Detroit production duo Drexciya’s debut album followed a series of highly influential 12” releases and came at the end of a decade they’d spent creating a small but perfectly formed electro/techno discography. Neptune’s Lair has 21 tracks but 9 of them are sub-3 minutes long, creating an album that continually delivers fresh sounds and new ideas. The music is broad-ranging, taking in 4/4 techno slammers, machine-tooled synthetic funk, soundtrack-esque pieces and all sorts of angular, abstract electronics. Ahead of its time, it’s an album that remains extremely influential in electronic music.

The Detroit-based techno-electro duo Gerald Donald and James Stinson, collectively known as Drexciya, concocted a nautical backstory to their releases worthy of anything from Namor the Sub-Mariner: an underwater colony, Drexciya, was populated by the unborn progeny of African women thrown overboard during the Atlantic slave trade’s Middle Passage. But the instrumental music of their Neptune’s Lair debut—synthy, propulsive, energetic—never sounded anything short of celebratory.