The 25 Best Dancefloor Bangers Of 2024

It’s been a banging year for bangers, with plenty of moments losing our collective minds to weighty bass, heart-racing rhythms, infectious vocals, and more, pumping through soundsystems and energising dancefloors. Now you can relive many of those priceless memories all over again with our list of the 25 best dancefloor bangers released this year (in alphabetical order of the lead artist).

Three years in the making, Ahadadream, Priya Ragu, and Skrillex’s hit track ‘TAKA’ finally got its release in March following months of anticipation. First concocted in the studio in a lockdown link up between bass specialists Skrillex and Ahadadream, the pair later enlisted the help of Priya Ragu to add that recognisable vocal chant, and as a result, became the earworm it is today. The track first popped up in Ahadadream’s 2023 Boiler Room set and was met with a rapturous response, before getting plays by the likes of Four Tet and Chris Lake, only driving its hype even further. Before long, ‘TAKA’ picked up remixes from Caribou and Peekaboo, and even found its way onto a prime time TV advert for Apple’s next iPhone.

Omar McCutcheon has made a name for himself as Batu with deep UK techno productions that came out on dance music pillars such as Hessle Audio, Livity Sound, XL Recordings and his own label Timedance, an essential imprint for leftfield dance music since its establishment in 2015. Seven years on from setting up the Bristol institution, Batu introduced A Long Strange Dream to the world. The label is dedicated to his “spontaneous musical explorations,” and ‘Zeal’ marks the biggest deviation from the traditional Batu sound, while still pertaining all the hallmarks of a McCutcheon production. It’s a groovy, hands up in the air festival banger that has been doing the rounds since its summer release. ‘Zeal’ is house but done in a very Batu way: rough and gritty round the edges but bouncy and buoyant in its energy. Charged up by dreamy pads, riffing synths and a bass that refuses to sit still, the track is laser-focused on dancefloor frenzy.

2024 saw the return of Caribou, with the studio album ‘Honey’ being Dan Snaith’s first release under the moniker in four years. It’s also his most dancefloor friendly. The LP’s titular track features glimpses of the melodic ethereality that defines his discography, but is mostly led by a rudeboi bassline and 2-step rhythm that made it a staple at summer festival stages. A few years ago, it would have been a shock to listen to Caribou and reach for gunfingers, but stranger things have happened this year.

What do we want to hear when we go to the club? ‘Club classics’ right? Except this remix, produced by George Daniel and TimFromTheHouse, is an amalgamation of far more than than its source material. ‘Club classics featuring bb trickz’ incorporates ‘Brat’’s copious hedonistic motifs — kicking off with dubstep-inspired wobble beneath Charli’s pitched-up ‘365’ vocal with just a sprinkling of “When I go to the club” weaved in-between, that quickly ascends into all-out electroclash, the chosen sonic milieu of xcx’s club fantasy. Around the mid-point, Spanish rapper Bb Trickz begins describing a trip to the club with a kindred delicious petulance to xcx — yes, we can’t speak Spanish, but we haven’t been able to stop mumbling “Brat prr prr” since our first listen. It’s nothing short of genuis then as Trickz finishes her verse with the line: “vamonos a casa ya, jo” or “Let’s go home now girl”, which is followed quickly with Charli’s “No, I never go home don’t sleep”. It’’s a packet of only red wine gums but ‘Brat’, taking everything we want to hear from the record in a club setting and concentrating it into its salacious best.

If you haven’t heard this weapon of a track this year, then you need to get out more. ‘BACKBONE’ has genuinely been the backbone of every drum ‘n’ bass set. Played across the clubs, across the airwaves, in fact, it’s probably been heard across space at this rate. Those six little words have such suspense and yet simplicity behind them that paired with the track’s mammoth drop it never gets old, and especially with the 1000s of edits of the track, you’ll never know which version to expect. Marking the duo’s first-ever Number One hit it comes as no surprise that it had similar success to Chase & Status’ ‘Baddadan’ with Flowdan from 2023. Even Stormzy was just as shocked to find out it had reached these heights as the moment he heard the news went just as viral. After ‘Baddadan’ and now ‘BACKBONE’ it makes you think, what have the boys got planned for us in 2025?

In a link-up between ghettotech partystarter MCR-T, Poland’s favourite techno export VTSS, and Swedish seductress COBRAH, the trio bring their individual dance music sensibilities together on ‘TITS, LIPS, HIPS, KISS (10/10 Remix)’ – a fast-paced club banger bringing pure euphoria to the dancefloor. With a huge 1.3 million streams on Spotify and counting, as well as a spin on Radio 1’s Future Dance show from Sarah Story and thousands of Shazams to date, ‘TITS, LIPS, HIPS, KISS’ brings rowdy peak-time techno up a tempo, with flirtatious vocals from COBRAH.

