped her influential 2018 GRAMMY-nominated debut LP, Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides.

By the end of 2020, the siblings had narrowed it down to 16 tracks, pulled from the unreleased music SOPHIE had been playing in her live sets and editing and remixing based on fans’ reactions. After her death, Long enlisted her collaborators and friends to help him finish the songs. Thus, SOPHIE is rich with a diverse group of artists in dance and pop, including Juliana Huxtable, Nina Kraviz, Kim Petras, Bibi Bourelly and Hannah Diamond, and a cacophony of big sounds and moods. It helps preserve the memory of an artist forever ahead of her time, whose deep impact on pop, dance and art will echo out for decades. “I think her brain,” Long told Billboard with a smile, “was just ahead of the technology,” — A.M.Y. 

The Cornwall producer’s 1994 album has long been many things to many people: the lengthy, largely beatless collection is at times eerie and austere, but also deeply touching and serene. It has since, deservedly, become one of the most lauded ambient albums of all time as a result of its striking originality and the myths surrounding its production. A 30th anniversary rerelease in October saw the original LP version – including the breathtaking “#19” (aka “Stone In Focus”) – make its way onto streaming for the first time, alongside sought-after remixes from the Aphex archive and a rearranged running order. — T.S.

On October 12, influential house-and-beyond Scottish DJ and producer Jackmaster died from an undisclosed head injury in Ibiza. With his Glasgow-based label Numbers, he released early records from Jamie xx, Jessie Ware and SOPHIE, along with the next generation of Glasgow talent including Denis Sulta, Rustie and others, highlighting his role as a tastemaker and champion of fellow dance artists.

From his early days of working at influential Glasgow record store Rubadub, the artist born Jack Revill was an enthusiastic lover and dedicated student of dance music, as exemplified in his DJing. “My sets at their most eclectic would include everything I like: house, techno, disco, Italo, dubstep, grime, ’80s pop and everything in between,” he told Billboard in 2018. And as Resident Advisor put it after Revill’s passing, “If you were a participant in the club scene from roughly 2006 to 2018, Jackmaster was an icon.” Then in 2018, he was accused of sexual harassment by staff at a U.K. festival, after which he publicly apologized and took time off to address his substance abuse.

Jackmaster’s life and career represented the best and worst of the dance music industry: the deep love for a good rhythm and the comradery in lifting up others with you, and the perils of working in a scene centered on partying, where booze and drugs flow freely. Unlike many, Revill took accountability for his bad behavior and appeared to be putting in the work to do better before his death. — A.M.Y.

In January we did a deep dive with Texas-based producer Odetari to hear about why he was the future of dance music. In October, that bet turned out to be a good one, when the artist — who had already put up a laundry list of hit singles on Billboard‘s Dance/Electronic Songs chart — crossed over onto the Hot 100 with his track “Keep Up.” It was an achievement for dance music generally, particularly in an era when dance tracks don’t cross over to the Hot 100 as much as they did a decade ago, and for Odetari’s acutely futuristic strain of it in particular. —  K. Bain

Charli XCX, Troye Sivan and their respective teams took great care to make arenas feel like nightclubs on their fall North American Sweat Tour, and it worked. Not only were the shows hyped and hugely well-received, they also made a lot of money. In November, Billboard Boxscore reported that 22 shows in the U.S. and Canada in September and October made $28 million and sold 297,000 tickets, even outperforming Billboard‘s projections of $23.5 million. And they seemed to have fun while doing it, with tour support artist Shygirl taking us behind the scenes of the tour to give a glimpse of Sweat life on the road. — K. Bain