Image via Michael McKinney
Michael McKinney understands the cultural importance of Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci.”
As with 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024, there was no immediately obvious center to DJing last year. That’s for the better. A million exciting directions may make cartography a bit more challenging, but it’s a sign that the format is alive and well. This column, as ever, is an attempt to chronicle a (personal and specific) view on the format, one that looks at DJing as its own sonic tradition: one about building towers out of vinyl, about histories overlapping until any distinctions dissolve, about celebrating the anything-goes possibility contained in selecting records.
That said, there’s a theme to the best stuff. Call it chance, call it confirmation bias, call it a reasonable expectation: the strongest DJ sets of 2025 were, by and large, live affairs. This makes a kind of sense, of course. Dance music is a million things, but many of those things are physical — it’s in the way a subwoofer makes your hair stand on end, in the way a sweat-soaked crowd can conjure its own kind of energy, in the way a great drum break might just turn a room electric.
Below, you’ll find all manner of those sessions, picked from all corners of the globe and the Internet, but you’ll find plenty of other ideas of what a great DJ set can be, whether it’s zero-gravity ambient music, limited-run cassettes that double as elegies, miles-deep genre explorations, deliberately kitchen-sink stylishness, or just about anything else. Here, things are sorted by approach rather than sound, inasmuch as those can be distinguished from each other. There’s a roughly ranked list at the end, too, if that’s your speed. Keep in mind, though, that it’s not exactly one to one: not everything on the list is mentioned prior, and not everything mentioned up top is on the list.
That said, let’s get into it. Here are a few—truly, just a few—of the best DJ sets 2025 had to offer.
Tape labels are hardly a new thing, but it’s worth saying it straight: in 2025 — as in 2024, as in 1985 — some of the very best music was released on cassettes. This is at once frustrating and exciting: for better and worse, it turns digging for sets into a kind of treasure hunt, and it’s easier to hold onto a jewel than digital vapor. (That said, some of these releases do ultimately become the latter; many thanks to generous Discogs users the world over on that front.)
Perhaps the most audacious of the year’s cassette releases is the Waxy Music Tape Series, an eight-tape series released to commemorate its titular listening bar, which shut down midway through the year. By and large, the series is a neat fit with many of the year’s finest tapes: this is guitar music through and through. Ivan Liechti’s One Eighty is a remarkable sad-sack indie-rock collage; The DJ and Judas der Maschine go deep on post-punk and weirdo rock records with Near Mint / VG+ and Im Rauch, respectively; Moon Lagoon’s Stranded finds a middle ground between Latin jazz, MPB, and field recordings; and Busterbandit & Ronny Hunger’s Cosmic Country is altogether stranger than the title might suggest. That said, you’ll have to keep your eyes peeled for a while: Waxy printed only a handful of each of these tapes, resulting in something that’s an artifact strictly targeted at those already in the know.
Speaking of Ivan Liechti: in 2025, the Ghost Riders compiler had one hell of a year. Besides One Eighty, he teamed up with Paris’s Julien Dechery for a pair of killer sessions: Peekaboo, released in early winter on The Trilogy Tapes, is a low-key masterwork, a galaxy of guitar pedals and heart-on-sleeve indie rock; 02.05.25, from a few months later, stretches that approach for another hour, promising infinities yet again, wrapping heartstrings around amplifiers and CDJs alike. (In their offering for The Trilogy Tapes, JS & Ninka offered what feels like a spiritual sibling in Untitled: morose indie rock and warm-blanket ambient music, paired together just so.) Dechery, Leichti’s co-conspirator, had a pair of killer tapes all his own, too: READYAA? is a top-notch session of filmi and breakbeat belters, while Warmth In Cool splits the difference between Indian folk musics and old-school trip-hop.
