200 Greatest Dance Songs of All Time

When Pharrell Williams first met Daft Punk, at a party for Madonna, he told them he wanted to work together: “If you just want me to play a tambourine, I’ll do it.” When they got together in Paris, Williams said he wanted to channel Nile Rodgers — and the robots played him the track they’d cut with Rodgers. Williams cut his coconut-oil-smooth vocal on that visit. “You don’t need MDMA for this music, because it’s so incredibly vivid,” he enthused.–M.M.

“‘Easy’ in my mind is an homage to Daft Punk’s Discovery,” Porter Robinson said in 2013 of his surging collaboration with Mat Zo. “It takes the disco chords of all of the early French stuff and gives it a louder, more trance-inspired feel.” It’s an expert updating, equally glittering and classicist: The central synth line evokes a Theremin as much as a Moog, and the vocal line (sampled from Colourblind’s NYC garage classic “Nothing Better”) has the heart-in-throat feel that eluded so much of the era’s stadium EDM. —M.M.

In 2003, Parisian musicians Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay entered a contest to remix the British rockers Simian’s “Never Be Alone.” “You could download the separate tracks: guitar, drums, and other things,” de Rosnay told The New York Times. “But we were working without music software: just a sampler, a sequencer, and a synthesizer. So we downloaded just the voice on the chorus, because there was not space enough for more than eight seconds of sound on our sampler.” The result was a jagged blare that perfectly bridged electroclash and EDM; retitled “We Are Your Friends,” it became a hit in 2006 and launched Augé and de Rosnay’s career as Justice — as well as prompting Simian to make themselves over as the dance act Simian Mobile Disco. —M.M.

Dance music is a young person’s game, and no epoch demonstrated it like the early-’10s EDM boom. Built around a swarming synth vamp so catchy it wasn’t uncommon to hear people chanting along with it (there are no lyrics), Martin Garrix’s “Animals” was issued when the Dutchman was only 18, and became an instant worldwide smash. Naturally, this aroused suspicion. “At first, people in the industry assumed I didn’t make my own shit,” Garrix later said. “So I would do livestreams and production tutorials on the internet to get rid of that stigma.” —M.M.

“As far as I know, I coined the phrase. I hadn’t heard anybody call it freestyle music prior to me coming up with the name of the group Freestyle,” Miami production pioneer Pretty Tony said in 2015. His airy, hyper tracks bridged the gap between the local epochs of KC and the Sunshine Band and 2 Live Crew. “Lookout Weekend,” his second single with Debbie Weshoff Lopez — he’d recruited her while she was working at a record shop — was freestyle at its frothy zenith. Like its predecessor, “When I Hear Music,” “Weekend” went triple platinum. In response, Tony said, “I bought me a Porsche. As a matter of fact, two Porsches.” —M.M.

Built around a sample of Tim Trees’ Baltimore club sample “Bank Roll,” then-23-year-old rapper Tate Kobang’s remix is a fine modern tribute to Charm City, its people, its perseverance, and most of all, its energy. In his last verse, he even shouts out K-Swift, the legendary DJ who helped bring Baltimore club music into the mainstream before her untimely death in 2008. “She was just one of those bodies in our culture that was like, ‘She ain’t never going anywhere,’” Kobang has said. And just like K-Swift’s work before it, “Bank Rolls (Remix)” helped introduce a whole new audience to the underground Baltimore sound. —C.S.

“We both like Northern soul, Sixties music, and the 12-inch record,” Marc Almond explained in 1981 of himself and Soft Cell partner David Ball — so they combined all three into one almighty slab. The duo’s synth-pop version of the Gloria Jones R&B stomper “Tainted Love” was a hit by itself, but for the extended version, they slid that song into another classic from the same era by the Supremes. “It was originally just going to include a few bars of ‘Where Did Our Love Go?’ but we like the way it turned out and included the whole song,” Almond said. The whole nine-minute medley — New Wave disco in a nutshell — has hypnotized dance floors ever since. —M.M.

One day, the Orb’s Alex Paterson received a tape from a friend, with a note: “This might be a good idea for a new Orb single.” Side A was an interview with Rickie Lee Jones, who described the starry Arizona skies of her youth: “The most beautiful skies, as a matter of fact … purple and yellow and red and on fire.” Side B was Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint. When Paterson put them together, he got “Little Fluffy Clouds,” the cuddliest record of the acid-house era. Reich “was very happy when he heard it,” Paterson said. “Suddenly, it was being played to the masses, and they were loving it.” —M.M.

Richard D. James, a.k.a. Aphex Twin, may be better known for the kind of dance music best appreciated while seated, but for a time in the early Nineties he pumped out rave bangers of the first order. Exhibit A: “Quoth,” a percussion symphony released under the moniker Polygon Window, and a real barn burner — particularly for American Midwesterners of the period, who got down to this one in actual barns. —M.M.

