2023: Drum & Bass Reaches the Top of the Charts

If 2021 was a year of reopening and 2022 a year of return, 2023 was the year drum & bass was heard, in large numbers, by people who had not been going to the clubs. It reached the top of the UK singles chart, produced two further top-ten hits for a veteran production duo, and showed up in Billboard's year-end commentary as one of the sonic trends of the year. The record was less tidy than the headlines, though: the same twelve months saw a large London venue close and one of the genre's best-loved voices die.

On 13 October Kenya Grace's 'Strangers' reached Number 1 on the Official Singles Chart. According to the Official Charts Company, she wrote and produced it herself, and she became only the second woman in UK chart history, after Kate Bush with 'Running Up That Hill' in 2022, to reach No. 1 with a single fully written, performed and produced by herself. The record, on FFRR, is a wistful vocal built on a drum & bass rhythm, and Billboard described it as pushing a low-key, simmering style of the genre further into the mainstream, while noting it was also the first Hot Dance/Electronic Songs No. 1 written, produced and sung solely by a woman. It was not a record from the genre's own labels, but a bedroom-pop song that adopted its tempo.

The other mainstream story belonged to Chase & Status. 'Baddadan', with Bou, Flowdan, IRAH, Trigga and Takura, first charted on 10 August and peaked at No. 5, the duo's sixth UK top-ten hit and the first for the other five artists, as the Official Charts Company noted; the chart body described it as a dancehall-inspired track that "trips on its EDM beat" into the rave. A second hit, 'Disconnect' with Becky Hill, first charted in late July and peaked at No. 6, and Billboard's year-end list contrasted it with Kenya Grace, noting that Hill's record showed the genre "can also fully wallop". In November the duo released the album 2 Ruff, Vol. 1, which reached No. 4 on the Official Albums Chart. The sound at the heart of it, MC-led, bass-heavy and rooted in grime and dancehall as much as in the breaks, echoed the Black British musical lineage that drum & bass had always drawn on.

While pop-facing records dominated the headlines, UKF's year-end album list showed a scene still working in long form. Technimatic's For All of Us was framed by its reviewer as a response to a pandemic, wars and economic crisis, a record meant to lift the spirits. P Money x Whiney's Streets, Love & Other Stuff on Hospital pushed grime and drum & bass together, with guests including Example, Ocean Wisdom and Dreps. Break's Digital World, his fifth album on his own Symmetry Recordings, featured MC Fats, Liam Bailey, Fox and Charli Brix. DLR's Money Till I Got None was a rough twelve-track record about the trade-off between the craft and the conventions of streaming and social media. And DJ Marky's The Time Is Right, which UKF's writer described as moving through liquid, jump-up, minimal and funk, drew on funk, jazz, soul and Brazilian bass, almost two decades after his debut album In Rotation.

Printworks, the large London venue that had hosted drum & bass nights, closed on 1 May 2023. The final season included DNB All Stars nights, with Bou, Inja and K Motionz among the names, on 19 February and 26 March. Mixmag noted that reports had suggested the site would reopen after redevelopment, but the closure of a room of that size was still a reminder that the post-reopening boom rested on fragile infrastructure.

The scene also lost one of its great voices. News that MC Fats had died broke on Friday 10 March. Born Wildale Spencer and working from a background in soul, rare groove and reggae, he had brought his style to jungle and drum & bass sets since the early 1990s, and appeared on records such as DJ Hype's 'Peace Love and Unity'. UKF recalled Calibre dedicating a wheel-up to his 'Drop It Down' at a London AV show; Break's Digital World features him.

Outside the UK, interest was growing in more measurable ways. Chartmetric's analysis of Spotify found that 101 of the 379 tracks added to the Mint playlist in 2023 were by drum & bass artists, compared with 77 in 2020, and that the editorial Massive Drum & Bass playlist had roughly doubled its audience during the year. The same report suggested many American Gen Z listeners had probably first met the sound through TikTok or in house and dubstep sets during the pandemic. Billboard's year-end dance list marked drum'n'bass as one of the clear sonic trends of the year. In the Czech Republic, Let It Roll expanded to five stages at its 2023 summer edition, including the new Botanica stage.

By December the pattern was clear: the sound had reached pop charts and American streaming playlists, while the labels and clubs that built it were still stretched. The next year would test whether the crossover could be turned into lasting infrastructure; Chase & Status, for one, were named Producer of the Year at the BRIT Awards 2024 and were due to perform with Becky Hill at the ceremony.