Elsewhere still, Berceuse Heroique continued their essential run of blink-and-you’ll-miss-them releases. fka boursin opened their year with Cowboys Don’t Cry, which sounds like “Americana” as heard through a thousand dreams; Krikor’s Dub Declaration is a one-of-one collection of dub and digital dancehall; Don’t DJ’s XO Tikisme splits the difference between space-age downtempo, creeped-out electronics, who-knows psychedelia; DJ Persuasion’s ‘93-94 Hardcore Mix is, joyously, exactly what it says on the tin; Gigi Formatti’s An Underrated 80’s Sci-Fi B Movie Soundtrack is uncanny, playful, and spooked in equal measure; and YL Hooi’s Water, somehow, finds the intersection of cloud rap and traditional folk-music stylings.
All Night Flight’s in-house tape arm, Tabi Tapes, followed up a banner 2024 with four equally critical brain-benders: Tom Val cooked up a delirious survey of French folk musics; Ugne Uma blurred the lines between documentary, downtempo, and sound collagery; S.P.N. turned in a bleary-eyed session of industrial, classical, and synth workouts; and Wrakhowitch swung for the fences with a tape of scuzzed-up rock-and-roll. Fleetway Tapes, the tape series put out by A Colourful Storm, offered up a sepia-tinged tearjerker of a set from Florence: A Requiem for Prime Time TV is equal parts muffled and out-there, like a half-remembered story told a hundred times.
Of course, it’s not as though tapes get all the fun. NTS Radio, as ever, was a critical outpost for new-school mixing — sometimes straight-up DJing, sometimes more traditional radio formatting, sometimes banter, sometimes something else entirely. Taylor Rowley’s “Windmills of Your Mind” acted as something of a salve, with carefully selected songs of love, heartache, and quiet tenderness, while Jack Rollo’s “Early Bird Show” was a bit more mystical thanks to Rollo’s tendencies towards contemporary minimalism and star-kissed folk records. (And that’s setting aside the tarot readings.)
Lastly, Rollo was behind a series of this year’s finest tapes and radio shows as one half of Time Is Away, offering up meditations on loneliness, the moon, and Lac Léman; elsewhere, they looked towards “folk music” the world over and dug into world-weary ambient musics. Jen Monroe’s “Getting Warmer,” by contrast, offered something a bit more sun-kissed: feather-light folk, warm-weather rock music, and dream pop imagined as something a touch astral.
Elsewhere, some of the year’s finest sets proposed the DJ set as a highly specific thing: as a way to go deep rather than wide, as a way to explore histories of scenes and sounds. With the help of new-school electronic-music trailblazer Debit, Sonido Dueñez — the arguable originator of cumbia rebajada — got his time in the sun with Rebajadas Tape 1 and Rebajadas Tape 2, a pair of archival sessions that dunk cumbia in a vat of smog and syrup. Nosedrip, in a specifically requested set at Making Time 2025, went deep on a million permutations of new beat, and Evie zeroed in on sand-blasted balearic beat and house records.
In a trio of stunning NTS sessions, Chuquimamani-Condori — one of the figures behind one of last year’s finest albums — celebrated and subverted histories at once, putting contemporary country, DatPiff ephemera, and ancient folk musics in a blender. sddp, by contrast, went deep, turning in 90 minutes dedicated to productions that flip Brandy tracks, paying homage to a long lineage of club music in the process. Over on NTS, BamBoy dug into the raucous ends of contemporary Indian hip-hop, and Black Rave Culture’s Resident Advisor mix is a hyper-specific and sweat-drenched vision of new-school American dance music.
Elsewhere still, Newcastle duo High Spirits quietly released ST005, a lights-out tape that splits the difference between lovers rock and reggae records. Following last year’s killer tape of feel-bad house music, Finn & thehouseofacidhouse ran it back, offering another session recorded “live from the hardcore continu-glum.” (Finn’s deep-dive on Databass Records for NTS is not to be missed, either.) Miles Mac & DJ Possum continued their winning streak with their offering for Bar Part Time, with slow-mo downtempo and house-music pumpers calibrated just so. Slunty, a.k.a. Pontiac Streator, turned up the temperature a bit, opening the year with a can’t-miss session of Amen-break tearjerkers, and boxofbox went deep on old-school progressive house, sprinting down a million blind alleys along the way.
