Our Favorite Dance Albums Of 2017

Regardless of how much we acknowledge that group-movement to a centralized rhythm is medicine for the soul, some emotional climates simply aren't conducive to reaching a singular moment of exultation and release on the dance floor. Across much of the world, 2017 sure as heck didn't feel like the right year for the ecstatic. So then, the question is: what to do? One answer arrived at in our listening was to get planning. It's a directive that took on numerous shapes — battening down the hatches or building alliances, jumping off artistic cliffs or simply re-appraising the state of one's own practice. And if there were organizing principals to the year's electronic and dance albums NPR Music is spotlighting, it was these.

Not to say that 2017 didn't have its share of joyful parties or tracks, but even those were laced with a streak of facing up or dancing down Babylon — of trying to right