The 30 Best House Tracks of the ’90s
best of the 1990s
Philip Sherburne Ben Cardew Matthew Strauss Jazz Monroe Eric Torres Madison Bloom Condé Nast
Including classics by divas like CeCe Peniston and Crystal Waters, foundational producers like Theo Parrish and Masters at Work, and playful pranksters like Basement Jaxx and Daft Punk
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Pitchfork
From its 1980s roots in Black, Latinx, and queer communities in cities like Chicago, Detroit, and New York, electronic dance music exploded in the 1990s, taking techno, rave, jungle, and other permutations around the globe. But nothing better exemplifies ’90s dance music than house, whose pumping groove supplies the heartbeat of club culture.

It was everywhere—both the dominant force in the underground and the sound du jour at the top of the charts. And it morphed as it spread, spinning off innumerable styles. There was deep house, cued to dusky moods and soulful expression; gospel house, pairing dancefloor deliverance with spiritual union; minimal house, blippy and lithe—and that’s just to name a few. House could be lean and tracky or carefully arranged, hell-bent for leather or in love with the drift.

The following list, presented in alphabetical order by artist, includes house tracks featured on our 250 Best Songs of the ’90s, as well as ones that didn’t make that tally but are still crucial to the genre. These are the cuts that best defined ’90s house—the ones that changed dance music forever, and keep us moving today.

Read Pitchfork’s list of the best songs of the 1990s here and best albums of the 1990s here, and check out our full ’90s package here.

Barbara Tucker: “Beautiful People (Underground Network Mix)” (1994)

Produced by Masters at Work, “Beautiful People” combines songwriting in the lineage of disco legends Gamble and Huff with the cutting edge of ’90s house. The 1994 single topped the Billboard Hot Dance Club Songs chart and will forever be remembered for Barbara Tucker’s vocal, which was sampled by Masters at Work’s Louie Vega under his Hardrive alias and subsequently used by Kanye West on 2016’s “Fade.”

But there is so much more to the song than one (admittedly powerful) line, as Tucker’s sassy, yearning delivery rides a wave of jazzy chord changes, exquisite high notes, and back-to-church organs. She’s got one of the most recognizable voices in house music: Its soulful tones, immaculate control, and hint of unspecified naughtiness are enough to draw the most introverted wallflower onto the floor. Working under his Hardrive alias, Masters at Work’s Louie Vega would end up zooming in on two particularly potent bars of Tucker’s performance to create the equally iconic hit “Deep Inside,” a sleeker, trackier 1993 cut—released a few months before Tucker’s single—that would go on to be sampled by DJ Rashad. –Ben Cardew

Listen: Barbara Tucker, “Beautiful People (Underground Network Mix)”

Basement Jaxx: “Fly Life” (1996)

Though they would go on to make much bigger hits like “Red Alert” and “Where’s Your Head At,” nothing quite captures Basement Jaxx in heads-down dancefloor mode like “Fly Life.” Released amid a run of club-focused EPs the UK duo turned out in the five years before their 1999 debut album, it’s a tough, insistent slice of sample-heavy disco house in the vein of DJ Sneak’s “U Can’t Hide From Your Bud”; it stands out from the pack by virtue of its relentless stabs and a hair-raising vocal line that stretches wordless melisma into psychedelic curlicues. The “Brix Mix,” meanwhile, threw a gruff ragga vocal into the stew, proving house music’s adaptability, and signaling Basement Jaxx’s own imminent post-genre future. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Basement Jaxx, “Fly Life”

Blaze: “Lovelee Dae” (1996)

“Lovelee Dae” is an outlier in New Jersey duo Blaze’s catalog. Compared to the harmonic range of most of their soul-, jazz-, and gospel-tinged productions—their 1990 debut LP, in fact, came out on Motown—the 1996 single employs little more than a fistful of chords arrayed around a driving house groove. But what chords! Filtered this way and that, morphing between strings, Rhodes, and synths, they move like mercury and glisten like opal; Steve Reich himself couldn’t have envisioned a more enveloping matrix of pulses.

