The 50 Best House Records of All Time: Staff List

In 2025 house music is such a globally popular and varied genre that its origins in early 1980s Chicago warehouses seem improbable.

But the myth of house music of course starts right there in the Windy City, as Black and brown queer artists in largely underground spaces used nascent technology to make the music of the future. Love, lust, strength, passion and defiance defined the spirit of the genre in its earliest days, as producers often transferred the church music of their youth to songs meant for another, if not ultimately so dissimilar, type of worship.

The sound was soon reverberating through clubs as vinyl pressings were passed by hand from DJ to DJ, record shop clerk to househead. House music changed the fabric of clubland in all of dance music’s North American hub cities and then in Europe, with a collection of artists in each place using their own vision (and their own tech) to make strains of the sound that were often stranger and more far out than the original. By the time house music reached Top 40 radio it had fused with pop, a hybrid so undeniable that now we barely even notice that a lot of popular music is forged from the style.

40 or so years after the genre’s creation, the many subgenres of house — piano, gospel, acid, progressive, future, Afro, etc. — now each form worlds unto themselves, but the twin hearts of house music remain a 4/4 beat and a feeling.

Here, we count down the 50 greatest essentials of the genre. Read on for the countdown, and find its corresponding playlist here.