The Best Chillout Artists to Know

Chillout was never built around one sound, and it was never built around one artist either. It's a family of people working in genuinely different directions who all landed somewhere near the same mood. Here are the names worth knowing, organised by what they actually brought to it — not a ranked chart, just the people who shaped this thing.

The founders: The KLF and The Orb

Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond, working as The KLF, released Chill Out in 1990 — a continuous, sample-collaged journey rather than a normal album, and still the record most people point to as the genre's founding statement. Alex Paterson's The Orb picked up the same ambient-house instincts and pushed them into club culture proper across the early 1990s. Between the two projects, you've got the genre's actual origin story.

Worth a mention too: DJ and broadcaster Mixmaster Morris was a genuinely important advocate for ambient and chillout-oriented programming through this same period, helping bring the sound to wider club audiences beyond London's own scene.

The melodic school: Air and Zero 7

If the founders built the genre's ambient backbone, Air and Zero 7 gave it a more accessible, song-based face. Air's Moon Safari (1998) is French electronic pop at its most gorgeous — melodic, warm, instantly recognisable. Zero 7's Simple Things (2001) leans further into proper songwriting, built around guest vocalists and a live-band sensibility rather than pure electronic texture. Both records are frequently the point where a curious newcomer actually falls for the genre.

The trip-hop branch: Massive Attack and Portishead

Bristol's Massive Attack and Portishead sit slightly apart from the ambient lineage — heavier bass, sampled breakbeats, a moodier and more dramatic emotional register. Massive Attack's Blue Lines (1991) and Portishead's Dummy (1994) are both essential listening if you want to understand where chillout's darker, more atmospheric cousin came from. Whether trip-hop counts as chillout proper or a closely related neighbour is genuinely debated, but no serious account of this world skips either band.

The dub and jazz crowd: Thievery Corporation and Kruder & Dorfmeister

Thievery Corporation blend dub, reggae, bossa nova and jazz into a genuinely global-sounding downtempo, with The Mirror Conspiracy (2000) as a strong entry point. Kruder & Dorfmeister, the Austrian duo, did something similar from a slightly different angle — polished, dub-influenced remixes and productions collected on 1998's The K&D Sessions, an album that quietly shaped a huge amount of downtempo production that followed it.

The modern instrumental generation: Bonobo, Tycho and Boards of Canada

A later generation took the same core values — space, restraint, texture — and updated the production. Bonobo built detailed, live-instrumentation-heavy downtempo across records like Black Sands (2010). Tycho, primarily the work of producer Scott Hansen, made warm, melodic instrumental electronica exemplified by 2011's Dive. Boards of Canada took a hazier, more analog-sounding route, and Music Has the Right to Children (1998) remains a reference point for nostalgic, textured electronic production well beyond chillout circles specifically.

One more name worth knowing: Nujabes

Nujabes sits at the crossing point between chillout, instrumental hip-hop and jazz sampling — a genuinely distinct lane that's influenced a lot of the "lo-fi beats" sound now common on streaming playlists, even where that connection isn't always acknowledged.

A quick honourable mention too for Moby, whose 1999 album Play brought electronic music, blues and gospel sampling to a genuinely mainstream audience. It isn't a chillout record through and through, but its calmer moments sit comfortably alongside everything else on this list, and it introduced plenty of listeners to this general territory for the first time.

Where to go from these names

Every artist here represents a slightly different branch of the same family tree, so it's worth actually hearing the differences rather than treating them as interchangeable. Our guide to chillout's subgenres untangles exactly how ambient house, downtempo, trip-hop and dub relate to one another, and our essential albums guide goes deeper into the specific records mentioned above. New to all this? Start with our beginner's guide to chillout instead.

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