That intensity of focus resonated far outside the tri-state area’s soulful-house scene: In 1997, house innovators Derrick Carter and Luke Solomon released the track on their Classic label in the UK, and the following year Germany’s Playhouse got in on the action. Remixes proliferated, with Carl Craig, Roman Flügel, Isolée, Kompakt’s Michael Mayer and Tobias Thomas, and many others distilling the song into increasingly high-proof doses of minimalism. But it’s that soaring vocal refrain—“It’s a lovely day/And the sun is shining”—that makes it the most guilelessly optimistic day-brightener in the deep-house canon. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Blaze, “Lovelee Dae”

Cajmere: “Brighter Days” [ft. Dajae] (1992)

Curtis Alan Jones brought a Jekyll-and-Hyde dichotomy to Chicago house music. As Green Velvet, he reveled in dark-side thrills on songs like “The Stalker,” “Answering Machine,” and “La La Land”; as Cajmere, he explored sweeter, more wholesome vibes. (One major exception: Cajmere’s 1992 anthem “Percolator,” a tweaked-out descent into chants and squeals that was recently sampled on City Girls’ “Twerkulator,” could easily have come from his angstier alter ego.) Cajmere’s most upbeat moment remains 1992’s “Brighter Days,” in which Chicago singer Dajae offers a message of uplift in the simplest of terms over sprightly drums and organ stabs; it’s as carefree a song as house music has ever produced. DJ Rashad and DJ Spinn sampled the vocal on their 2013 track “Brighter Dayz,” flipping Dajae’s coolly optimistic hook into a more contorted figure, suggesting the way hopes harden over time. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Cajmere, “Brighter Days” [ft. Dajae]

CeCe Peniston: “Finally” (1992)

“Finally” was CeCe Peniston’s debut single; alongside local producer Felipe Delgado, the Phoenix singer worked up the song as part of a one-record deal for A&M after being spotted singing backup on a few Delgado-produced hip-hop and dance records that never really got off the ground. The lyrics, penned while the former beauty-pageant winner was still in college, are a simple fantasy of meeting the love of her life, yet the triumphant way she belts out the titular word suggests an almost religious sense of rapture. As pop-dance crossovers flourished, “Finally,” with its supple organs, stubby basslines, and terse orchestral stabs, was perfectly poised for success, hitting No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 and topping the Dance Club Songs chart. More importantly, as AIDS wreaked havoc on the gay community, the song’s promise of deliverance telegraphed a message of uplift amid struggle. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: CeCe Peniston, “Finally”

Crystal Waters: “Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless)” (1991)

As in New York, Newark, and Atlanta, the underground club scene in Baltimore was intimate. With Crystal Waters’ “Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless),” respected local DJs and producers the Basement Boys were able to transpose the sybaritic vibe of local hot spots like the Black Box to similar musical sanctuaries for Black and gay youth outside Maryland. Their instantly memorable, organ-driven rhythm track combined with Waters’ distinctive, jazz-influenced vocals to create a perfect peak-hour club record. Dancing to serious subject matter is a form of exorcism in house music—and the opening bars of “Gypsy Woman” sent the denizens of New York City’s most influential nightclubs running for the dancefloor. –Carol Cooper

Listen: Crystal Waters, “Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless)”

Daft Punk: “Around the World” (1997)

The music doesn’t begin so much as surface, as if “Around the World” arises from some great depth, that lowpass filter cutting out the high-end without obscuring the “fundamental” signal. And then the song fully emerges, the bass suddenly going like something stolen out from under Bernard Edwards’ fingertips, the hi-hat doing that bright, open chhh business on the offbeat. The up-from-underground stuff turns out to have been sort of poignantly appropriate. “Around the World” was an exhumation, disco as reworked in post-industrial Chicago and Detroit, then adapted anew by two blessed weirdos from Montmartre, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo.

Crucially, Daft Punk retained from Chicago house and Detroit techno the artists’ sense that they were bound up in the larger social dynamics of urban de-industrialization. DJs saw themselves as conduits for the music, not its authors. Daft Punk obscured their identities, just as Juan Atkins and Derrick May did before them. They dressed like anonymous robots because, as Homem-Christo has said, “The energy people send to the stage bounces back and everybody has a good time together rather than focusing on us.” Disco had returned with a radical proposition, hauled up from the underground without, you might say, affecting the fundamental: that the music belongs to the people dancing to it. –Tommy Craggs

Listen: Daft Punk, “Around the World”

DJ Sneak: “You Can’t Hide From Your Bud” (1997)

