200 Greatest Dance Songs of All Time

“No, ‘Young Hearts Run Free’ wasn’t cut with no discos in mind,” Candi Staton said in 1976. “I just did it, and when it came out we found the clubs were playing it.” Hardly likely — disco hits were regularly going to Number One by then, and while “Young Hearts,” produced by Dave Crawford, stopped at 20 on the Billboard Hot 100 (Number One on R&B), it’s still one of the greatest, soaring and melancholy, with Staton’s vocal almost unbearably felt. Something else she told the same interviewer hits closer to home: “I suppose whatever a producer does with me I’m always gonna be singing soul music.” —M.M.

Any song that’s been licensed out a lot tends to lose its flavor quickly — particularly in dance music. But this airy little number — a collaboration between two of the biggest dance stars to emerge in the late 2000s — has an appealing modesty about it, even as it induces mass singalongs at festivals (still). Not everyone was quite so impressed, though. “I don’t love my own original work,” Deadmau5 told Rolling Stone in 2016. “Like, I don’t sit there jerking off to ‘I Remember’ every night.” —M.M.

Scratching the sweet spot between minimal techno and synth-disco, Metro Area — the duo of Morgan Geist and Darshan Jesrani — made “Miura” one of the 2000s’ signature club hits. With vocalist Dei Lewison — whose father, Woody Cunningham, had played drums for the disco-funk band Kleeer — overdubbing cuckoo noises and artfully layered harmonies, the track’s beat, a nod to Lipps Inc.’s “Funkytown,” lit up the dance underground. “I work to get really empty bass lines, and ‘Miura’ is probably the emptiest one I’ve ever done,” Geist told Resident Advisor. “I really enjoy when there’s no virtuosity involved, but it still comes across as expressive.” —M.M.

U.K. acid house duo Bill Drummond and Jimi Cauty added a stunty, satiric element to their music that made them one of the most colorful electronic groups around.  In 1992, they opened the BRIT Awards with a screeching version of their Number One hit “3 A.M. Eternal,” performed alongside the crust punks Extreme Noise Terror. But even though the KLF would retire soon afterward — “It would be a shame to destroy the beauty of an act having a number-one hit and then disappearing,” Drummond said in 1990 — the original “Eternal” still shimmers with the halcyon promise of the first rave era. —M.M.

In 1994, jungle achieved critical mass in London, particularly the dancehall-infused jump-up style — and Shy FX came into his own that year, on his way to becoming one of the great drum-and-bass producers; his classics include 1996’s bi-level B Line monster “Wolf,” 1998’s rolling stampede “Bambaataa,” and the 2005 album Diary of a Digital Soundboy (with T. Power). But “Original Nuttah,” only Shy FX’s third 12-inch, still bristles with excitement — the chopped-up breakbeats hurtle out of the speaker, and dancehall chanter UK Apachi is startlingly alert. When he declares, “I am a murderer!” you half believe it. —M.M.

When the Control cut “The Pleasure Principle” was released as a single in 1987, European fans of Janet Jackson were lucky enough to get a seven-minute dance mix from producer-DJ Shep Pettibone, who at that point had already worked with the likes of Afrika Bambaataa and New Order. Pettibone’s take on the euphoric track adds to the song’s already-staccato rhythms with vibrant guitar licks, beat breaks, and new vocal riffs from Jackson, and yet the whole thing still manages to feel light as air. —C.S.

Early-Nineties New York house 12-inches were often distinguished by their haunting, minimalistic dub versions, and this is the ultimate example. Produced by Joseph Longo (a.k.a. Pal Joey) and Soho, the original “Dance” was a straightforward disco-house chugger. But the “Beats Mix” is one of those instances in which stripping a track down to its basics gives it additional spookiness and heft, punctuated by tart horn hits. “Making something is a pull and tug until it’s right,” Longo said in 2013. The result is a hardy reliable, a record that still gets consistent DJ play. —M.M.

“Chime” was an archetype for a turn-of-the-Nineties British rave hit. It cost almost nothing to make — brothers Phil and Paul Hartnoll recorded it onto their dad’s cassette deck — and it wound up reaching Number 17 on the U.K. chart. The track’s spangly, iridescent riff raises the hair on one’s neck, and at its center is a bass pattern played on a Roland TB-303, a.k.a. the acid machine. “When ‘Chime’ came out,” Paul said in 1993, “there was concern from certain parties saying ‘Shouldn’t we do it again with the 303 a bit quieter?’ They were saying ‘Acid’s dead, acid’s dead!’ Well, we’ve used it ever since.” —M.M.