Resident Advisor celebrated a history of its own with RA.1000, inviting eleven critical figures in electronic music to contribute ten remarkable sets. Theo Parrish went deep on disco and house in a three-hour stunner, and Tim Reaper grabbed several tons of contemporary UK dance-music stylings. Frankie Knuckles’ estate offered up two remarkable archival house-music recordings, while Helena Hauff looked towards something (slightly) more modern, filling her sticks with riotous electro and techno tools. Jyoty, a mixture of the U.S. club circuit at this point, turned in a truly anything-goes session that documents the sound of the modern east coast, and Bicep’s session shows the two at their arena-conquering best. Mark Ernestus, a one-of-one figure in dance-music history, cooked up a two-hour survey of contemporary amapiano, and Sama’ Abdulhadi whipped up a lights-out session of pressure-cooker techno. Lastly, Terre Thaemlitz created a blistering, heartfelt, and unblinking session angled straight at contemporary geopolitics, and DJ Harvey & Andrew Weatherall pushed each other into outright delirious territories for a long-form scorcher. The sets are, almost without exception, astounding, for their depth, breadth, and sheer sense of expansiveness: DJing, they remind the listener, can be just about anything.
After years of pop-music edits and billion-ton slammers dominating club circuits, it feels like, in 2025, the pendulum may have started to swing back: for plenty of world-class DJs, slow-and-low (and a bit austere) was the name of the game. This was, of course, by no means the only path to a great night out — and even the most serious mixers knew how to have a bit of fun behind the decks — but it nevertheless emerged as something of a trend line.
The clearest example of this may be Brian Leeds’s recordings. A million lifetimes ago, as Huerco S., he helped rearrange contemporary conceptions of what “ambient” music can sound and feel like; as Loidis, he has been doing something subtler still, reimagining old-school tech-house as a portal to somewhere entirely new. His finest sets of the year — all four of them — present roughly a dozen hours of the stuff: heads-down rhythms mixed into something that far exceeds the sum of their parts. If half a day of recordings isn’t enough, though, it’s worth turning to PLO Man’s winning set for RA: minimal and low-slung four-fours, pitched to perfection. (Adrian Sherwood, just a few weeks later, came to the same pages and turned in a best-in-class exploration of contemporary dub.)
Vladimir Ivkovic, a.k.a. one of the planet’s most remarkable living DJs, turned in two different sessions that best encapsulated his M.O. (Funnily enough, they’re both back-to-backs.) At Draaimolen Festival in 2024, he was behind a long-form who-knows-what in the middle of the woods, with ISAbella joining near the end; at 2025’s Love International festival, he teamed up with long-time sparring partner Sean Johnston for a comparatively straight-ahead session of stompers. Odopt’s LI set went deep on tech and trance chuggers; elsewhere at the same event, Nosedrip and Orpheu the Wizard focused on no-shit club rollers: breaks, house, trance, and techno tilted towards the sweat-soaked crowd. DJ Fart in the Club, a deadly serious tech-et-cetera DJ, continued her winning streak with a pair of killer recordings.
In naffcast011, Toronto’s Ciel turned in a meditation on “little sounds in huge expansive spaces,” mining the past twenty years of their crates in the process. Amelia Holt — who, in 2025, quietly made her case as one of the States’s strongest selectors — made her best showings for the rural Podcast series and at Soma Festival. The former is bound less by sound than it is by approach; it shows Holt weaving featherweight trip-hop and tripped-out jungle and fog-blasted hardcore and so much more. The latter, by contrast, is awfully heads-down, carrying a near-uniform focus on four-fours and psychedelic techno cuts. Lastly, Hewan Aman’s subglow/Live entry shows the Parisian DJ going deep on dub, using the genre as a jumping-off point for all manner of zonked-out dancefloor sounds.