Part of a wave of Chicago musicians who came up in the mid ’90s under the umbrella of Green Velvet’s Cajual and Relief labels, DJ Sneak took a raw, sample-heavy approach in his early productions. And with 1997’s “You Can’t Hide From Your Bud,” he showed just how much finesse he could bring to even the simplest loop. The track is little more than a one-bar loop of Teddy Pendergrass’ “You Can’t Hide From Yourself” that’s been filtered to the point of delirium. Strings surge, horns crest, and a sampled Pendergrass offers the occasional wordless interjection. What gives it such life is the way Sneak shapes the snippet, teasing the highs and lows in a way that suggests the sun playing hide and seek behind clouds. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: DJ Sneak, “You Can’t Hide From Your Bud”

Everything But the Girl: “Missing (Todd Terry Remix)” (1995)

UK duo Everything But the Girl were reeling from a career-tanking flop of an album when Todd Terry’s remix launched all three of them into unstoppable global airplay. That Terry’s take on “Missing” had so much octane in the mid-’90s market speaks to the fluidity and hunger for variety from that era’s radio programming. Deep dance tracks cultivated by far-flung collaborators could be mammoth hits, as likely to ring out in a club as a CVS; former sophisti-pop darlings from Northern England could meld minds with a house virtuoso from Brooklyn and throw sparks across the globe. Tracey Thorn’s voice, let loose from its typical acoustic furnishings, aerosolizes into a fine mist against Terry’s galloping loops. In his mix, her words scale up from quiet reflection to existential yearning: a missing so deep it’d take an ocean to fill. –Sasha Geffen

Listen: Everything But the Girl, “Missing (Todd Terry Remix)”

Frankie Knuckles: “The Whistle Song” (1991)

While Frankie Knuckles’ pioneering early tracks were soaked in acid and eroticism, his sound became warmer and more soulful as the genre of “house” solidified. The title of his 1991 album Beyond the Mix captured the essence of deep house: Beyond the music and the musician is the potential for collective experience that dance unlocks, the ego death and emergent sense of togetherness that can come from existing as one unit within the unified organism of a crowd. While elsewhere Knuckles works with vocalists to deliver fervent club Jeremiads over an electronic chorus, “The Whistle Song” is pure sound. There’s no direct address or thematic telegraph, and in its simplicity, Knuckles’ instrumental opus demonstrates the possibility of dance music as pure feeling, unbound from time and language. The titular whistle is our guiding compass in a misty soundscape that dissolves the barrier between musical rhythm and natural ambience. –Nadine Smith

Listen: Frankie Knuckles, “The Whistle Song”

Gemini: “Day Dreaming” (1997)

From 1994 until the turn of the millennium, Gemini, aka Spencer Kincy, was one of the most revered figures in the second wave of Chicago house. Then he disappeared. Rumors proliferated in his absence. A decade ago, when a reporter tracked him down, he was homeless and apparently struggling with mental illness, even as a fresh crop of reissues, edits, and bootlegs was boosting his popularity among a new generation of clubbers and DJs.

Gemini doesn’t have any real hits to his name; he was so prolific, varied, and consistently innovative that his tracks functioned more like seeds, sprouting new sounds from the depths of other DJs’ record boxes. But “Day Dreaming,” from his 1997 Peacefrog EP On the North Star With Gemini, is as concentrated an encapsulation of his talents as you could ask for. The beat shuffles with the most casual kind of grace. The chords splash like rose water. And is that lead riff a keyboard or a pod of singing dolphins? For all the tragic intrigue of Kincy’s own life, on “Day Dreaming,” he expresses the mysteries of existence in the gentlest, most beatific terms. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Gemini, “Day Dreaming”

Isolée: “Beau Mot Plage” (1998)

Like a handful of the most innovative electronic producers in the 1990s, Frankfurt’s Rajko Müller—better known as Isolée—made an anthem that defined a movement. His single, “Beau Mot Plage” brought microhouse, a cool take on four-to-the-floor that favored sound design over soul, to the mainstream—or at least the big rooms of better clubs. The song’s expert engineering had a bit in common with the stiffly funky clicks and hissing of the endless 12"s that came in its wake. But unlike most of its imitators, Isolée’s track is simply massive. It’s precisely hedonist and balances opposing forces expertly: a thick undertow of bass against melodies that spatter like waves cresting with foam; whirlpools of dub and the forward momentum of an irresistible, if slightly submerged, kick drum. And the astonishing rounds of guitar-like pinging—whether sampled or ersatz, who knows—ground “Beau Mot Plage” like a sandbar between past classics like “Sueño Latino” and “Little Fluffy Clouds” and the work of future pleasure seekers like Four Tet and Octo Octa. Prog in structure, pop in sensibility, on this beach microhouse never felt more macro. –Jesse Dorris

