In a recent interview with FACT, Orlando Higginbottom aka TEED (Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs) touched on the challenge of creating an albums ‘shelf life’ ahead of the release of his debut offering ‘Trouble’.

“The main challenge I set myself was to make a dance album with some shelf-life. It seems there have been very few albums in dance music history that have stood the test of any time at all.  It’s always been about individual tracks.

In truth, not many electronic or dance albums have a lasting shelf-life, many would point to Daft Punks ‘Discovery’ (2001) as being pretty seminal while others could even say MSTRKRFTs (2006) first effort ‘The Look’s’ did things to them that they’d never felt before.

The brutal thing being that both are old… like really old.

When you look at the modern electronic/dance landscape it’s easy to see that singles w/ remixes are the norm, that albums are few and far between and when they do drop, seem to fall into the category of ‘stale’ or ‘dry’.

Unlike Major Labels that push artists to release more music all the time Dance labels don’t seem to quick to do that to their bread makers, they understand that quality music takes time to rise and a new-track-a-week isn’t what is really needed.

So why exactly is it? Is it the high-speed consumption of todays listeners forcing producers to release sub-par quality?

To me Social Media is to blame – The ease at which producers cop criticism in a highly aggressive manner is worrying, within minutes of something going live people can pass off months of work as “boring, blah blah was better” – this can lead to a habitual eagerness to create something better, something newer, something to fit current standards… which at times isn’t always the solution.

Moving forward it’d be good to see producers take the time to create an album, hell it can take them 4 years if they want as long as the final offering is a quality release!

What albums have stood the test of time for you?