Shortly after London dubstep producer-DJ Skream released his playfully brooding 12-inch “Midnight Request Line,” he recalled, “I was on a boys’ holiday with my friends. They had a DJ Magazine or a Mixmag rack up on a shelf … I looked at it, and I had Record of the Month. I was like, ‘Shit, I need to get home.’” The track, with its fluttering synth line, legato bass glide, and clap-heavy beat, catapulted Skream, and dubstep, into the limelight. –M.M.

“Ghetto house” was house music’s analog to gangsta rap — the self-described style of a cadre of Nineties Chicago producers (notably, those on the Dance Mania label) who fashioned a rough-and-ready, sample-based, thoroughly street-oriented style. The wheelchair-bound Paul Johnson was the style’s juiciest practitioner, pumping out off-the-wall genre pieces with a singular sense of flair. (Ditto his DJ mixtapes, typically featuring his dreamy voice-overs.) Johnson’s pinnacle was this blunt-force object, a cavernous kick drum over which the producer, who died from Covid in August 2021, gleefully mewls, “Feel my motherfuckin’ bass in your face,” like he’s crooning to a lover. When the kick comes back in, it’s clear he’s doing just that. —M.M.

“When Ten City started, I think we were both at a point where we wanted to expand the genre by writing proper songs while at the same time doing more abstract things,” said Marshall Jefferson, who produced the Chicago house vocal trio. “That’s the Way Love Is,” Ten City’s third single, crystallized their style — Philly-soul strings over lush love songs, topped by Byron Stingily’s stratospheric falsetto. It went Top 10 in the U.K. and Number One on the Billboard dance chart; moreover, Jefferson said, “people in South Africa have told us stories of how that song represents liberation for them.” —M.M.

Hailing from England’s Midlands, industrial groove unit Nitzer Ebb came by their danceability properly. “The clubs we knew were disco and funk,” frontman Douglas McCarthy explained to The Guardian. “It’s in the DNA of the area.” Nitzer Ebb’s most rousing anthem, “Join in the Chant,” was a perfect techno crossover — particularly in Detroit, where techno artists like Carl Craig and Jeff Mills had once made industrial music. Richie Hawtin mixed “Chant” into his pivotal 1999 mix CD Decks, EFX & 909, while Andrew Weatherall once said, “The closest I felt to God was listening to ‘Join in the Chant’”— Hawtin’s hometown, right next to Detroit. —M.M.

Bronski Beat’s Jimi Somerville once joked that his vocal training consisted of singing along with Donna Summer and Sylvester records. “I wanted a lot more out of life than working in a paint factory and having to accept that being gay was a nighttime occupation only,” he said. “I just had had enough of the abuse and the heartache.” He poured that angst into “Smalltown Boy,” a searing portrait of alienation and escape that, with its keening vocal hook (“Run away, run away, run away”) and supple synth bed, immediately became a gay club anthem, hitting Number One on the Billboard club chart and landing in the U.K. Top Three. —M.M.

LFO were the kings of Sheffield, England’s so-called “bleep” scene — Warp Records’ original signature sound, which sounds like exactly what that sound suggests. But, as Warp’s Steve Beckett put it, “it had nothing to do with the bleeps for the people making it — for them it was all about the bass.” The track that got LFO signed was their self-titled number, on which icy synth chords and squiggly bleeps set the table for the layers of low end — the bass line makes you move, while the sub-bass can shake a city block. —M.M.

As its title suggests, Drake’s foray into dance music — Honestly, Nevermind — feels minor by design, casually pulling Jersey and Baltimore club music and various deep-house strains. The undisputed peak is “Sticky,” produced by Gordo and Ry X, on which Drake takes a break from the low-key vocals that dominate the rest of the album and raps about topics near and dear to him, like the liberation of the recently jailed Young Thug and the passing of fashion icon Virgil Abloh. It’s a great example of a megastar swooping into a subculture and coming out sounding like a better version of himself. —J.D.

“The love of house music started when I went to Club Zanzibar in lieu of my prom,” Roland Clark said — referring to the Newark, New Jersey, spot where Tony Humphries had a king-making DJ residency. This anthem makes the depth of his love plain. Over gamboling kicks and hats and a pinwheeling electric-keyboard line, Clark delivers a monologue that captures a rapturous dance-floor moment — “All the sweat just goes down my face/And I pretend that there’s nobody there but me in this place.” Clark also put the a cappella on the 12-inch, and it was subsequently sampled by Fatboy Slim on his third album, Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars. —M.M.