Listen: Isolée, “Beau Mot Plage”

Kenny Bobien: “U Gave Me Love” (1999)

With a shared history of Black creativity, utopian release, and spiritual uplift, gospel and house are natural kin. New Jersey vocalist Kenny Bobien is the self-proclaimed king of gospel house, and “You Gave Me Love,” produced by Baltimore house masters Basement Boys, is the epitome of his art. Over filtered disco surges, a rollicking piano line, and robust beats, Bobien delivers a vocal of devastating fervor, enough to provoke tears of joy in believers and non-believers alike. –Ben Cardew

Listen: Kenny Bobien, “U Gave Me Love”

Kerri Chandler: “Rain” (1998)

“You can always tell what kind of day I had if you listen to my music,” Kerri Chandler once said. He wrote “Get It Off,” his first track, while struggling with the death of his girlfriend, who was murdered outside New Jersey’s Club Zanzibar, where he made his name. If you know the story, it comes through in the record: the melancholy, the brooding—even the vinyl scratching sound captures the violence of his life being ripped in two.

Part of the beauty of “Rain,” though, is its ambiguousness. Is it happy song or sad? The skipping groove and walking bassline—one of Chandler’s hallmarks—are lithe and upbeat. The ruminative keys follow a stumbling, slippery chord progression that almost seems to change with every loop, and sounds like the product of a restless mind idly dancing over the ivories. Even when he adlibs about pain and rain, it’s not clear whether he’s wallowing in the depths or willing the downpour into being, cleansing himself in those cool blue chords. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Kerri Chandler, “Rain”

Masters at Work: “The Ha Dance” (1991)

Part of the beauty of “The Ha Dance” stems from its wildly unlikely origin story. New York’s “Little” Louie Vega and Kenny “Dope” Gonzalez had been squeezing club-ready dubs out of major-label remix commissions since the mid ’80s, but by the turn of the decade, they wanted to get their name out there as producers, full stop. One of their earliest original productions, 1991’s “The Ha Dance” took its hook from a phrase chanted by Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd in Trading Places—“boo-bwele, boo-bwele, boo-bwele, HA!”—which they punctuated with a metallic crash on every fourth beat. It was a hit with house crowds. It was a hit with hip-hop crowds. But it really took off in the ballroom scene, where the song’s insouciant riff and percussive accents were perfectly suited to voguing’s athetically extravagant dance moves.

The song has gone on to become a pillar of ballroom culture, its crash sampled in untold numbers of tracks; influential ballroom DJ MikeQ once estimated that he alone had produced as many as 400 “Ha”-sampling cuts in his career. Given the sample’s ignominous backstory—Trading Places is laced with sexist jokes, racist and homophobic slurs, and blackface—ballroom’s cultural ownership of “The Ha Dance” feels like the sweetest revenge. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Masters at Work, “The Ha Dance”

Matthew Herbert / Dani Siciliano: “Going Round” (1997)

Toward the second half of the ’90s, as American house music spread across Europe, it began morphing into unusual new forms marked by broken rhythm patterns, unconventional textures, and playful sound design. Matthew Herbert was right in the middle of it, with one foot in the UK’s exploding house scene and an ear for the minimalist antics that would soon revolutionize German dancefloors.

The standout track from Around the House, his 1998 album with San Francisco vocalist and then-partner Dani Siciliano about domestic themes, “Going Round” marks the high point of the era’s minimal house. Over a clattering beat that sounds like a game of pick-up sticks—Herbert sampled many of the record’s sounds from cutlery, kitchen appliances, etc.—Siciliano spins the dizziness of a couple’s inability to communicate into a melancholy refrain, an unsteady amalgam of sorrow, pique, and resignation. A teaser of 2001’s jazzier Bodily Functions, the song hits the sweet spot between Herbert’s conceptual interests and dancefloor instincts. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Matthew Herbert / Dani Siciliano, “Going Round”

Moodymann: “Shades of Jae” (1999)

