2021: Back in the Room as Jungle Finds New Ears

For most of 2021 the dancefloor was still a rumour. Lockdown rules in the UK eased and tightened again, festivals were announced and cancelled, and drum & bass spent the first half of the year doing what it had done through 2020: living on headphones, livestreams and records. What changed was the quality of the attention. The people who had been listening alone for twelve months arrived at the reopening with strong opinions about what they wanted to hear, and some of them had not come through the traditional routes at all.

Planning was the hardest part of the job. Boomtown cancelled its 2021 edition in April, saying that without government-backed cancellation insurance it could not carry the financial risk of an event of its size. Other organisers went the opposite way and shrank. In the Czech Republic, Let It Roll could not stage its traditional summer festival, but returned to the airfield at Milovice with a smaller event called SAVE THE RAVE, which the festival remembers as Noisia's final performance at a summer festival. In London, Hospitality announced a September weekend in Beckenham Place Park to mark the 25th anniversary of Hospital Records, a south-east London park, following four editions of its Hospitality in the Park festival.

Then came 19 July. When the remaining COVID restrictions in England were lifted, queues formed outside clubs ahead of midnight, and Mixmag's report described crowds counting down the seconds outside Egg before the doors opened for the first time in sixteen months. It was a rule change, not a recovery, but the scenes outside the doors showed how much the circuit of rooms had meant to a music made for loud systems.

The year's strongest records were not designed as club hits. Calibre's Feeling Normal, released on 26 February through his own Signature Recordings, was described by UKF's writers as his first album fully at 140 bpm, drawing in ambient tones, murky dubstep, garage and loose breakbeat connections, with vocals from Cimone and DRS. UKF's writer noted that it arrived alongside the seventh instalment of his Shelflife series, from a producer who has said music comes out of him "like water".

In March, Dimension released his debut album Organ, seventeen tracks produced, engineered and mixed by himself, with guests including Liam Bailey, MC GQ and Clementine Douglas, and including 'Desire', his earlier collaboration with Sub Focus. It reached No. 65 on the Official Albums Chart, modest on paper but notable for a hard-edged drum & bass producer's first long-form statement, and UKF's contributors singled it out as raw, dark and instantly recognisable as his. UKF's year-end list shows how wide the field was: Fox's Squang Dangs in the Key of Vibes and Lenzman's A Little While Longer on The North Quarter, London Elektricity's Rebuilding Better Worlds and Nu:Tone's Little Spaces on Hospital, DRS's Light Language, Pola & Bryson's Beneath the Surface on Shogun Audio, Monty's Hit the Lights on 1985 Music and NC-17's Most Violent Year on Dispatch. Away from the established names, Aleph's Ego Death on Renraku and BCee's This Time Next Year on Spearhead marked a debut and twenty years in the game respectively.

The tracks list tells a similar story of range: Dimension with Liam Bailey on 'Lord's Prayer', Ivy Lab's 'Soul Sista' with Frank Carter III on Critical, Makoto's 'Spread Love' on Hospital, and a pair of collaborations involving dBridge, with Jubei on Carbon Music and with Instra:mental on CNVX. The minimal, patient end of the music was as visible as the festival-ready end.

PinkPantheress made old breakbeats reach a new audience. Her song 'Break It Off' went viral on TikTok built on Adam F's 1997 drum & bass hit 'Circles', which The FADER noted had been a UK top 20 single, and it sat on her mixtape to hell with it, released on 15 October. The charts were modest, with 'Pain' peaking at No. 35 and 'Break It Off' at No. 74 on the Official Singles Chart that year, but the importance was in the route: someone scrolling through a short clip could now meet the sound of the mid-1990s without any club, pirate station or record shop in between. This was a crossover, not a revival of drum & bass as a scene, and the mixtape sits closer to bedroom pop and garage in tone than to the dancefloor. It is a data point about discovery, not proof that a whole genre had turned mainstream.

Bass music's borders blurred in other ways. In June, Skrillex, Noisia, josh pan and Dylan Brady released 'Supersonic (My Existence)', which Dancing Astronaut placed at a half-time D&B tempo, and which showed how much Noisia's production language had spread beyond drum & bass. Yet the Dutch trio's own story was heading towards an ending: they announced a final London show at Printworks for 10 December, part of a farewell tour whose plans, first announced in 2019, the pandemic had delayed.

By the end of the year the reopening had happened, but the shape of the scene was different. Albums had been given time to land. A younger, more diverse set of jungle producers was getting attention on its own terms. Pop-adjacent artists were borrowing breaks, and veteran acts were saying goodbye. The next two years would show how many of those threads could turn into festivals, charts and a new global audience.