Letter 17 - Nightclub Bathroom Electro-Pop
Hi,
This week I recommend four pop albums released this year that are (mostly) so influenced by dance music, clubbing and raving, you’d think they were written in a nightclub bathroom, with thumping bass permeating through the walls.
I also briefly discuss how we have arrived at this inflection point on the dance & pop music feedback loop, and the tragic irony in the timing of it. If you just want to read about the albums, feel free to skip to the section titled 2025 Electro-Pop below.
As always, I have curated playlists you can listen to while you read on Apple Music and Spotify. I’ve started bulking out these playlists with songs which are influential or similar tracks to those I discuss in these letters.
If you missed any of my previous letters, or want to find some other music or films, you can find them in The Odhracle Archive.
Please like & subscribe, share with anyone who would enjoy, and let me know what you think of any of the recommendations in the comments below.
Much love, Odhrán x
Dance & Pop Music Cultural Exchange
There is a constant process of give and take between what’s broadly considered mainstream pop music, and the music played out by DJs in clubs.
This is a historical state of affairs. Discos were the proto-club environment, disco dovetailed with the synths of Kraftwerk, inspiring songs like Donna Summer’s I Feel Love, which led to electro-pop acts like Depeche Mode and Yellow Magic Orchestra, whose success pushed on drum machine and sampler technology. This gave the requisite tools to Detroit techno innovators, and to house music forefathers like Frankie Knuckles, who inspired mainstream dance acts like Daft Punk and their big beat counterparts like The Prodigy, as much as they inspired dance-pop originators like Madonna and Björk, who ultimately paved the way for countless producers, including modern innovators like the late SOPHIE.
Today, dance music’s direct influence on the flagship releases of major pop stars has never felt clearer, with albums like Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia (2020), Lady Gaga’s Chromatica (2020), Beyoncé’s Renaissance (2022) & Kylie Minogue’s Tension (2023).
The dividing line between pop and dance music has even become blurred due to this constant cultural exchange, evidenced in the streaming-era domination of acts like David Guetta and Calvin Harris, and labels releasing pop-music marketed as dance music in acts like Becky Hill.
Mainstream-ification of Clubbing
What’s less common historically is clubbing and raving (as opposed to dance music) being such a direct influence on mainstream pop music, or at least that influence being acknowledged by pop artists and labels. I’m mostly referring to clubs which focus on genres like house, techno, DnB, and their related genres, not your high street club playing top 40 tunes (no denigration to the latter, which play a formative role in the music ecosystem).
Raving itself was highly prominent in cultural discourse in the heady days of the early 1990s, but with significantly less social acceptance, ultimately culminating in the UK with the much criticised Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 which, in a section titled “Powers to remove persons attending or preparing for a rave” granted the police powers to arrest individuals attending a gathering of 20 or more people where amplified music (including “sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”) is played. The US responded similarly, with then-Senator Joe Biden sponsoring the Reducing Americans' Vulnerability to Ecstasy Act (the “RAVE Act”).
Clubs, raves and electronic music festivals were once counter-cultural spaces, but this back and forth between dance and pop has normalised those spaces for the general public (or at least, a sanitised version of them). There’s been some watershed moments in this regard in recent years, like Eliza Rose and UK garage producer Interplanetary Criminal’s B.O.T.A. (Baddest Of Them All) (2022) getting number 1 in both the UK & Ireland for consecutive weeks, and Four Tet (former resident of seminal London club Plastic People (RIP)) playing Madison Square Garden and headlining Coachella.
It’s one thing for big beat acts of yesteryear, or paint-by-numbers made-for-mass-consumption dance music, to achieve mainstream success, but it’s quite another for formerly underground electronic genres, and their sub-cultures, to transition into the mainstream. Because of this Overton window shift, clubbing and raving is no longer inherently a counter-cultural activity, and nor are weekend-warriors booking annual leave to attend festivals met with judgemental side-eyes in the office.
Dance Music/Pop Music Inflection Point
But still, nothing is original, and all of the records I discuss below have direct lineage to albums like Björk’s Debut (1993) and Madonna’s Ray of Light (1996), however we seem to be entering a phase of pop releases being explicitly influenced not just by the music played at clubs and raves, but by the experiences the pop artists have had in those environments.