Everybody knows the Puffy Combs remix of Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy,” featuring ODB — even the singer prefers it to the original. But the other big redo of that song made nearly as much noise in the clubs. Not only did Carey consistently enlist the cream of Nineties New York house music to remix her tracks, she went back to the studio and rerecorded the vocals to those remixers’ specifications. For this 11-minute epic, Def Mix’s David Morales and Satoshi Tomiie coaxed Carey into some of her loveliest crooning, and added splashy drums. And in a nod to both the Puffy remix and Lil Louis’ “French Kiss,” they even slow it down a little in the middle. —M.M.

When asked what the Roland 808 drum-machine sound meant to her, rapper Lady Tigra replied: “Sweat.” Her first and greatest hit was recorded when Tigra and her partner in L’Trimm, Bunny D, were still teenagers in Miami-Dade County. The boy in the song “makes a comment on going to my room/But I’d rather stay out with his car that goes boom,” and the 808’s bottomless low end backs her up fully. Decades later, “Cars” also went boom on TikTok, where it has soundtracked around 3 million videos. —M.M.

Sure, this song sampled the same a cappella Gladys Knight vocal from “Neither One of Us” as another big hit of the era, Midland’s “Final Credits.” But DJ Koze doesn’t do things like anyone else, whether it’s minimal techno (2003’s “Brutalga Square”), neo-disco (his 2008 remix of Matias Aguayo’s “Minimal”), or druggy house (2015’s “XTC”), and he needed only a couple of Knight’s lines to make his point. The track’s woozy, string-soaked groove had been a regular feature of Koze’s sets for some time before he released it — he had to quit playing it for a while before the sample was cleared because fans were putting clips on YouTube trying to ID it — and since then, it has been streamed 38 million times on Spotify. —M.M.

The Village People were a hoot — a group of proudly gay stereotypes who sang chesty anthems whose subtexts were the whole text. As David Hodo, the Village People’s “construction worker,” recalled, their greatest hit was inspired by the group’s founder and producer, Jacques Morali, seeing “the big pink YMCA on 23rd [Street].” Morali, who was French, had never heard of the YMCA. Hodo says that after it was explained to him, “someone joked, ‘Yeah, but don’t bend over in the showers.’ And Jacques, bless his heart, said, ‘I will write a song about this!’” Naturally, a top-five smash was born. —M.M.

Todd Edwards’ production style is instantly recognizable — layers of densely crosshatched samples that sound random but gain coherence with repetition. Edwards’ snappy hi-hats were as captivating as his cut-ups — he helped draw the blueprint for U.K. garage. His signature came into focus with his pair of remixes of the French producer St. Germain’s “Alabama Blues.” Edwards’ fizzy “Vocal Mix” features swirls of strung-together syllables aerating the track. The “Dub Mix” is even more captivating — those syllables cohere into the words “It’s all right, Jesus loves you,” a unique way of bringing the church into the club. —M.M.

Putting a sticker on one’s first album that calls it “The next episode in house” is an audacious move, but when the Finnish producer Luomo did so on 2000’s Vocalcity, he lived up to his own hype. The album’s summit is “Tessio,” a hypnotic and long-overdue meeting point between experimental techno (the producer’s other bailiwick) and soulful house, European architecture shot through with deep feeling. It became a club classic that invited singalongs: “I’m trying to be all yours/Although I ain’t answering your calls/Don’t say it’s false/I’m only following my thoughts.” —M.M.

You might not necessarily recognize the artist — a Detroit R&B stalwart, formerly of the band One Way — or the title, but you most certainly recognize the groove. Not only was Mariah Carey’s “Make It Happen” built from one of its samples, this spare, infectious gospel-funk jam also has long been a constant in deep-house DJ crates and mention producers’ tool kits. There are innumerable edits, samples, and quotations of the song afoot. Most recently, the Weeknd utilized it for “Sacrifice,” on Dawn FM. —M.M.

Prince ruled the radio in 1984, but this track was designed for the clubs. Not only was “Erotic City,” the B side of “Let’s Go Crazy,” maybe his most epic pure dance-floor groove, it was decidedly not for radio — not with those curse words on the refrain. Or were they? Sheila E., in her memoir, The Beat of My Own Drum, attests that what she and Prince are singing is, “We can funk until the dawn.” A Las Vegas radio station got fined by the FCC, which thought they were singing something else. Either way, we still can’t believe he left it off Purple Rain. —M.M.

