Comedown: eighteen albums for the morning after

Chill Out (1990) is the ur-text: Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty's imaginary overnight drive across the American South, with Elvis, Fleetwood Mac and Tuvan throat singers drifting past like radio stations you catch and lose. None of those samples were ever cleared, so for thirty years you couldn't legally stream it. Come Down Dawn is the 2021 rebuild with the borrowed bits scrubbed out — purists miss the missing Elvis, everyone else finally gets to hear the record that taught dance music how to lie down.

Before anyone said 'trip-hop,' three Bristol sound-system veterans slowed hip-hop to a heartbeat and let dub, soul and reggae bleed into the gaps. Blue Lines (1991) runs at that after-hours tempo where a night's adrenaline finally drains off; Shara Nelson's 'Unfinished Sympathy' is the sunrise, Horace Andy the ghost in the corner. Almost everything on this list with a pulse under 100 BPM owes it rent.

A guitar band who heard My Bloody Valentine and Aphex Twin in the same week and refused to pick, so they became both. Quique (1993) dissolves shoegaze into looping ambient techno until you can't find the edges of any single sound. It's the least famous record here and the one that rewards a 4am headphone session most.

Tom Middleton and Mark Pritchard named every track after its exact running time, then named the album after its own: 76 minutes, 14 seconds. Under the numbers is some of the warmest ambient techno ever put to tape, closer to weather than to melody. When the beats do arrive, they feel like a favour.

The other Bristol landmark, and the darker one. Geoff Barrow built the beats from crackling vinyl and spy-film guitar; Beth Gibbons sang like someone confessing at the end of a bar. Dummy took the 1995 Mercury Prize and then got played to death at dinner parties, which unfairly buried how genuinely bleak it is under all that candlelight.

George Evelyn's second album is the most literal comedown record ever made — the title is basically a set of instructions. Warm bass, dub echo, soul samples melting at the edges. It sounds like a Sunday you didn't plan, and it has aged better than most of what Warp released that decade.

Built entirely from records dug out of a Sacramento basement, no live instruments anywhere — Guinness certified it the first album made purely from samples. Endtroducing (1996) turns other people's forgotten music into one long melancholy dream. 'Midnight in a Perfect World' is the exact moment the party ends and the thinking starts.

Jason Pierce made a breakup record and scored it for gospel choir, brass and enough drone to sedate a horse. It shipped in packaging shaped like a pill blister, which is the joke and the confession at once. The comedown here isn't chemical, it's romantic, and it's the most beautiful wreck on the list.

Two brothers in rural Scotland, tape machines detuned just enough to feel like a memory going bad. Half-heard children's voices, synths warped like sun-damaged film. It doesn't soundtrack the morning after so much as the years after — nostalgia for a childhood that may not even be yours.

French, sleek, a little smug, and none the worse for it. Moon Safari (1998) is comedown music for people whose comedowns happen in nicer flats than yours — Rhodes piano, vocoder, 'La femme d'argent' unspooling for seven unhurried minutes. Easy listening in the best sense, back when that wasn't an insult.

Wolfgang Voigt buried a 4/4 techno kick under fog banks of looped orchestral strings and named the record after the forest outside Cologne where he first took acid as a teenager. You feel the pulse more than hear it. Königsforst (1999) is what happens when the club is three fields away and you're lying in the dirt, perfectly content.

Thousands of samples stitched into one sun-drunk suite — the happy cousin of everyone else here. Since I Left You (2000) is the comedown that turns giddy instead of grey, all crackle and disco ghosts and stray found voices. It took them sixteen years to manage a follow-up, which tells you how much they crammed into one record.

Jason Swinscoe's band play actual jazz, then let Ninja Tune's editing suite smear it into something wider. Fontella Bass sings on 'All That You Give' like she's blessing the room; Roots Manuva turns up to close things out. Every Day (2002) is comedown music with a live drummer, and that heartbeat is something the laptop records can't fake.

Kieran Hebden chopped folk, jazz and hip-hop into confetti, then reassembled it into something that breathes. Rounds (2003) is fidgety and warm at once — 'She Moves She' skitters, 'As Serious as Your Life' glows. It's the sound of a restless mind finally settling, which is most of what a comedown is.

A German producer who loved shoegaze more than most shoegazers, drowning trance synths in reverb until they came out sounding like homesickness. There are no words on it and it doesn't want any. Put it on at first light and it does the emotional labour for you.

For years nobody knew who made it, which suited the music — Untrue (2007) sounds like a city talking to itself after everyone's gone home. William Bevan pitch-shifts anonymous vocal scraps into ghosts and lets rain and vinyl crackle carry the rest. The 2-step garage skeleton is still in there, slowed down to grief. The best night-bus record ever made.

Stephen Wilkinson started out doing woozy Boards of Canada folk, then his first Warp album cracked open into hip-hop, funk and soul without losing the tape hiss. Ambivalence Avenue (2009) jumps between styles like a mixtape from a friend with great taste and no attention span. Sun-warped and generous.

Immunity (2013) plays as one continuous night: the studio door creaking open on the first track, the 3am peak, then a nine-minute title-track descent at dawn with King Creosote murmuring somewhere in the fog. It's the rare dance album that plots the whole arc, hangover and all. End the playlist here and go to sleep.