In 2024, Charli XCX’s Brat shoved the rave and club scene into a mainstream cultural light its rarely been exposed to. Charli’s first gig in her teens was at a warehouse rave in Hackney Wick, and her magnum opus album is in direct dialogue with the culture she was introduced to through those experiences. The album, co-produced by hyperpop label PC Music’s founder A.G Cook, blends pop & hyperpop with rave & Eurodance across Club Classics & Von Dutch, with the latter getting an official remix by legendary dubstep duo Skream & Benga. The rollout included a series of “PARTYGIRL” DJ sets, including two Boiler Rooms and a Glastonbury slot.
Below the party-girl veneer however, clubbing-influenced albums like Brat tend to explore themes of escapism and self-actualisation on the dancefloor. I’m not big on the “the rave is my church” marketing gimmick pushed by techno-themed Instagram accounts that this brushes up against, but there’s definitely something in the process of self-discovery that can occur on a dancefloor the wrong side of 4am.
I don’t think Brat influenced any of the records I discuss below, but it serves as a bellwether for this era of pop music wearing its club and rave influences on its sleeve.
Has Commercialisation Failed the Club Scene?
Before we get into the albums, it’s worth noting the tragic irony in these club-influenced pop albums arriving at a time when the club scene is actively dying in many places.
This specific inflection point between the club and pop music hasn’t arrived organically. It comes after 13 years of corporate interests, particularly American private equity piling money into dance music, resulting in things like the creation of American “EDM”. For example, in January 2025, Boiler Room, once a grassroots enterprise which played a massive role in bringing underground electronic music and club culture to the masses, was purchased by US private equity-owned Superstruct Entertainment.
Whilst there are obvious pros and cons of this flow of cash into what were previously spaces somewhat free from overt capitalistic elements, you might presume one of the pros is financial stability. However:
The UK has gone from having 3,144 night clubs in 2005 to 1,733 in 2015, to 787 in June 2024 - losing 75% of its nightclubs in 20 years.
Ireland has gone from 522 clubs in 2000 to 110 in 2019, to 83 as of January 2025 - a loss of 84%.
These are catastrophic figures for those trying to earn a living in something which is crucially important as an incubator, not just to music, but to all artistic endeavours.
There are lots of causes of this decline, some of which can’t be helped (e.g. Covid or Gen Z’s aversion to drinking) but there are those that can be mitigated through licensing law reform and sufficient Government funding. If you want to learn more, I recommend reading the reports and commentary from the UK’s Night Time Industry Association, Ireland’s Give Us The Night, and Northern Ireland’s Free The Night. This issue is not just limited to clubs, the Music Venue Trust has described the “collapse” of the UK touring circuit due to losing grassroots venues at a rate of two per week.
Not even the injection of massive amounts of capital into the dance music scene has stemmed the tide, with the funds not making it in sufficient amounts to smaller venues. Without those venues, artists like Charli would be exposed to the cultures that can only exist in those spaces, and there’s absolutely no chance Four Tet plays Madison Square Garden.
So whilst it may feel like a high point in electronic music and mainstream cultural crossover, there’s sufficient reason to fear these packed mega-venues, seemingly never-ending number of festivals and chart success of club-influenced music, may actually be the club and rave scene going supernova, before it collapses in on itself.
2025 Electro-Pop
I’ve linked to each record’s Bandcamp or site where you can purchase it, and you can listen to a playlist of the songs I discuss on Apple Music and Spotify.
Oklou - choke enough (2025)
Genre(s): Electro-pop, hyperpop, & Eurodance.
For fans of: FKA Twigs, Erika de Casier & SOPHIE.
Songs to try: obvious, harvest sky & choke enough.
If the maximalist Brat (2024) is the club, then the minimalist Choke Enough is the chilled out afters.
The debut album from French leftfield pop artist Oklou (pronounced Ok-loo, real name Marylou Mayniel). A classically trained cellist and pianist, upon moving to Paris in her early twenties Mayniel immersed herself in the local party scene and became a DJ. She later moved to London, rubbing shoulders with PC Music artists and co-founding club music label NUXXE.
