Rewind: 10 albums still sounding fresh 20 years on

"Orbital are still light-years ahead of the competition." That was our view on Paul and Phil Hartnoll's fourth album in '96 and we weren't the only ones gushing over their concoction of giddy, playful melodies and cloudy, nasty-minded beats. The public loved it, too, sending it to number five in the UK charts, where it stayed for 12 weeks. Opener 'The Girl With The Sun In Her Head' is a beauty, an ode to photographer Sally Harding, a friend of the brothers, who died in 1995. The sound of a beating heart sets the track in motion, before startling synths cruise in and a slew of crispy breaks roll out throughout the 10-minute track. Interesting fact: this one was made using electricity from Cyrus, the solar power generator owned by Greenpeace. Environmentalism is a prominent theme on the record, linked into the sharp, searing 'Dŵr Budr' (Welsh for 'dirty water'), which was inspired by the "murky water in Brighton", according to Paul. 'P.E.T.R.O.L' is one hell of a screwed-up rampage, featured on Playstation driver game Wipeout, alongside tunes by The Chemical Brothers and Leftfield. They even got actress Tilda Swinton as the lead role in the video for 'The Box'.

It says a lot when someone nicknamed The Baron of Techno has hosted their own arena at one of the biggest festivals in the world since 2011. Tomorrowland in Belgium is where Dave Clarke has been every July for the last five years, joined by the likes of Scuba, Green Velvet and Marcel Fengler, proving that he's still got plenty of pull two decades since his debut album, 'Archive One'. Six years before the LP came out on Deconstruction, he debuted as Hardcore on XL Recordings, producing the "feel the bass"-shouting 'I Like John (Punky Mix)', before unleashing the hectic rave bomb 'Hey R U Ready (Non Minimalist Mix)' on R&S in 1991. By the time he'd reverted to making tunes for the album under his birth name in '96, his output had grown fiercer and was destined to cause carnage on the dancefloor. 'Miles Away' is a pacy, hammering package of house, 'The Woki' chops, screws and flips erratically and 'Storm' is a crash-course of wild techno. Chaotic as the album may be, closer 'Splendour' demonstrates Clarke's knack of being able to drop the tempo and rustle up a moody beauty to ease us out. It's not just techno he excels in.

The importance of Mark Bell is unquestionable. Alongside LFO partner Gez Varley, he pioneered a whole new type of techno: wonky, laden with bleeps and total weirdo club music. His untimely death in 2014 led to an outpouring of tributes from DJs and artists and, as so often happens these days, a petition was started to get LFO's self-titled 1990 rave anthem to Christmas number one. Peaking at number 12 in the UK charts when it was first released, it's a track they'll always be known for and the pair will forever sit in the Warp Records hall of fame. 'LFO' appeared on debut album 'Frequencies', a record co-produced by the pair, but on 'Advance', album number two, producing fell solely in the hands of Bell as Varley (who departed the group in after its release) only wrote two of the tracks. For those who'd heard the Japanese edition of Björk's 1995 album 'Post', the floating whistles from the dizzying 'Shove Piggy Shove' would be familiar to the ear. Bell had previously given a demo of the tune to the Icelandic singer, who chose to use it for the album's Japanese release, before it appeared in instrumental form on 'Advance'. This one represents the dreamy and charming side of the album, compared to the aggressively grinding 'Shutdown', wounding 'Tied Up' and dancefloor Rottweiler 'Kombat Drinking' (the first half of it, anyway). It wasn't praised as much as their debut, but it's still packed out with enough bruising techno to leave you feeling properly shaken.

The most avid A Tribe Called Quest fan may not rate this as the best of the group's albums, but it still reached the peak of the Billboard 200. As if the combination of ATCQ members Q-Tip, Phife Dawg and Ali Shaheed Muhammad wasn't enough, hip hop royalty J Dilla had a hand in this, producing the most of the tracks as part of production outfit The Ummah (along with Tip and Muhammad). They dish out their fair share of fighting talk on 'Beats, Rhymes and Life', throwing the first punch on opener 'Phony Rappers'. "It seems there's a sanitation, y'all full of thrash talker. Sounding good but money can you feed the dog hawker," goes Tip, before Phife lays the smackdown with "his rhyme style is older than a Chrysler car Nova." Even the swish '1nce Again', with the crystal-clear chorus from Tammy Lucas, has Phife piping: "You have MCs dropping bombs that's incredible, some of the brothers, their styles are just despicable." The war talk earned them a Grammy nomination for Best Rap Album in '97, losing out to 'The Score' by Fugees, and come 1998 it had reached platinum status in the US. The album name was later used as the title for a documentary exploring all things A Tribe Called Quest, too. Long live Phife.