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Music

The 10 Best Robert Hood Records to Date

We've run through ten total classics from the Detroit don's long and storied career.

Here at THUMP we love nothing more than sitting back with a slab of bread and butter, a refreshing glass of tap water, and a whole load of Robert Hood records. The Detroit mainstay's spent the last 25 years crafting the kind of absurdly solid house and techno that makes dancers submit to higher powers on dancefloors across the world night after night.

The Underground Resistance founder's just released another album as Floorplan—the religiously inflected house outfit he heads up alongside his daughter Lyric—and it's one of our favourites of the year so far. Under his own name he's dropped an incredible 12" on Dekmantel and there's a full album for the label on the way.

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Which is why we decided to run down 10 of our favorite Hood tracks from throughout the years. There aren't many producers around who can make music this incredible for five solid years, let alone 25.

1. Robert Hood - The Greatest Dancer (Studio Version)

Chic are clearly one of the best groups to ever roam this earth and any anyone who disagrees doesn't deserve the gift of hearing. Robert Hood is one of the best producers to ever roam this earth and anyone who disagrees doesn't deserve the gift of hearing. Which, naturally, means that Robert Hood smashing the hell out of a Chic record is one of the best things to ever roam this earth and anyone who disagrees, well, you get the point.

2. Floorplan - Never Grow Old

Fun fact for you here: the hi-hats that crash into the mix exactly a minute into this are the greatest use of percussion in this history of music. That's a fact. An undeniable fact.

3. Robert Hood - [A1] Untitled

Apart from the whole music thing, Robert's also really good at naming his records. The one-two LP punch of Floorplan's Paradise and Victorious is brave, ballsy, and totally fitting. Imagine being a man so sure of his own talents, his own abilities, that you can call a release Invincible with a straight face. That's the man I want to be. The A-side from this 2001 EP is a stonker, and yes, it is better than the Michael Jackson album of the same name.

4. Robert Hood - Exturnus Oblique (Re-Plant)

Not to sound like the world's worst stoner but me and a good friend of mine once got very, very, very stoned and this track came on the stereo and we both sat there slack-jawed saying "THIS CANNOT BE REAL" over and over again, and that's the best compliment you can pay a record, I think. Other than having it as a first dance track, or the song that plays as your coffin's lowered into the ground or your ashes are throw into the sea.

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5. Floorplan - Baby, Baby

THUMP's very own Angus Harrison took me to one side and said, "Please can we put "Baby, Baby" in this list?" I said we could but only if he explained why it's so good. Here's what he had to say about it, "The magic in "Baby Baby", as with so many tracks by Robert Hood, is in never reaching the climax every second of the track seems to be reaching for. It is the sound of winding yourself up, up, up, up but never quite getting that release. And that agony, as anyone who has ever heard the track out will know, is ecstasy." So there you go.

6. Robert Hood - Sleep Cycle

Back in 2004, Big Bobby, as I like to think of him, revolutionised techno with the peerless, timeless, seminal and still-stunning Minimal Nation, an album that stripped techno back to the barest of bare bones, creating, yep you guessed it, minimal techno along the way. "Sleep Cycle" is just a few teeny, tiny elements that pound and pummel unceasingly for nearly seven minutes, and it's an absolutely fantastic way to while away a wait for a bus. High praise indeed.

7. Monobox - Film

What's the best film you've ever seen? Cool Runnings? The Shawshank Redemption? Un Chien Andalou? Whatever it is, this cut under Hood's Monobox guise it better than it. Yep, that's right, it's even better than Johnny English Reborn.

8. Robert Hood - The Family

The Robster's undoubtedly a family man, and now that his daughter Lyric's a fully fledged member of Floorplan, the whole world knows it too. So let's hear this as an ode to the joy of family life. It's like Christmas day without the arguing, or The Royle Family or the creepingly crushing sense of depression and utter sadness that sneaks up on everyone just after lunch.

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9. Robert Hood - Shaker

Last year we said that, "Robert Hood doesn't so much make music as craft hulking, huge, ridiculously massive mechanisms that bolt relentlessly on and on, getting tighter and tighter to the point where implosion seems inevitable," when referring to the other side of this tremendous 2015 release ("Ritual" by Floorplan) and the same applies to this rough-hewn monster of a record. It's Hood at his imperious absolute best, a disorientatingly intense experience that you sort of never want to escape from.

10. Floorplan - We Magnify His Name

We'll let Robert himself explain this one

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