Paradoxically, you can tell Kenny Dixon Jr., aka Moodymann, is a musician by the way he utilizes samples—not just looping or pasting them in, but interpreting them. “Shades of Jae” is the ultimate example: A lolling Bob James keyboard line and a bit of Marvin Gaye’s live version of “Come Get to This” float like wisps of smoke, interacting fleetingly in places and closely in others, but rarely in the same way twice. That teasing quality is shared by the beat itself: The kick drum, house music’s traditional cue that it’s time to dance, comes in only when Moody feels like it. But he teases us so deliciously, and the groove is so resoundingly right-there without it, that if you can resist moving fully to the whole thing you might be in a body cast. –Michaelangelo Matos

Listen: Moodymann, “Shades of Jae”

Nightcrawlers: “Push the Feeling On (MK Dub of Doom)” (1992)

Detroit producer Marc “MK” Kinchen’s “Nocturnal Dub” rework of “Push the Feeling On,” a 1992 single by Scottish funk band Nightcrawlers, can lay a valid claim to being the most important house remix of the ’90s. Not only did MK’s mix (later re-christened the “Dub of Doom” for U.S. release) feature an early example of the Korg M1 organ sound that Beyoncé recently revived on “Break My Soul”—via StoneBridge’s iconic 1993 Robin S. remix—it also helped to introduce the world to Kinchen’s hugely influential cut-up vocal style, later cribbed by DJ, producer, and Daft Punk collaborator Todd Edwards and pretty much the whole UK garage fraternity. All this, plus a bumping house beat, a barrage of unlikely pop hooks and a vocal that—in its scissored splendor—is both utterly unintelligible and totally irresistible. No wonder “Push the Feeling On” refuses to go away: A lightly re-edited take of MK’s remix was a massive European pop hit in 1994, and the song has since been sampled by everyone from Pitbull to British rapper AJ Tracey. –Ben Cardew

Listen: Nightcrawlers, “Push the Feeling On (MK Dub of Doom)”

Norma Jean Bell: “I’m the Baddest Bitch (In the Room) (Moodymann Mix)” (1996)

This is the perfect example of a house song that can make you feel 10 feet tall. The sheer strut and its unquestioning surge of towering élan are awesome to behold; when Norma Jean Bell proclaims herself the titular top dog, her tone shuts down any and all argument. She’s supported by a bassline as perfectly calibrated as a Formula One car, a saxophone melody whose gorgeous technique speaks to Bell’s history in groups as varied as the Mahavishnu Orchestra and George Clinton’s P-Funk All Stars, and just the slightest hint of longtime collaborator Moodymann’s grungy atmospherics. You could compare “I’m the Baddest Bitch” to disco, funk, and jazz, but what it really sounds like is liquid self-confidence. –Ben Cardew

Listen: Norma Jean Bell, “I’m the Baddest Bitch (In the Room) (Moodymann Mix)”

Pépé Bradock: “Deep Burnt” (1999)

In an era of over-the-top French filter house (and over-cranked music in general), Pépé Bradock came through with a second-wave deep-house classic whose dusky palette and earworm grooves made it a staple of DJ crates from Detroit to Berlin. Bradock sails into the sunset on a small but mighty romantic string loop lifted from Freddie Hubbard’s 1979 mellow jazz number “Little Sunflower,” further propelled by hip-shaking tambourines (sampled from Max Roach’s “Driva’ Man”) and a strong, heartbeat-like 125-bpm kick drum. For just over nine minutes, he teases different melodic themes but never loses the utterly hypnotic groove—it’s simple and deep at the same time, a song that instantly becomes the perfect soundtrack to any experience. –Vivian Host

Listen: Pépé Bradock, “Deep Burnt”

Robin S.: “Show Me Love” (1993)

Good jams never die—they await rediscovery in our bedrooms and train rides, one conversion at a time. Beyoncé understood this adage when she recorded this year’s “Break My Soul,” dependent on 1993’s pop-house hit “Show Me Love.” In its original 1990 version, the track sported electric piano, vocoder, and synthesized string parts closer to the post-disco in which Lisa Stansfield specialized. It awaited an essential remix by Swedish DJ-producer StoneBridge, who added the Korg M1 bassline that both time-stamps and immortalizes it. As for the singer, Robin S. sounds like a regular person, like you and me giving the performance of our lives. Dance music often requires anonymity, the better to project our needs. But Robin’s hoarse, crinkly delivery (thanks to the flu, she has said) expressed the agony of listeners who tried dancing their way out of their constrictions. “Baby, if you want meeee,” she growls before the chorus. Ah, such a fleeting thing, desire. –Alfred Soto

Listen: Robin S., “Show Me Love”