Out of nowhere, speed garage anthem ‘A Little Closer’ has propelled Diffrent to stardom. The German garage producer has enjoyed a meteoric rise since its release, bagging a Rinse FM residency and putting out a joint-release with fellow up-and-comer Eloq on Interplanteary Criminal and Main Phase’s ATW imprint, and it’s no wonder why. The Club Heart Broken single is geared towards peak-time dancefloor pressure, taking under 30 seconds to drop a deep, dark, “woi oi” inducing bass over catchy vocals and staccato synths. Once you’ve heard “Are you ready for the rinse out? Are you ready for the rumble?” it’s impossible not to chime in. ‘A Little Closer’ is NUKG in its prime, a 4/4 garage banger that has dominated 2024 festival stages from Europe to Australia and racked up stream-era virality.

Doctor Jeep has been releasing some of the best club music of recent years, and this year’s top corker landed via Colombian tastemaking label TraTraTrax. Following his debut on the imprint with 2023’s much-adored ‘Push The Body’, the Brooklyn-based hitmaker made his return in July with ‘Mecha’, taking it back to his Brazilian roots. This baile funk-inspired heater packs a punch over the course of five minutes, dismantling the mechanics of his off-kilter 160 and techno into a full-throttle club banger that pulls influence from Latin dance music. Since its release, ‘Mecha’ picked up plays from fellow bass affiliates Bianca Oblivion and TSVI on stages and radio shows over the summer, and received remixes from the likes of Ploy, Wata Igarashi, and Peder Mannerfelt along the way.

There aren’t many couples who can say they celebrated Valentine’s Day with the release of their track, but of course, this is how dance music’s favourite love birds spent theirs. After soft-launching their engagement with an unmissable ring, Effy and Mall Grab have had quite the romantic year and ‘iluv’ is the perfect song to soundtrack this. Played out unreleased in a few of their solo sets, the track really caught everyone’s attention at Effy’s Boiler Room in Sydney as the beat of the song matched the heartbeats of the crowd before we saw the couple celebrate the tune together. Its out-of-this-world synths are jaw-dropping and easily captivate every soul in the club. Made with the euphoric bliss you can only get from being in love (or once you come up off a pinger) this track was our 2024 holiday romance.

What happens when one of the UK’s most exciting Latin club producer/label heads, a global baile funk superstar and a pop-meets-club tastemaker? ‘Pressure Funk’. Describing this track as a colliding of legends would be an understatement; a raucous journey through the dark recesses of funk, with sliding, colliding percussion blending into searing bass and a provocative vocal from Shygirl declaring: “constant pressure when we enter, SOS can you put the heat on the radar.” It’s dark, rapturous, sexy and everything we are craving in a rowdy club banger. But were we to expect anything from the assembling of dance music’s answer to the Avengers? Probably not.

Ambassadors of the new-wave of Detroit ghettotech, HiTech have launched themselves into our headphones with their irresistible, booty-shaking single ‘SPANK!’. As a whole, this track will hypnotise those hips and get the Hennessy flowing as it embodies the hectic energy of the trio. Warning, if you listen to this track for too long, you might end up with these in your stocking this Christmas.

In what has been a highly successful year for Josh Baker, dropping ‘Something To Me’ was the cherry on top. Conquering the tech-house scene with his name across line-ups from Ibiza to the US, people are travelling far and wide to catch his sets. Referencing the ‘90s SWV track ‘Weak’ and using freshly recorded vocals, the track has now reached over four million streams on Spotify alone, mesmerising tech-house ravers on top of the likes of Chris Stussy, Skream, Prospa and more who have all supported the track. Baker really cooked up something special with this one.

"The buzz around the tune has been wild," he told Mixmag around the track’s release. "It started with a preview of it being posted on my socials to then endless requests from people asking me to drop it at gigs. It quickly became the stand-out tune in my sets, capturing everyone’s attention when the bass rips and the vocal comes in. It’s also the first time I’ve worked with a vocalist so feels like a pivotal moment for myself as a producer."

The chokehold ‘flight fm’ has had on dancefloors worldwide has been undeniable. Joy Orbison’s biggest hit since the breakout ‘Hyph Mngo’ is no joke. Its nomenclature stems from a pirate radio station of the same name, one of the few that Pete O’Grady could tune into if he stretched his aerial far enough, and his love/hate relationship with flying.