Clubbing was a foundational experience for Mayniel, in an interview with Crack Magazine she said “dancefloors represented a way for me to show my qualities and my sensuality. It was my chance to shine, and that feeling never left me”. She draws parallels between club music and both the traditional French folk music her parents immersed in as a child, and the classical music she performed in orchestras - “I recognise my attachment to and love of this music, and also how freaking similar it is to forms of more modern music. There are the same cycles and loops repeating over one another – it shares a lot in common with rave music.”
What feel like disparate musical worlds are joined in perfect harmony by Oklou on this album. She does this primarily through what feels like the album’s main character - the variety of horns which it features. A synth-flute, oboe and trumpets are introduced in the periphery on the opening two tracks, and the horns come into their own via a synth-clarinet on 4th track obvious, creating a whimsical medieval sound that could be from a Zelda game. This sonic connection between her traditional & classical background and her modern sensibilities continues on the A.G. Cook produced ict, where arpeggio vocals and drums build into hyperpop euphoria alongside a chorus of trumpets.
Her lyricism on my personal favourite track harvest sky similarly bonds these concepts. It features trance synths and beats which underpin lyrics touching on folklore and mythology - “Dance for a harvest sky … If I’m the queen of the scarecrow” - with the song’s inspiration being La Fête de la Saint-Jean festivities Mayniel attended as a child. The muffled synths and bass at the beginning and end of this track capture that feeling of hearing pumping tunes from the temporary respite of a club bathroom, and the lyricism speaks to the clubbing experience she describes as zooming out “from the crowd and enter a lonely mental space” on the dancefloor.
After another hyperpop dalliance on the title track, she then blends that contemporary sound with 2000s Eurodance reminiscent of Cascada on take me by the hand featuring Drain-Gang co-founder Bladee.
The album’s final two tracks want to wanna come back and blade bird hit on more emotive tones, with the former about needing to leave a place to understand if you’ll miss it, if it is home, and the latter an acoustic-guitar track with analogies of being a caged bird.
Choke Enough is definitely my favourite album of the year so far, and I’ve loved it more with each listen. I recommend watching this live performance shot on an ice rink. This version of choke enough features a sample of a video edited to make it seem like the late, great David Lynch is bizarrely telling Cher she has a dark cloud hanging over her, which I sorely wish was in the album version.
Ela Minus - DÍA (2025)
Genre(s): Electro-pop, electronica & experimental pop.
For fans of: Kelly Lee Owens, Sofia Kourtesis & Björk.
Songs to try: Upwards, Broken & Combat.
Ela Minus (real name Gabriela Jimeno Caldos) has had an unusual journey to the release of DÍA. Caldos was first the drummer in a punk band when growing up in Colombia, and then reluctantly left the band to study jazz drumming at Berklee College of Music in Boston, under the tutelage of legendary jazz drummer Terri Lyne Carrington. She then majored in electronic production and design, and worked for a music production company building synthesisers.
She made a name for herself as a techno DJ and producer, and released her debut album Acts of Rebellion (2020) - techno-pop record notable for the self-imposed restriction of not using any computer generated sounds in its production.
DÍA takes the techno aspects of her first album, and combines them with more euphoric electronica and pop production, resulting in a slick electro-pop album. Whilst Minus is more renowned for her prodigal production skills, I think the narrative strands she pulls through this album’s lyrics that really stands out for me.
Early tracks Broken and Idols juxtapose upbeat electronica with confessional and introspective lyricism, with the latter exploring trauma, pain and shame being used as motivation. Minus ties the music more closely to the narrative on IDK, where extremely distorted guitars and drums underpin her expressed self-doubt. The production turns back to euphoric club banger territory on QQQQ, on which she sings the album’s bleakest lyrics in her native Spanish - “If it’s going to be like this, let the world end.”
The album takes a more positive outlook on the appropriately named I Want To Be Better, before the strongest part of the album - the narratively-tied three-track-run of Onwards, And & Upwards. Onwards opens with distorted guitar and builds to a drum beat in touch with her punk band origins. She flexes her poetical songwriting, with lyrics exploring self-immolation as a means of cleansing ones past “last night was the last night of that life // we’ll sit and watch it burn”, however it ends on a skeptical note - “Hope with flames comes rebirth // but I won’t hold my breath”.
On And, a short interlude, she says “It’s not about me, I get it, give you peace”, which could be a continuation of this skepticism. Upwards, probably the album’s standout song, then opens with wobbly distorted synths and promotes self-reliance - “I’d love to save you but I’ve got to save myself, first”. Even on this positive song, her self-doubt remains - “my mind keeps lying to me”.
