On Repeat: Harold Heath looks back at some of the best electronic music albums of 2025 in this special series for 5 Mag.

An album of Detroit techno from Detroit techno artist, Detroit’s DJ Boneis a welcome and entirely unsurprising event. The End of Never is eight tracks of, as you would expect, Detroit techno, that do exactly what you’d expect them to: they thud, they roll, and they groove in an entirely familiar, and extremely pleasing fashion. Essentially, if you want a new album of thudding, rolling, grooving Detroit techno that sounds like Detroit techno you’ve heard before and you’d like that album to be excellently composed, arranged and produced by one of Detroit’s finest, then The End of Never is the album for you.

It’s an album of, to use the overripe cliche, machine music with soul, which I’ve always taken to mean music that is electronic, rigid, repetitive, sequenced, and yet is imbued with and can communicate emotion. That’s definitely the case here as thudding, engineered kick drums, relentless, uniform and exacting percussion, platinum edged synth stabs and spiky, slippery lead synth lines create tough, driving productions that feel as though they’ve no brakes, that power along with such momentum that the deft introduction of the smallest melodic element at the correct moment, in carefully measured quantities, can instantly generate that mythological, constantly-sought, often-claimed, tough-to-define sonic gold: soul. Do not criticize at all to say that this is nothing new or groundbreaking, it’s just another exemplar of this particular music form: eight high-end contemporary Detroit techno jams, from one of the best in the game.

⚪️ The End of Never Tracklisting

DJ Bone XXXV: The End of Never (Further Records) 1. Critical (06:27) 2. Take UR Time (05:31) 3. The End Of Never (05:21) 4. Deep Inside (06:07) 5. They Flew Away (05:50) 6. Smooth Ones (06:16) 7. Red Alert (05:37) 8. The Hypnotist (05:30)