What is drum and bass?

Metalheadz and the dark turn.

By 1995 drum and bass had a home for its most forward material: the Metalheadz Sunday session at the Blue Note in Hoxton Square, a small room where the label's roster tested records on a system in front of a crowd that did not applaud politely. Timeless had given the genre a broadsheet profile. What happened next inside the clubs went the other way.

The Sunday Sessions ran for roughly three years, until the Blue Note closed in 1998, and they worked the way jungle's pirate-and-dubplate economy had: a producer cut a new track to acetate, played it once into that room, and watched what it did. It was scarcity as a physical property of vinyl, the same practice moved into a genre with A&R and press. The people who carried the dubplate culture from jungle into this are the jungle guide's territory.

The harder direction is usually traced to No U-Turn, Nico Sykes' studio and label in north London, and to a group of producers around it: Ed Rush, Trace, Nico, Fierce. Their records replaced the jazz and the atmospherics with distortion, compression and a machine-shop rhythm, and the compilation Torque, in 1997, collected the results. The name that stuck to it, techstep, is usually credited to that circle and spread through Grooverider's Radio 1 sets; who first used it in print is not settled. Doc Scott's "Shadow Boxing", released under his Nasty Habits alias on his own 31 Records in 1996, is the record most people reach for when they want to show what the dark side sounded like. In 1998 Ed Rush and Optical founded Virus Recordings and released the album Wormhole, which took the techstep template and made it funkier and more precisely edited, and pointed at what would be called neurofunk.

The atmospheric line: Speed, Bristol and Good Looking.

The dark turn was one answer to 1995. Another ran through a club night called Speed, at the Mars Bar in central London, where Fabio and LTJ Bukem played the jazz-facing, melodic end of the music to a room that wanted to listen rather than rush. Bukem's label Good Looking and its Logical Progression compilation series, the first in 1996, gave that sound a catalogue. His 1993 track "Music" is the usual reference: strings, a soft break, no drop in the modern sense. For a few years this branch was marketed as "intelligent drum and bass", a label that made a real distinction at the time and has aged into an embarrassment, since it implied the rest of the genre was not.

The other centre of the melodic version was not in London at all. In Bristol, Roni Size, Krust, Die and Suv formed the collective Reprazent, and Bristol labels, Full Cycle and the V Recordings axis run by Bryan Gee and Jumpin Jack Frost, built a rolling, jazz-inflected sound with a live-band feel. In 1997 Reprazent's New Forms won the Mercury Prize, beating OK Computer, and for a moment the sound of British music writing about itself was a drum and bass record made in Bristol. "Brown Paper Bag", from that album, is the track that reached people who owned no other record in the genre.

By 2000 the melodic branch had a name of its own, liquid drum and bass, after a Fabio mix CD called Liquid Funk, and it became one of the genre's most exportable forms: soulful, vocal, built on rolling two-step, carried by Calibre, High Contrast, Marcus Intalex and, later, the Hospital Records roster. High Contrast, a Welsh producer signed to Hospital, is the version of liquid that kept the soul samples and the big room at the same time; "The Basement Track" is the one that still gets played. Grooverider and Fabio took the whole spread of it onto national radio, holding a weekly Radio 1 drum and bass show from 1998 until 2012.

The subgenres and what they mean.

Drum and bass argues about terminology as much as jungle does, and most of the arguments are about where one branch ends and the next begins. The table sets out the main terms, roughly when each one appeared and how it relates to the core sound.

None of these are sealed boxes. A liquid producer will make a jump-up record; a neurofunk engineer will cut something almost ambient. The labels describe tendencies and scenes more than they describe rules.

2000s onward

How drum and bass became global.

Drum and bass was rooted in London and Bristol, but within a decade it was being made far beyond either city. Brazil built one of the first major scenes outside Britain: DJ Marky, XRS and Patife connected to the UK through Bryan Gee's V Recordings, and Marky's crossover with "LK", made with XRS and Stamina MC in 2002, became a UK club staple. Continental Europe followed, and by the 2010s major events included Rampage in Antwerp and Let It Roll in the Czech Republic. Toronto is often cited as an important early North American centre.

The music also kept moving between the deep side and the loud side without ever fully resolving. The Bristol and liquid lineages carried the melodic version; jump-up held the dancefloor; neurofunk went to the Netherlands with Noisia and Black Sun Empire and became a global technical benchmark.

None of that travelled on its own. It travelled through labels and touring networks, often shaped by a small number of people with a clear taste. Andy C founded RAM Records in 1992 with Ant Miles, and RAM became a durable route from dancefloor records to international rooms. DJ Hype's Playaz did similar work for jump-up, the loud, hook-led branch that fills rooms and gets written about least. Hospital Records, started in 1996 by Tony Colman of London Elektricity and Chris Goss, turned the liquid end into a catalogue, a festival and a touring show. Together, those institutions helped make distinct branches of drum and bass legible outside their original local scenes.

The other thing that happened in those years is that the music kept turning up in the singles chart, which the scene has never quite known what to do with. Pendulum's Hold Your Colour, made in Perth by Rob Swire, Gareth McGrillen and Paul Harding and released in 2005, became one of the genre's best-selling albums. In 2012 the genre took its first UK number one, DJ Fresh's "Hot Right Now" with Rita Ora, and the run did not stop there: Rudimental's "Feel the Love" the same year and "Waiting All Night" in 2013, Sigma's "Nobody to Love" and "Changing" in 2014, Kenya Grace's "Strangers" in 2023, Chase & Status and Stormzy's "BACKBONE" in 2024. A guide is allowed to prefer other records and still has to count these. They document a sustained crossover that an account running from Metalheadz straight to Nia Archives would miss.

Since 2021 there has been a resurgence, and this time the numbers are attached to it: Spotify reported drum and bass streams up around 94 per cent between 2021 and 2024, with most of those listeners under 34, and Pitchfork wrote in 2021 about a rising zoomer affinity for the genre. Nia Archives is the name most attached to the revival; her 2024 album Silence Is Loud reached number 16 on the UK albums chart, and it does the thing the whole guide keeps circling back to, folding jungle's breakbeats and reggae feel back into a drum and bass record. The jungle guide covers that revival from the other end.

Where drum and bass is now.

There is no single contemporary drum and bass sound. Festival-facing dancefloor records, jungle-informed breakwork, jump-up and deeper label-led music share the same international circuit without forming one unified revival.

Today's drum and bass artists do not form one movement. The chart-facing records, Nia Archives' jungle-informed work, international neurofunk and long-running liquid and jump-up scenes described above coexist rather than replacing one another. The overlap with jungle is visible again, but the two identities have not collapsed into one. Drum and bass also has a back catalogue deep enough that a new listener can spend a year inside 1995 alone, while current producers keep using the same break-and-bass framework for different rooms and audiences.