Cooked up while waiting for old friend Fold to drive him to Lost Village last year, ‘flight fm’ has motored through 2024 at 100MPH. There’s been countless edits, with everyone from Charli xcx to Soulja Boy slapped over the top of it. Fred again..’s effort, piecing together vocals from Lil Yachty, Future and Playboi Carti with the XL anthem, was officially released in the summer.

There’s a simplicity in its design: beyond rattling hats, weighty kicks, tight claps and a synth that morphs between a high-end pulse and the most brutal bass there’s not much to it. In one sense, it’s the ultimate dancefloor tool, but ‘flight fm’ is much more than the sum of its parts. The way that it builds before erupting into low-end pressure is dance music in its essence, a schooling in tension and release.

The DJ Mustard intro. The dissonant strings. The low-res Google Maps sex offenders thumbnail. Was there a track in 2024 that hit dancefloors as hard as ‘Not Like Us’? It certainly must have been the most shared. In the wake of Kendrick dropping his most vicious, yet most danceable diss track – the third and final bodyblow of a 36-hour flurry of releases – videos from clubs across the world posted and reposted to social media, the suggestion of course being that Drake was cooked if a silent disco at a Universal Studios cross country was screaming “A minooorrrrrrr” in unison. A bop so powerful he even got the Bloods and Crips dancing together.

2024’s buzzer beater banger ‘Yosemite’ is an interstellar link-up between two heavyweight DJs that needs no introduction. KETTAMA and Interplanetary Criminal have delivered a hit that combines a ruthless reese bass taken straight from the latter’s speed garage playbook with trancey chordal stabs underneath an infectious hook. Giving new life to the vocals in Reflekt’s ‘Need To Feel Loved’, ‘Yosemite’ is full-throttle dancefloor euphoria and you can’t get enough of it. Teased since the summer, there’s been few club tracks that have received such sustained hype before its release with TikTok rips reaching hundreds of thousands of views. Born out of their first studio session together, an impromptu meeting arranged by their respective managers in LA, the track is a debut collaboration from KETTAMA and IPC but it certainly won’t be the last.

2024 has been a breakout year for LWS. Building on the success of last year’s releases, including an EP on Peder Mannerfelt Produktion, the Edinburgh-based artist began the year with a self-released EP in March before truly coming into his own with the ‘Palloon’ project which came out on Call Super and Parris’ can you feel the sun imprint. Each of the four tracks are UK techno essentials, particularly ‘Steady On’, however the Scottish producer has gone on to outdo himself with the devilishly good ‘Gum Seleks’.

The track, part of TraTraTrax’s seismic ‘no pare, sigue sigue 3’ compilation, has naughty written all over it. A deep, dark, evolving and roving bassline that sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard before takes centre stage with pulsing drums underneath. It’s one of those songs that generates a “what the hell was that?” the first time you hear it being let rip in the dance. LWS himself has acknowledged that ‘Gum Seleks’ has been his “most requested tune“ by far”, and the hype train had been going into overdrive following plays from the likes of Joy Orbison and Ben UFO over the summer. In a year of big bassline’s, this is one of the biggest.

In September, news broke that Objekt was set to launch his own record label, Kapsela. It was exciting, given the dancefloor quaking impact that each of the tunes on his long-running white label series has had over the past decade, and also that ‘Ganzfeld’ – the IDM and UK bass mutant banger that still sounds as incredible as the first time we heard it – would be re-released as part of it. But the track that landed the hardest was a fresh production on the second record, ‘Chicken Garaage’. Conceived while he was eating Japanese fried chicken (chicken karaage) while on tour in Melbourne, it opens with a menacing, complex 2-step-inspired riddim that is soon joined by a futuristic, wobbling bassline to raise gunfingers to, all held together by Objekt’s unmatchable sound design. Pure fodder for the “ID anyone?” crew.

Having been a much-loved, often requested fixture in Overmono’s sets since 2022, the Russell brothers released their edit of The Streets’ melancholic, middle-England classic ‘Turn The Page’ in April to the delight of DJs and afters aux-hoggers alike. Adding a hissy, hefty, shuffling riddim and a stadium-sized bassline to the song’s introduction, before cutting out the beat to jumpstart an epic, phone-in-the-air breakdown that has become the hallmark of their sound, the edit came to soundtrack several main stages during the summer festival season. Just give me a garage beat and admit defeat.

The return of Rustie this year after nearly a decade was a cause for ecstatic celebration, and that feeling was sent to the stratosphere when we pressed play on his comeback banger. Chanelling all the Rustie trademarks we know and love and missed so dearly — maximalist build, spiralling melodies, gleaming synth sounds packing bass heft that make it feel like the blood in your veins has been replaced by pure serotonin — we had real tears flowing with the track on loop. Since hearing it in the club, we’ve still not come down.