Romanthony: “The Wanderer” (1993)

When Daft Punk tapped Anthony Wayne Moore, better known as Romanthony, to sing on 2000’s “One More Time,” they highlighted the effusive character of his voice, using Auto-Tune to render its contours like the shadows of a solarized photograph. But on his 1993 single “The Wanderer,” released on his own Black Male Records, the New Jersey producer-singer explored the opposite end of his vocal spectrum. While he sings the verses to this tale of loneliness and alienation at the high end of his range, it’s the way he mutters the song’s refrain, deep down in his chest—“It’s the system that makes you a wanderer”—that makes it so hypnotic. Add the swung groove and lush, almost new-wave synths and guitars, and you’ve got a song that sounds like little that came before it—or after. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Romanthony, “The Wanderer”

Ron Trent / Chez Damier: “Morning Factory” (1995)

Dance music is a never-ending, multi-directional feedback loop between DJs, dancers, and producers—and few songs illustrate this conversation better than Ron Trent and Chez Damier’s “Morning Factory.” Co-founders of Chicago’s Prescription Records, the two men were in the habit of traveling from the Midwest to New York to see Junior Vasquez and Frankie Knuckles spin at the Sound Factory, a club legendary for its pristine sound—“like having on a pair of headphones, but you could feel everything,” Trent would later tell Red Bull Music Academy. “It was like a combination of things that your mind had never experienced before, things that you were told didn’t exist. We were all about that.”

Back in Trent’s Detroit studio, cutting up a copy of Kerri Chandler’s Atmosphere EP, they set about trying to channel what they had experienced into a track of their own. Chandler’s trademark chords are recognizable, but “Morning Factory” is far more than an edit: Arraying pillowy chords around a syncopated groove that’s dazzlingly complex to parse yet dead simple to feel, it’s a buoyant, aerated club track infused with the spirit of dub—a deep-house milestone that inspired countless records of its own, along with innumerable moments of dancefloor bliss. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Ron Trent / Chez Damier, “Morning Factory”

Round Two: “New Day” (1995)

In the early ’90s, under aliases like Basic Channel, Maurizio, and Cyrus, Moritz von Oswald and Mark Ernestus masterminded multiple new strains of techno—minimal, ambient, dub—by fusing clean-lined machine rhythms with buoyant pulses and aquatic haze. But they didn’t stop at techno. Between 1994 and 1999, under the sequential series of aliases Round One through Round Five, they applied their spatial sensibilities and exacting production skills to deep house. You can hear their dubby signature in the chest-massaging sub-bass and glancing chords of “New Day,” but what makes the song so powerful is the guest vocal from UK session singer Andy Caine.

Lamenting a lost love, his smoky voice backed by radiant background harmonies, he makes a striking admission: “Feel like a 24-hour sleep.” It’s the kind of observation that stays with you, resurfacing in periods of grief. Ernestus and von Oswald’s production seems determined to make good on that desire—their weightless chords and frictionless glide amount to a waking dream, a momentary state of redemption that lasts as long as the groove keeps going. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Round Two, “New Day”

Roy Davis Jr.: “Gabriel (Live Garage Mix)” [ft. Peven Everett] (1996)

UK garage descended from American house music, and nowhere is that lineage clearer than in Roy Davis Jr.’s “Gabriel,” featuring vocals and trumpet from Peven Everett. The Chicago producer had been making deep, soulful house for a few years when he released “Gabriel” on his hometown’s Large label in 1996. While three mixes of the song are straight-ahead deep house, the skippy snares and deep-diving bassline of the song’s “Live Garage Mix” were perfectly suited for the UK’s burgeoning speed-garage movement, a zippy, anglicized version of the garage house that New York producers had been pumping out since the ’80s heyday of the legendary Paradise Garage club. “I had no idea about what they would call ‘speed garage’ at the time,” Davis would later admit; he gave it the name because the looseness of the drum patterns reminded him of the bands that he’d sometimes record in his garage. But the track took off on UK pirate radio, and in 2000, a different mix of it was included on Locked On’s influential Sound of the Pirates compilation, cementing its legacy. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Roy Davis Jr., “Gabrielle (Live Garage Mix)”

Soho: “Hot Music” (1990)