Long before Stranger Things, an earlier electronic generation discovered Kate Bush through this song by Brit duo Tim Garbutt and Jez Willis, who sampled Bush’s “Cloudbusting” and made a stadium-rave anthem out of it. “We’ve taken a lot of flak about that sample,” Willis admitted, “but we’ve always been very open and honest about it. Still, I’m surprised how many people didn’t know it was Kate Bush. When we were on tour, in South Carolina, the program director of this radio station had never heard of Kate Bush!” —M.M.

Londoner DJ Zinc has made more classic bass lines than nearly anyone in British bass music, from the darting pulse of 1995’s jungle hit “Super Sharp Shooter” to the swarming Day-Glo low end over a house pulse on “Wile Out,” his 2010 collaboration with Ms. Dynamite. But this U.K. garage instrumental is his zenith — the bass line played alternately pizzicato and with buzzy sustain, a skipping snare pattern that never resolves, the BPM perfectly situated for slowing down to regular house tempo or speeding up to drum-and-bass time. All of it kept the song in frontline rotation for years, and put it in the U.K. Top 30. —M.M.

When Kenny “Dope” Gonzales and “Little” Louie Vega began working together as Masters at Work, they hit the ground running. Their first 12-inch under that name featured “The Ha Dance” on the B side — built from a sample from the Eddie Murphy comedy Trading Places: “Bippity-bippity-bippity-HA!” Its herky-jerky rhythm made it perfect runway music for New York’s drag-ballroom scene, where voguing came into focus. Before he died in 2006, ballroom king Willi Ninja told Vega, “That is our anthem. We use it all the time to battle,” he recalled with pride. “Like breakdancers had ‘Apache,’ the voguers had ‘The Ha Dance.’” —M.M.

After leaving Miles Davis in 1968, jazz keyboardist Herbie Hancock was no stranger to dance floors, from the funk of 1973’s Head Hunters to the disco of 1979’s Feets Don’t Fail Me Now. Hancock even visited club DJs to promote the latter: “I was there to learn, and they were saying ‘What a nice guy he is to do our kind of music,’” Herbie recalled. When a friend made Hancock a tape that included Malcolm McLaren’s “Buffalo Gals,” he flipped. “I said, ‘What is that? I want to do something like that!’” He got his wish with “Rockit,” a demo that Bill Laswell and Michael Beinhorn of the group Material worked up for Hancock. The crowning touch was the scratches by DXT, a former drummer whose timing made the record jump. As breakdancing became a global fad, “Rockit” became its most frequent soundtrack. —M.M.

Simon Mejia had originally started Bomba Estereo as a solo instrumental electronic project — he was a DJ, after all — but after he was invited to perform at an electronic-music festival in Medellín, Colombia, it expanded into a band that he put together in a week. “I listened to groups like Nortec Collective and Sidestepper, and I really liked the sound of Thievery Corporation,” he said in 2010. That melting-pot aesthetic found its finest form on the hellaciously catchy “Fuego,” a galloping statement of purpose that became their anthem. “It was one of the first tracks I made when I began exploring a link between electronica and tropical music,” he said. —M.M.

As the Bee Gees noted in the excellent 2020 documentary How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, their multiplatinum disco anthem began as a tough-minded ode to survival on the mean streets of New York during the gritty 1970s. “The lyrics don’t talk about dance at all,” recalled Robin Gibb. Still, by looping two bars from their own song “Night Fever,” the band and producer Albhy Galuten created an insanely infectious groove for the trio to lift their voices over, and the perfect throbbing pulse to soundtrack John Travolta’s stride down a Brooklyn sidewalk at the opening of Saturday Night Fever. —J.D.

Few dance producers have ever had a year like the Philadelphia dance-scene don Josh Wink had in 1995. Everything he touched that year, from the explosive tribal house of Size 9’s “I’m Ready” to the gimmicky LOLs of “Don’t Laugh” to his berserk remix of Moby’s “Bring Back My Happiness,” was solid gold. But the track that ruled everything was the “Tweekin’ Acid Funk Mix” of “Higher State of Consciousness.” While the other versions of “Higher State” were also excellent — the “Hardhouse Mix” is richly psychedelic filter house — the “Acid Funk” version was an instant smash, laying the ultimate yammering 303 line over a crisp breakbeat and letting the sparks fly. There’s nothing like it at 6 a.m., with the sun glinting through the warehouse windows. —M.M.