The album’s core theme is resilience in the face of adversity - what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Singing in Spanish, she eloquently summarises this on the hymn-like ambient closer Combat, when she repeats the line “Birds born in cages are not afraid of anything.” which Pitchfork (I think accurately) says is a flipped reference to “an old Alejandro Jodorowsky proverb—“Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness”. Coincidentally both DÍA and choke enough end on similar bird analogies.
A brilliant, emotional, one-woman-show of an album. She did an ambient electronic show on NTS last month which I recommend checking out.
FKA Twigs - Eusexua (2025)
Genre(s): Electro-pop, experimental pop & electronica.
For fans of: Björk, Caroline Polachek & Charli XCX.
Songs to try: Eusexua, Striptease & Perfect Stranger.
If, like me, you weren’t into FKA twigs’ (Tahliah Debrett Barnett) foray into the mainstream end of R&B on her mixtape Caprisongs (2022), the wait for her return to full-form from her second album Magdalene (2019) has felt very long. So this has been, by some distance, both my most anticipated and listened to album of 2025 so far.
For a portion of the time between her last album and this release, Barnett was in a relationship with actor Shia LaBeouf, and has subsequently sued him for sexual battery and assault (the case is due to go to trial this year). Barnett’s experience recovering from her relationship with LaBeouf, which she says left her with PTSD, is fundamental to understanding her mindset when creating this project.
During the rollout Barnett loosely defined the concept “Eusexua” in a number of ways - once in a Tiktok, somewhat relevant to the theme of this letter, as being “for the girls who find their true selves under a hard metal silver stiletto on the damp rave floor”, and later, somewhat more succinctly in a Vogue interview, as clear-eyed euphoria - “that moment of nothingness just before a big surge of inspiration or creativity or passion. I describe it as a moment before an orgasm.”
The album’s inspiration came when Barnett attended a rave when when she was in Prague filming The Crow (2024) - “‘Imagine a derelict building, and there’s just mist everywhere so you can’t see where you’re going. Literally, all you can hear is the thud of the four-four techno beat,’ … this big warehouse and everyone is dancing. Everyone looks so good, but they’re not there to pull a look, they’re just there to dance. … In that moment it just occurred to me: my brain’s thinking properly again! Because I’d had the most intense brain fog for a couple of years. And I just thought to myself: ‘This feeling is the best feeling in the whole world. How fucking incredible that I’m just alive in this place’”.
The album’s thematic ties to clubbing and raving are inextricable, and the rollout was accordingly-themed, with twigs frequently discussing clubbing & raving, and hosting raves in London, New York & L.A.
The album was co-produced by electronic artist Koreless, and its first five tracks are clear in their sonic influences. The title track (which has production credits for progressive house legend Sasha, experimental electro-pop producer Eartheater, and speed garage & hyperpop-duo du jour Two Shell) blends twigs’ alt-pop stylings and the ‘90s Eurodance.
Girl Feels Good, with its pulsing synths, trip-hop beat and mellow guitar, sounds ripped from the soundtrack of a ‘90s action B-movie. It’s also reminiscent of Madonna’s Ray of Light, which makes sense as Marius De Vries has production credits on this track and the Madonna album.
Fittingly, Koreless produced the instrumentals for 4th track Drums of Death on a flight to Berlin to play a set at Berghain, and Room of Fools reminds me of 2024’s biggest club track - Joy Orbison’s Flight FM, with lyricism that explores losing yourself in a club - “In a dark room // Dancing // …On the dance floor // Demigods // In unconscious flow form”.
The album’s other core theme is sexual freedom. Whilst I’ve discussed the normalisation of clubs and raves broadly, it’s worth bearing in mind the formative role queer and kink culture plays in the scene. The clash between the mainstream-ification of raving and this aspect of its cultural identity is actually something of a live issue. It is only 2 years ago that UK club-scene legend Michael Peacock was the victim of filming and social-media shaming for some scantily clad dancing in Fabric.
Eusexua embraces this aspect of rave culture, both in its fetish-themed aesthetics, and its lyricism. Perfect Stranger is effusively positive about anonymous sex without historical baggage, and both Drums of Death and 24hr Dog are explicit in their discussion of BDSM. My favourite song on the album is probably Striptease, which draws parallels between sex and emotional vulnerability - “Opening me feels like a striptease … I’m stripping my heart till my pain disappears”.
