2011: Big Stages, Many Directions

The new decade opened with drum & bass already speaking several dialects. One tune might be a noisy warehouse memory, the next a radio-ready collaboration, the next a meticulously engineered roller. Bigger audiences did not automatically mean a simpler genre.

Chase & Status released No More Idols in 2011, building a bridge between their rave and jungle foundations and a much larger audience. 'Blind Faith', featuring Liam Bailey, turned the feeling of a crowded British rave into a striking video. The album moved between D&B, dubstep, pop voices and hard-edged tracks without pretending they were all the same style.

The original 2011 album; useful as a listening overview.

Official 2011 music video; a dramatised look back at rave culture.

Camo & Krooked's Cross the Line arrived on Hospital Records on 3 October. Its energy and song-driven arrangements captured how far the music had travelled beyond its London origins. The pair came from Austria, but the sound belonged to a connected worldwide club community.

A track from the original 2011 Cross the Line album.

Listen to 'Anubis' after 'Blind Faith'. One pushes a bright, tightly controlled dancefloor rush; the other tells a wider cultural story. Both could thrive in the same decade. Online video networks such as UKF were making that diversity visible to listeners far beyond the record shop.

By 2011 drum & bass existed on several scales at once. A festival could turn a producer into a visual spectacle; a label could maintain an international fan base; a tiny club could still develop a new local style. The phrase "mainstream versus underground" was useful for arguments but inadequate as history. Artists moved between contexts, and a track could begin as a specialist DJ weapon before reaching thousands of listeners through video channels or a live show.

Chase & Status's No More Idols widened the audience for a production approach informed by drum & bass, dubstep, grime and pop songwriting. Its guest voices and big arrangements made it more like a broad UK bass-music statement than a narrow genre demonstration. That breadth was both the selling point and the source of controversy among purists. Understanding the album requires placing it inside the UK's wider musical ecosystem, not scoring every song against a single tempo.

Large-scale live presentation transformed what an electronic-music career could look like. Lighting, staging, artwork, promotional videos and collaborators became major creative decisions. For independent artists this offered possibilities but also created financial and organisational risks. The anonymous white label remained alive, yet audiences were increasingly encouraged to follow artists as recognisable personalities and long-running projects.

Camo & Krooked's Cross the Line, released on Hospital in October 2011, demonstrated another international route. Austrian producers could draw on the UK's scene vocabulary and answer it with their own emotional and technical ideas. A major label was no longer simply exporting a British sound; it was curating an international conversation. The duo's career shows how a distinct melodic sensibility could coexist with peak-time force.

Not every D&B artist needed a huge stage. Shogun Audio, Critical, Exit, Soul:r and other imprints fostered communities of producers and DJs whose records sounded less obviously commercial. Their importance was organisational as well as musical: a consistent night or label could guarantee that adventurous tracks would meet an audience prepared to hear them.

Women and MCs continued to play major roles in this infrastructure, often with far less visibility in album-centred retrospectives. MC DRS, for example, cannot be reduced to a decorative feature on a producer's tune; his identity spans hosting, spoken-word texture and collaborations across different corners of the genre.

A record could now travel through a specialist premiere, radio support, an official video and social sharing, rather than waiting only for vinyl distribution. The larger audience brought renewed debate over authenticity. But the strongest historical observation is how resilient the underlying rhythm had become: the next year would put drum & bass at the top of the British singles chart without stopping its underground life.