Early house music was often deeply pitchy — and that handmade quality was a big part of its charm. That’s particularly true of this uplifting anthem, a gospel song in form and feel (“We must stop fighting/To achieve the peace”) from a New Jersey vocal trio who’d recorded it in a basement with a four-track. Its lo-fi roughness, as well as the occasional sharpness on the vocal trade-offs, only add to the song’s sense of urgency. —M.M. 

In the summer of 1974, two songs reached Number One on the Billboard Hot 100 that had first broken in clubs. One was Hues Corporation’s “Rock the Boat,” the other was this smooth classic. They were the first disco hits. The glistening track for “Rock Your Baby” was cut by keyboardist Henry Wayne Casey, drummer and bassist Richard Finch, and guitarist Jerome Smith, and McCrae was added since he was hanging out at the TK Records offices: “I think they gave me ‘Rock Your Baby’ to get me out of their hair,” he recalled. After the record hit, Casey, Finch, and Smith would form the nucleus of KC and the Sunshine Band. —M.M.

The Panamanian pioneer El General set the blueprint for reggaeton when he began making gigantic international hits using reggae riddims in the Eighties and Nineties. But what often goes overlooked is just how experimental he was — and how much he shaped club music more broadly. One undeniable example of his impressive range is “Perezosa,” the booming — and empowered — dance anthem featured on his album Club 555, which was packed with high-voltage electronic sounds that bottled up the spirit of the most kinetic parties across Latin America. —J.L.

4Hero — Marc Mac and Dego MacFarlane — are drum-and-bass stalwarts, making hits all along the style’s path from early-Nineties U.K. hardcore to late-Nineties neo-fusion, sometimes under other aliases. Tom and Jerry was one of them; it gets the credit for this gem, released just as jungle’s popularity was blossoming in the U.K. The easy-gliding stepper, with an enchantingly needling guitar and occasional cartoon effects, kept things playful but packed a deadly serious groove. —M.M.

The debut single by James Murphy’s LCD Soundsystem is both a killer groove and a brilliant stand-up comedy routine, a hot blast of wry irony that also helped ignite the New York dance-punk scene of the early 2000s. Murphy plays an aging hipster watching his relevance fade as a new generation of cool kids rises up to make him feel obsolete, even if he “was there, at the first Can show in Cologne,” or was the first “to play Daft Punk to the rock kids.” “Losing My Edge” made you laugh your ass off and dance your ass off, and even if you’ve never been anywhere, its FOMO remains universal. —J.D.

Pablo Flores is considered a secret architect of Latin pop. The Puerto Rican DJ spent years working with major acts associated with Emilio Estefan, including Gloria Estefan and Ricky Martin. When he was introduced to a little-known Colombian singer named Shakira in the Nineties, he and his music partner, Javier Garza, helped her compose “Ojos Asi,” a prescient song that honored her Lebanese roots while foreshadowing boundary-pushing, global-sounding Latin music. His extended remix took these ideas even further with masterful production that appealed to dance floors across the world. —J.L.

Recording as Squarepusher in the mid-Nineties, Tom Jenkinson twisted drum-and-bass’s frenzied athleticism into aural pretzel logic, turning it definitively undanceable and infusing it with a whiff of collegiate superiority. “Basically, I was beginning to stare up my own ass,” he later said; as a result, “I wanted to shake things up and make music in a more spontaneous, almost flippant way.” But the cut-up vocals and glitch-heavy production of “My Red Hot Car” aren’t mere abstraction — the flickering trickery alternates with cunning negative space, all delineating a crowd-moving groove featuring Jenkinson’s friskiest bass line: catnip to adventurous DJs. —M.M. 

With a vocal from Róisín Murphy that her partner Mark Brydon memorably described as “Peggy Lee on mescaline,” the duo Moloko’s 1998 single “Sing It Back” was moody, downtempo, and overscaled. It bombed. Then, the Belgian house producer Boris Dlugosch sent them his version — a crisp house groove on the Chic model — the rhythm guitar beguiling, the bass drolly antic. That remix reached the British Top Five and served as a launching pad for Murphy’s adventurous, and frequently danceable, solo work. —M.M.

“Phil [Oakey] had this idea lyrically for this song: a story in the song which is very much A Star Is Born [and] My Fair Lady — the impresario who takes an everyday person and transforms her into a superstar that outshines himself,” Human League keyboardist Jo Callis said of “Don’t You Want Me,” which Callis co-wrote. The group didn’t think much of the song at first — though its he-said-she-said structure and nagging riff were as hooky as the giant chorus. The song was the group’s first Number One in the U.K. and U.S., as well as a Top Three hit on the Billboard Dance Club chart, making it a key moment in the merger of U.K. synth-pop, club music, and the Top 40. —M.M.