2022: Farewells, Festivals and a Top-Three Hit

By 2022 the question was no longer whether drum & bass could survive without its rooms, but what kind of scene would fill them. The answer was plural: a Czech festival that sold out for the first time, a Belgian field turned into a drum & bass and dubstep weekend, a pop single driven by a drum & bass beat reaching number three, and a Dutch trio closing down one of the genre's most influential careers. It was also a year of loss.

Let It Roll, the Czech festival that dates its history back twenty years, returned in 2022 after the pandemic gap and marked the anniversary with its first complete sell-out and a live performance by Pendulum. In Belgium, Rampage Open Air ran from 1 to 3 July at Kristalpark in Lommel, its second outdoor edition after the 2019 original. Organisers promised six stages and more than 250 acts, with around 150 drum & bass artists spread across neuro, jump-up, rollers and old-school bills, alongside a large dubstep line-up. The scale suggests how much continental demand had stored up.

In the UK, Boomtown came back in August after cancelling in 2021, spread across fifteen stages near Winchester. Mixmag's review described Shy FX packing the main Origin stage with 30,000 people, Critical Music's twentieth-anniversary set with Kasra and GQ, and SHERELLE playing jungle, footwork and drum & bass alongside MC Chickaboo. A queer drum & bass crew, Unorthodox, took over a stage. The festival was also billed as Noisia's last UK show.

Noisia had announced in 2019 that they would break up, and the pandemic delayed the farewell tour until 2022. In May the trio released Closer, their third and final album, twenty tracks of which eleven were new, with guests including Camo & Krooked, IMANU, Halogenix, Posij and Black Sun Empire, plus the earlier singles 'Foundations' with Mefjus and 'Supersonic' with Skrillex. Their final show was at Lowlands in the Netherlands in August, after the Boomtown set. For a group that had spent two decades building its catalogue, the ending was unusually deliberate.

UKF's year-end list offered a different picture of the year, built from albums that asked to be played start to finish. Wardown's second album, Wardown II, on Blu Mar Ten, dealt in nostalgia and imagined futures with samples of children predicting the years ahead. Bop x Subwave's Renaissance, on Hospital, was the debut album from a Russian duo, running from 1980s synths through post-dubstep to 170 bpm breaks. SATL's Gloom on The North Quarter spread across tempos and styles with vocals from Rhi, Saigo and Frank Carter III. SOLAH's King, also on Hospital, was praised as a soulful and positive record dedicated to her son, and UKF's reviewer noted it brought a vocalist long associated with collaborations into the foreground. Icicle's Post, on Vision, was a dark, techno-tinged record that its reviewer said the artist had suggested might be his last drum & bass LP.

The MOBO Awards also restored an electronic/dance category after more than a decade. Nia Archives won it; Resident Advisor credited Goldie and the Black Electronic Music Association with helping bring the category back. The category's return mattered beyond the individual winner, recognising Black British contributions to electronic music.

The charts told a quieter story. Venbee and Goddard's 'Messy in Heaven', which The Line of Best Fit described as a collaboration with the drum & bass producer Goddard, began charting on 6 October and peaked at No. 3 on the Official Singles Chart, on Columbia. It was a pop song first, with a drum & bass beat arriving after a solemn piano opening, so it is better read as another example of the sound travelling than as a victory for the scene's own record labels. Still, it put Goddard's production in front of audiences who had never heard a record from Critical, Ram or Hospital.

The year's heaviest news came on 27 February, when the family of MC Skibadee announced that he had died, aged 47. Mixmag reported tributes from across the music, including one calling him a favourite MC's favourite MC; he was also a member of the group SASASAS. For many listeners the MC is the voice that carries a rave, and losing one of the genre's best-loved hosts was felt as a loss of the room itself.

Festivals were back at scale, a Black British electronic music category had returned to the MOBOs, Noisia's catalogue was complete, and a drum & bass beat had reached the top three of the UK singles chart. The following year would show whether those signals could grow into a sustained climb.