Subwoofers at the ready! The jungle and drum’n’bass revival is upon us

J ungle and drum’n’bass are back, back, BACK! High Contrast’s Notes from the Underground album – its elegiac 90s rave moods created with vintage 90s tech – was a dance chart success at the end of 2020. Chase & Status’s RTRN II FABRIC mix, which turbocharged jungle classics, was huge last year, too. Harmony by Origin8a and Propa ft Benny Page is everywhere lately and it’s far from the only euphoric 174bpm tune you’ll hear on daytime Radio 1.

Meanwhile in the leftfield, a new generation led by DJ Sherelle are drawing new crowds into a 160bpm melange of jungle, experimental rave and footwork or – as Sherelle herself puts it – “super nice fast tempo music that people are able to dance to”.

But then, this isn’t even the first time these genres are back, back, back. As DJ Ben UFO says: “There have been ‘jungle revivals’ regularly for at least as long as I’ve been DJing.” And he should know: his eclectic sets sent many of the dubstep generation scurrying to buy old 12-inches a decade ago. Welsh producer and DJ High Contrast, AKA Lincoln Barrett, puts this down to jungle/d’n’b being “an outlier or underdog: every other dance genre is over there in the 130 bpm-ish corner fighting for the top spot, while we stand alone.”

That lone-wolf attitude could have done for the scene. Certainly, around the turn of the millennium, drum’n’bass was seen as an insular boys’ club – and in the late 00s it looked in danger of being eclipsed by its mutant offspring, dubstep. But it always contained the seeds of its regeneration: both in the commercial sounds of DJ Fresh and Pendulum that would lead to Rudimental and Sigma’s success, and in more experimental styles that Benny Page traces back to late-90s tracks such as Digital’s Deadline – and which have reverberated through the 21st-century underground.

Some things are very different now, however. For one, the scene is more diverse, with young stars such as festival-conquering DJ Mollie Collins and singer-producer Nia Archives rising fast through the ranks, and earlier generations of women such as DJ Storm and DJ Flight getting their dues. Label owner and academic Julia Toppin goes so far as to say label mentoring schemes led by the EQ50 project mean it is now “ahead of other genres in pushing for gender equality”.

Secondly, genre-mashers such as Sherelle are fighting for high tempos to be heard in the wider dance world, “not just a novelty, so-and-so’s surprise jungle set, but as normal”. But perhaps more than anything it’s the sheer, bloody-minded obsession of jungle/drum’n’bass fans that make it the genre that won’t die. After all, as High Contrast puts it: “If hipsters do move on to something new, it’s not a problem, the real heads will remain. ’Twas ever thus.”