One of the top U.S. rave draws of the Nineties, Dubtribe Sound System was the San Francisco husband-wife duo of Sunshine and Moonbeam Jones; they’d sit cross-legged onstage, boxes and synths surrounding them, grinding out heavy grooves in strictly real time. Their greatest moment, “Do It Now,” is a pep talk that blossoms into a love song (“You’re beautiful inside/I’m in love with your mind”). The full 13-minute version also blossoms, building instrument by instrument into a surging groove monster that can make even the crustiest skeptic believe in universal love. —M.M.

Breakbeats came back into house-music vogue again in the late 2010s, and this track was a big reason why. Objekt is the alias of TJ Hertz, a British techno producer-DJ residing in Berlin, and “Theme From Q” was inspired by a club there, Basement Q, which closed in 2012, and it sounds less like an excerpt from a night there than a survey, with a James Brown sample (from Lyn Collins’ “Think”), dubstep-like bass drops, and occasional beatless stretches that only ratchet up the tension. Mixmag named it the best track of 2017. —M.M.

For a year, Strafe’s serpentine, early-Eighties electro-hip-hop masterpiece “Set It Off” — a solo recording by Brooklynite Steven Standard — was a huge club hit. That was because almost nobody could find it — the president of Jus Born, the label that released it, was only pressing a thousand copies at a time and sold them solely for cash out of his own car trunk. Clubs like the Fun House and Paradise Garage were nearly the only places you could hear it. Even after that changed, Standard sometimes disdained his own work — “I was ashamed of the mix,” he said in 1986. But it’s hard to stay mad when something you’ve made gives so many people so much pleasure, and there’s a poignant scene in the documentary 808 of Standard singing “Set It Off” live over the original machines he made it with. —M.M.

A-Trak was watching NYC post-punk revivalists Yeah Yeah Yeahs perform at Coachella in 2009 when he decided to “lock in” a remix of the second single from their album It’s Blitz, “Heads Will Roll”: “Usually it’s the other way around, the band would ask the remixer, but I heard something there and I needed those stems” (i.e., complete unmixed multitrack recordings). Though he turned it in way late, A-Trak’s stab-riff turnout of the song blew up among the DJ peers he sent it to (Busy P, Aeroplane, Erol Alkan) forced the YYYs’ label to put it out. “I still hear DJs play it,” he wrote a decade later. —M.M.

Though Frankie Goes to Hollywood was a functioning group long before they began recording with super-producer Trevor Horn, “Relax” was constructed by Horn alone in the studio in a 14-hour spurt, following two frustrating weeks of the band not quite capturing the spark. With Holly Johnson’s buzzsaw tenor declaiming about holding off an orgasm — the lyrics led to a de facto ban from the BBC — over awesomely overscaled synths, “Relax” became a sensation — for a while it threatened to become the bestselling British single ever. More importantly for dance-music history, it was a hit that became famous as a 12-inch single, released in several editions containing a plethora of remixes. —M.M.

In the late Nineties, “garage” meant very different things in the U.S. and U.K. For Americans it was East Coast house music rooted in soul and very song-oriented; the Brits’ version tended to be faster and more instrumental. But the “Live Garage Version” of Chicagoan Roy Davis Jr.’s “Gabriel” featured a swinging rhythm that chimed right alongside the rising U.K. garage sound; its lyric offered parallels between the biblical trumpeter and the modern house floor (“He was an archangel of love … Dancing soon became a way to communicate”). For Davis, the subtitle “Live Garage” wasn’t a specific reference to any genre: “That was because my studio was next to my garage,” Davis told Resident Advisor. —M.M. 

Hal Davis had a very productive 1976. He was one of Motown’s key in-house producers, and in that bicentennial year, he helmed two dense, swirling dance-floor epics: Diana Ross’ “Love Hangover” and this soaring remake of Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ bruised disco ballad. MFSB, the Philadelphia International house band, teases out a widescreen arrangement on the original “Don’t Leave Me This Way,” but for Thelma Houston’s cover, Davis and arranger Art Wright concentrate on the groove — a much more immediate recording. —M.M.