This theme is also present on Sticky, an emotional and self-critical ballad - “I tried to fuck you with the lights on // In the hope you’d think I’m open and have a conversation”. This gentler song sounds closer to her earlier LPs, and the opening melody is reminiscent of Aphex Twin’s piano instrumental Avril 14th, which itself was sampled (badly and without permission) by Kanye West on Blame Game from his album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010). Kanye’s song explores the exchange of blame following a break-up, but with bravado and assigning the most of the blame to (shockingly) not Kanye, in contrast to twigs’ self-criticality and vulnerability on Sticky. I love the end of this track, where twigs’ singing about her being “tired of messing up my life with // Overcomplicated moments” is itself abruptly interrupted with glitchy static, which I thought was clever.
The standout aspect of the album is, as always with twigs, her breathtaking vocals. Striptease features Dolores O'Riordan-esque singing layered over a deep bassline, which transitions into haunting soprano vocals over a drum & bass beat. On Room of Fools, she pivots from growled singing to fluctuating between different types of vibrato.
I don’t love every aspect of this album. I can’t get onboard with the critical revisionism of Childlike Things, which features North West, daughter of Kanye and Kim Kardashian, singing in broken Japanese. I understand how it fits into the narrative structure of the album, but it’s an unwelcome departure sonically and a dip in quality. And whilst I like most of album closer Wanderlust, its final third gets a little too musical theatre for me.
On the whole though, I think this album is brilliant, and I’m so grateful to have twigs back.
Biig Piig - 11:11 (2025)
Genre(s): Indie-pop, alt-pop & dance-pop.
For fans of: Nilüfer Yanya, Caroline Polachek & Olivia Dean.
Songs to try: 4AM, Favourite Girl & Decimal.
Another album I’ve been waiting on for a long time for - the debut full-length album from Irish-Spanish pop artist Biig Piig (Jess Smyth). I’ve never been able to work out why it’s taken so long for her to drop an album. She went viral for that Colors performance 7 years ago, released 5 multi-track EPs after that, and her 2020 duo of singles Oh No and Feels Right have a combined 105 million streams on Spotify.
The first half of the album deals with the response to a break up, and the second half is more thematically about love. It opens with 4AM. A lovely synth-laden indie-pop track nostalgic for the post-club experience of wandering aimlessly through the city. It has a muffled and distant bass that builds and gets clearer as the track progresses, like your foggy memory recalling moments from the night just gone. This tone continues on the next song Ponytail, with high-pitched synths and frequent high hats.
It was produced by frequent collaborator Zack Nahome, and features guest-songwriting from other frequent collaborator Maverick Sabre - like on the fun & flighty dance-pop bop Favourite Girl. The standout song is Decimal, a club track with a deep bassline, distorted guitar, pulsing synths and Biig Piig singing in Spanish, which is always a nice change-up she can chuck in. As an aside, the way she pronounces “alcohol” is ASMR for my brain.
Smyth’s earlier releases were kind of RnB-infused indie-pop, but she has been moving towards a dancier sound in recent years, (e.g. the the end of her 2022 single Kerosene). She dialed this up a notch on her with 2023 single Watch Me, a techno-pop song released months after Kylie shook the dance-pop world with Padam Padam.
A sensual song about female empowerment, Watch Me features dark bass and distorted synths, and came with a self-directed video featuring Smyth clad in latex. I loved this new direction and in a pre-Brat world it felt like Biig Piig was on the cutting edge of pop. However, in the 10 month gap between it and 4AM’s release, it feels like Smyth moved towards her earlier indie-pop sound.
This would be fine, but you can hear the introduction of club music adjacent synths and basslines on this album, but without the full throttled commitment of Watch Me. I think what holds me back from loving this record is best summed up on Favourite Girl, which has electro-pop elements that I like, but doesn’t lean into any of them with any gusto. As a long-time fan of Biig Piig, given the long delay of its release, I was worried about her full-length album sticking the landing when it finally arrived, but in some ways it feels like it never really took off.
Still, it adds some good songs to her now fantastic set-list, and hopefully she’s kept her club-banger powder dry for album number 2.