5 Futuristic Albums to Transport You » PopMatters

The future haunts popular music. From Sun Ra‘s cosmic philosophies to Kraftwerk‘s robotic minimalism, from Janelle Monáe‘s android suites to the shimmering dream worlds of Björk, artists have long looked to the future as both a warning and a possibility. To imagine the future in sound is not merely to garnish it with synthesizers and sci-fi tropes but to wrestle with what it means to be human in a world constantly shifting under the weight of technology, identity, and desire.

In 2025, that conversation is more urgent than ever. Music is no longer just a mirror of culture, but a laboratory for speculation: a space where love can be reprogrammed, identities shapeshift, and utopias and apocalypses coexist in the same beat. What defines “futuristic” music today is not its palette of synthetic tones; those are already common currency, but its ability to disrupt time itself, destabilizing the boundaries between memory and prophecy.

The five albums gathered here don’t simply gesture toward tomorrow. They inhabit it. Each one offers a distinct vision of how music can bend space, fracture genre, and reimagine the self. Together, they form a constellation of possibilities.

Kid Cudi – Entergalactic

Loneliness Among the Stars

Few artists embody the paradox of futurism like Kid Cudi. Since his 2009 breakthrough Man on the Moon, Cudi has been hip-hop’s melancholic astronaut, orbiting mainstream rap while never quite belonging to it. Entergalactic, released alongside his Netflix animated odyssey, distills his ethos into an interstellar love story that is both cartoon fantasy and confessional diary.

Futurist records often revel in alienation, but Cudi makes the infinite feel intimate. His voice — nasal, fragile, endlessly human — floats against glacial synths and psychedelic textures. Songs like “Willing to Trust” transform zero gravity into a metaphor for vulnerability, while “Do What I Want” pits trap percussion against shimmering arpeggios.

“Space here is not a void,” the album insists, “but a canvas for longing”. In Cudi’s cosmos, the cold vacuum of the future still carries the warmth of a heartbeat.

NZCA Lines – Infinite Summer

Dancing Through the Anthropocene

Where Cudi looks upward, NZCA Lines looks around at the planet itself. Michael Lovett’s Infinite Summer dazzles with the sleekness of 1980s synthpop, yet its brilliance hides shadows: an ecological crisis, a world locked in perpetual heat. The title alone feels like an omen, paradise turning to drought, endless light shading into exhaustion.

Tracks such as “Persephone Dreams” seduce with crystalline surfaces, but their lyrics evoke collapse: oceans swelling, skies burning. Lovett’s genius lies in the tension between sound and theme. The music sparkles like utopia even as it mourns the fragility of the earth beneath it.

This is futurism for the Anthropocene: the apocalypse not as silence, but as something glittering and dangerously danceable. Infinite Summer reminds us that tomorrow’s catastrophe may arrive disguised as pleasure.

Don Toliver – Love Sick

Posthuman Desire

If NZCA Lines envisions planetary collapse, Don Toliver zooms into the microcosm of desire. Love Sick is futurism refracted through romance in the digital age, where emotions are filtered, mediated, and reassembled by technology.

Toliver’s Auto-Tuned croon is less an effect than an existential condition. His voice drips like liquid chrome, warping between seduction and distortion. In tracks like “Private Landing”, ecstasy collides with alienation; in “Do It Right”, nostalgic samples crash into futuristic beats, compressing decades into a single moment.

Here, AutoTune becomes a metaphor: in a posthuman world, to love is to glitch, to yearn through distortion. Love Sickaches with vulnerability despite, or because of, its synthetic sheen. It argues that the future of intimacy is not the erasure of feeling, but its mutation.

Lava La Rue – Starface

Queering the Cosmos

For Lava La Rue, futurism is liberation. Starface imagines queerness not as marginal, but as interstellar —a force expansive enough to light entire galaxies. Where Cudi makes space personal and NZCA Lines makes it planetary, La Rue makes it political, envisioning futures where identity is fluid and infinite.

The EP shapeshifts like its creator. UK rap bleeds into neo-soul, psychedelia rubs against indie textures, all threaded with cosmic imagery. “Lift Off” pulses with ecstatic confidence, while quieter tracks hover like weightless daydreams.

La Rue’s cosmos echoes the traditions of Black queer futurism, Octavia Butler’s novels, Janelle Monáe’s android anthems — yet it feels distinctly rooted in London’s multicultural vibrancy. Starface is speculative but never escapist. It argues that the future is not abstract: it is lived, grounded, and already shimmering in communities that refuse confinement.

Johnel – Galactic Theme

Ancestral Rhythms in Hyperspace

If La Rue queers futurism, Johnel reorients it toward heritage. Galactic Theme fuses African polyrhythms with cosmic synthscapes, producing music that feels both ancient and interstellar. Inspired by Kid Cudi’s Entergalactic, this short album is a distinctly Afrofuturist vision: the drum as heartbeat and warp drive, ancestral memory traveling across galaxies.

Unlike futurist projects that abandon the past for shiny abstraction, Johnel insists that continuity is itself a radical gesture. Released via Nnamani Music Group, his music resonates with Sun Ra’s cosmic philosophies and Burna Boy’s global reach, yet it never imitates. Instead, it extends the lineage. The future, he suggests, is not blank but already inscribed with ancestral echoes.

In Galactic Theme, one hears time collapse: tradition becomes trajectory, history becomes horizon. The past is not left behind in tomorrow; it is what powers the leap into it.

The Future Is Already Here

What unites these albums is not sonic uniformity, but rather a defiance of stasis. Cudi turns solitude into cosmic intimacy. NZCA Lines transforms climate dread into shimmering pop. Toliver reframes digital longing as posthuman desire. La Rue queers the cosmos into infinite possibility. Johnel launches ancestral rhythm into orbit.

To call them “futuristic” is less about sound design than about ambition, the audacity to construct sonic worlds that imagine beyond the limits of today. Each album refuses the idea that the present is fixed. Each insists that tomorrow can be sounded into existence.

“Perhaps the most radical act of futurism,” these works seem to say, “is not predicting what comes next, but daring to invent it.”

In their music, the future is not a horizon waiting to arrive. It is already here, scattered across beats, refrains, and voices bold enough to claim it.