Electronic Sound Magazine Issue 84 Back Issue

3We seem to say it every time we sit down to put together our end-of-year lists, but what a 12 months it has been for electronic music. Especially for our cover star Julie Campbell, aka LoneLady. As well as being the winner of our Album Of The Year award, she’s also partly responsible for a second record in our Top Five. She’s the first artist to achieve anything like that, by the way. We reviewed almost 900 albums in 2021. Not all at once, obviously, because that would be mad. But covering 900 releases is pretty staggering. And we’d have liked it to have been more. The wealth of incredible music out there means that for every record we did review, there was a big pile of others we weren’t able to include. That’s the problem with being a print magazine. There’s only so much room in each issue, so we have to draw the line somewhere.
The same rule applies when it comes to compiling our end-of-year lists. Picking our Top 40 means there are 860 releases, give or take, that didn’t make it. To be honest, with such rich pickings again, we could have drawn up countless lists that would have been almost as strong as the one we finally settled on. So if your top choice isn’t in there, we’d like to reassure you that it was, absolutely, our 41st favourite album of 2021.

Our 24-page Review Of The Year includes Q&As with not only LoneLady but the winners of our best Reissue, Compilation and Soundtrack gongs too. Elsewhere in the magazine, you’ll find interviews with Nightmares On Wax, Jon Hopkins, Coldcut and Mira Calix, as well as a look behind the scenes of Delia Derbyshire Day. For our regular features, Global Communication’s Tom Middleton reveals his influences, Youth tells us about the making of his first hit – Blue Pearl’s ‘Naked In The Rain’ – and our very own Fat Roland takes over the Time Machine for his usual festive trip. And it certainly is a trip.