Speaking of subglow: CCL, the Berlin DJ who founded the label and party, continued their hot streak. Their finest recordings — Invisible Cities I: Saphira and Invisible Cities II: Amara — presented something entirely different to many of the sets already documented here: DJing presented as a ticket to another world, selecting shown as a way to wrap heartstrings around amplifiers. (The first Invisible Cities entry is fittingly tagged with #fantasy.) This approach, it turns out, was far from anomalous in 2025. Ciel, in a remarkable turn for Best Out of Town, spent eight hours winding down from rave tools to something far sludgier, eventually finding her way towards starry-eyed rock-and-roll. With Apricot 69, Mazzacles pulled off something deeply impressive, massaging balearic beat into increasingly blissed-out forms; on Schmusi Floor @ Between Mountains Festival, Berlin’s Telephones imagined “chillout” music as an entire universe.
Berlin-based dancefloor architect Significant Other was behind two of this year’s most impressive sets, both with a similar structuring: dub used as a window into another world. (In that sense, it recalls Hewan Aman’s subglow entry.) Dripping 2024, which is, at turns, unsettling, beautiful, and playful, is a seven-hour masterclass of the stuff; on Live @ Sustain-Release 2024, he goes deep on bad-trip chill-out music, inviting any would-be ravers to tune in and black out. Joan Gila’s The Observatory, pulled from one of the strongest mix series running, is similarly queasy, a pile-up of liturgical musics and freaked-out jazz soli and deep-listening head-spinners the world over. (Romi’s entry in the same series, which turns towards dub techno and minimalism, is also critical listening.) Jake Muir’s 03 is just as delirious, a two-hour tumble through zero-grav ambient music and blissed-out drone records. Universal Cave continued a long-running, and aptly named series — Soft Rock for Hard Times — with the ninth edition, offering up a time capsule of rock-and-roll and folk musics.
It’s not all brain-benders, though. (Or, at least, it’s not all that particular mood.) With Pacific Spirit No. 93, NYC’s DJ Lloyd presented R&B as something pulled from a busted time capsule, and ion’s remarkable pi/live entry finds the DJ flooding the dancefloor with jazz fusion, acid, and plenty of dub wizardry. iiiiju, mixing for inis:eto, takes a delightfully freeform approach to downtempo mixing (country! Modern classical! Post-minimalism!) and Richard Akingbehin focused on the delirious end of dub techno in a critical mix recorded for pi pi pi. Bambi & Beatrice M. continued their tag-team winning streak with Herbarium No. 030 by leaning into the slo-mo and out-there ends of dub, as well, and Low Pitcher split the difference between the club and the headphones while focusing on the same stuff. (Noticing a theme yet?)
With liquidtime #13, MDC.312, and pi/live, NAP explored three different axes of his sound, ranging from no-BPM ambient music to full-on club stormers. Lastly, Cousin & Priori, mixing live from Sustain-Release 2024, cranked out nearly seven hours of dancefloor delirium — it’s not as low-key as plenty of things here, but the sheer why-not attitude towards mixing merits placement anyways.
As long as we’re talking about out-there selections, why not crank the volume back up? In 2025, as ever, plenty of the finest sets were also among the year’s wildest. This is the section for the acrobats, the tightrope sprinters, the daredevils.
So it’s only right to start it up with Djrum. In a 2025 interview with Tone Glow, he put a key element of his genre-hopping sound plainly: “I can’t follow a script,” he said. His turn at the Essential Mix turntables belies that self-effacing attitude while revealing its strengths; it’s a sprint between a million styles, all linked by madcap turntablism and an ever-ratching intensity. Objekt, recording from Parameter 10, took a relatively straightforward idea — “leave the dubstep to the professionals” — and complicated it umpteen times over, folding all sorts of high-energy styles into the mix. (Kode9 & Tim Reaper’s heavyweight back-to-back from the same event isn’t to be missed, either.) Bristol’s k means continued her inimitable run with podcast entries for Dekmantel and Unsound; the latter, in particular, shows a one-of-one ear for music that sits at the intersection of footwork, techno, and out-and-out black holes.