New York in 1990 was a vibrant place. Hip-hop and house music were changing by the month, and ruling the clubs in the process. It was also a scary one—the city’s murder rate reached its peak that year with 2,245 killings, a huge increase over 1989. Joseph Longo was perfectly situated to capture that vibe in a bottle. A clerk at the 12-inch storehouse Vinylmania in Manhattan, he became a producer in the late ’80s and by 1990 was producing classics in both rap—Boogie Down Productions’ “Love’s Gonna Get’cha (Material Love)”—and house, under aliases like Earth People and Pal Joey. As Soho, his “Hot Music” reconfigured airy Wynton Marsalis snippets over an all-business kick-drum pattern just off kilter enough to carry more than a hint of menace. “Playing ’Hot Music’ usually caused chaos,” Longo recalled in 2013. Decades on, it still does. –Michaelangelo Matos

Listen: Soho, “Hot Music”

St. Germain: “Alabama Blues (Todd Edwards Dub Mix)” (1995)

DJ-producer Marc Kinchen, aka MK, may have pioneered the idea of the vocal cut-up, but it was his New Jersey disciple Todd Edwards who refined—and arguably perfected—the technique: Edwards used hundreds of microsamples to create his signature sound, a buoyantly rhythmic and geometrically patterned mosaic that is as avant garde as it is entrancing. Edwards made his breakthrough with his vocal and dub remixes of St. Germain’s 1995 single “Alabama Blues,” and the young Daft Punk—who would later invite Edwards to collaborate on Discovery and Random Access Memories—were listening. The dub is the pick of the two, albeit by a slim margin; its radical chord changes, perfectly swinging beats, and hook-laden production are both straightforwardly pop and profoundly ambivalent to convention. Traveling the fringes has rarely sounded so joyful. –Ben Cardew

Listen: St. Germain, “Alabama Blues (Todd Edwards Dub Mix)”

Stardust: “Music Sounds Better With You” (1998)

The promise anchoring French house is that one perfect loop can change your life. When producer Alan Braxe, singer Benjamin Diamond, and Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter came together as Stardust and clipped a few seconds from Chaka Khan’s “Fate,” they rocketed into the annals of dance music history. “Music Sounds Better With You,” the trio’s lone single, is meant to be shared with other people, emphasizing communal ecstasy in the way Diamond sings “with you!” like it’s lifting him an inch off the ground. The song’s generous bliss laid the groundwork for Daft Punk’s shift from the DJ tools of Homework to Discovery’s accessible craftsmanship, and decades later its basic principle—a tight, filtered nibble of joy—is part of pop music’s lingua franca. –Jamieson Cox

Listen: Stardust, “Music Sounds Better With You”

Theo Parrish: “Smile” (1997)

Along with Moodymann, fellow Detroiter Theo Parrish is responsible for some of the deepest, most soulful house cuts ever to come out of that city. And none of them displays a more singular sense of focus than one of his earliest records, “Smile.” It’s a masterful display of control, making due with little more than a loping, low-bitrate drum pattern, a cryptic bass-and-keys riff, and a voice intoning the titular word every two bars, like a mantra. But what should be simple crumbles to dust the closer you peer at it. The staggering drum beat is as much boom-bap as deep house, with snares stumbling just off the beat; the bassline is not so much a riff as a charcoal smudge that skews the root note beneath keys that are themselves smeared to the point of illegibility. As for the vocal sample, its lilting, dubbed-out refrain drifts beyond language: It may say “smile,” but when paired with that downcast backing, it sounds steeped in suffering, an expression of the blues at its purest. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Theo Parrish, “Smile”

Ultra Naté: “Free” (1997)

Not many of 1997’s dancefloor hits began with a slinky guitar riff like the one that opens “Free.” Never mind that Ultra Naté came up singing in church and made her name in the early ’90s alongside Baltimore house pioneers the Basement Boys; when she sat down with producers Lem Springsteen and John Ciafone of Mood II Swing to work on her first single for New York independent Strictly Rhythm, she tasked them with delivering something in the vein of R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion.” “We wanted a rock song that would work in clubs,” she once said. They ended up with something far more distinctive.

For the backing vocals, Springsteen and Ciafone got a murderer’s row of singers who had worked with artists like David Bowie and Luther Vandross. And while Mood II Swing’s name didn’t appear on the record’s spine, any true house head would have recognized their signature in the song’s syncopated groove and bumptious bassline. Late-’90s acts like the Chemical Brothers may have gotten all the credit for mashing up genres, but Ultra Naté and Mood II Swing proved that house could be just as open-armed. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Ultra Naté, “Free”