A strong contender for song of the summer, Shanti Celeste’s ‘Ice Cream Dream Boy’ could be heard everywhere from Glastonbury to Love International, played by the likes of Benji B, HAAi, Joe Goddard and, of course, Shanti herself. A vibrant, feel-good dance anthem with bouncy chords and lush vocals, the track was inspired by a period of “honeymoon romance” between Shanti and her partner, the so-called ‘Ice Cream Dream Boy’. It is undeniably euphoric and free-spirited, capturing the uncontainable joy of falling in love and the youthful spirit of summer.

Marking the second release to come out via Shanti Celeste’s own imprint Peach Discs in collaboration with London label Method 808, ‘Ice Cream Dream Boy’ was subsequently remixed by K-LONE, Saoirse, Peach and more – a sign of its popularity with DJs and fans alike.

This house-rap banger from Mumbai-based producer Kratex and multilingual rapper Shreyas was a sensation this year. Released via Spinnin’ Records in May, the pulsing bassline, piercing flute melody and infectious “LakaLakaLaka!” refrain caught fire instantly and racked up millions of streams and plenty of club play. With lyrics rapped in the Marathi language, an ethnolinguistic group of people that Shreyas says have been overlooked in the music industry, it’s a rousing anthem of pride in one’s own skin and honouring your culture. Also inspiring even more dancefloor-oriented reworks, such as the pumping KSHMR remix, its impact has been seismic.

After a year of waiting, we finally got our hands on what has become the holy grail for any DJ’s USB, ‘Push’. You might have heard its world premiere on Jyoty’s Rinse FM show or even caught the man himself Skrillex play it at his 2023 B2B2B headline slot at Coachella with Four Tet and Fred again... Skrillex teams up with Hamdi, the baton-taking dubstep maestro on the scene as well as fellow producer OFFAIAH to create one of the most highly anticipated tracks of 2024. With the infectious vocals from Argentinian singer TAICHU, ‘Push’ is one of the catchiest and wobbliest tracks to grace the dancefloor. The allure of the lyrics building up and that sudden drop of silence before we’re kicked in the teeth with the track's swinging bassline just makes it an irresistible banger.

With Nia Archives releasing a chart-busting album, SHERELLE curating her own space at Glastonbury and the likes of DJ Storm continuing to push envelopes above 170BPM, it seems reasonable to say that the ‘jungle revival’ is over. Instead, the genre is fully embedded as a pillar of the UK’s cultural fabric, and a generation of artists are pushing the music in new directions while remaining rooted in the genre’s decades long history. It’s perhaps no better exemplified than in Tim Reaper & Kloke’s collaborative album, ‘In Full Effect’ – the first jungle album that Hyperdub has ever released – which blends forward thinking sonics that touch on techno, electro and even UK drill, with the sped-up amen breaks of jungle. ‘Alienation’, one of the album’s highlights, opens with disorientating, distant percussion before carefully building into a headsy flurry of tightly designed hats and snares, all threaded by a semi-humming, semi-growling bassline.

Arguably the biggest amapiano hit of 2024, TitoM & Yuppe’s ‘Tshwala Bam’ had dancefloors alight all the way from South Africa to the rest of the world, helped on its way to fame by a viral TikTok dance challenge after its release in February. ‘Tshwala Bam’ surpassed more than 100 million streams in under a month, and has since amassed over 157 million streams on Spotify and YouTube alone, renowned for its deep, rolling drum beat and hooking vocals from featuring musicians S.N.E and EeQue. A remix from Burna Boy sent ‘Tshwala Bam’ even further into the stratosphere, leading the hit single to a Number One spot in the Official South African Charts, and three nominations in the African Entertainment Awards USA 2024.

Upon the release of Verraco’s ‘Breathe… Godspeed’ EP in June, Pitchfork’s Phillip Sherburne described the record as containing “shades of garish 2011 dubstep crossed with the harsh, fuck-off sonics of underground noise music”, and we can’t think of a better way to describe lead single ‘Godspeed >” than “fuck off sonics”, because boy - does this track make you want to scrunch your eyes tight, raise your face to the ceiling and shout “FUCK OFF”. Consisting of a world-shattering, cataclysmic bassline underpinned by a rattling, aerobicised percussion and a high-pitched vocal declaring “I love you baby”; from first listen, we were dying to hear it on a domineering soundsystem, prepared to have our synapses blown out by a tune that is equal parts terrifying and intoxicating. It doesn’t disappoint, ‘Godspeed >’ is the pinnacle of naughty bangers, raucous energy meets disquiet in the most satisfying way.