It’d be a bit of malpractice not to mention Honcho Campout here, too. The annual festival is something of a mecca for who-knows dancefloor sounds, and while many of the sets came out too late for review here, Doula’s live recording—a car-crash of industrial-strength rave tools, thrash metal, screaming noise, and heavyweight hardcore—is an early standout.
Elsewhere, a few DJs turned things up ever hotter. gyrofield’s podcast for Resident Advisor — a veritable windstorm of breaks, screwed-up footwork, and screaming dubstep — is the kind of session that ought to be star-making. Hardcore mainstay Kilbourne put out plenty of heat in 2025, but POWER SOCA GABBA THUMPER (“the two best genres smushed together”) is likely her best offering. DJ Marcelle, who is quite possibly the most unpredictable selector working, turned the decks inside out at Horst Arts & Music Festival, and Hank Jackson did something similar in a pair of full-calibre sessions. Yumi, his back-to-back partner for one of those sets, went stranger still at Osmos in the Trees, grabbing anything-goes club rhythms at a suitably frenetic pace.
Nema Hän, recording live from the same festival, pulled off one of the year’s most impressive tricks, cranking the dials on both club-night energy and full-throated delirium; the result is, somehow, groggy and propulsive at once. DJ Mum and DJ Mistry’s sets at Soma Festival 2024 are also flat-out remarkable: the former looked towards kitchen-sink club tools the world over, whether that’s dubstep, R&B, gqom, or trap; and the latter is a trust-fall of field recordings, trip-hop, dub, voicemails, psychedelic pop, and so much more. Yibing, mixing for GROOVY GROOVY’s increasingly essential mix series, weaved a double helix of who-knows club sounds and electronic-music balladry, making something that feels like it’s moving in three tempi at once.
There’s something about live-at-club-shaniko that feels out of time, or perhaps a bit romantic. In a way, it feels like a kind of DJing that’s started to disappear in the wake of the Internet: a local hero playing to a hyperlocal community, offering their own view of dance music in a way that’s wholly unfriendly to algorithms or quickly written captions. The set, which was recorded live in Shaniko, Oregon, went all night — the sort of thing that, rightly or wrongly, can lead towards all sorts of self-mythologizing.
But it’s not about that. DJ Screendoor, by this time a Portland staple, presented the set with a tossed-off kind of grace, looking towards the ravers and the architecture of the space itself rather than emphasizing anything about the booth itself. Just take a look at the artwork: how long does it take for one of the taxidermy mounts to look back?
It’s worth putting it straight, even if Screendoor won’t say it himself. live-at-club-shaniko is flat-out remarkable; it’s a herculean effort of heads-down dancefloor mixing, packed with quietly audacious blends and a million rug-pulls.
Here, Screendoor spends twelve-plus hours going deep — no, deeper than that — on house, techno, and minimal-whatever dance-music idioms. It’s a gargantuan achievement on technical, artistic, and physical levels, a heavyweight session pulled off with glee and nary a scuffed blend. Scan around and you’ll find a million different ideas: no-shit disco, elliptical electro, wigged-out R&B bootlegging, gospel-house screamers, minimal techno that promises eternities. But on anything this sizable, the specifics feel besides the point. Instead, it’s about how Screendoor builds innumerable bridges between universes, exploring a million shades of club-night jubilee in the process.
There’s almost nothing flashy about live-at-club-shaniko, but perhaps that’s part of the point. This is function-first DJing taken to some kind of logical end-point. Here, Screendoor lays out a universe of low-key club-night sounds and invites ravers to disappear between the kick drums. What more could a dancefloor need?
We rely on your support to keep POW alive. Please take a second to donate on Patreon!
