2025: Bigger Rooms, Older Records, New Albums

If 2024 was the year drum & bass reached the national chart, 2025 was the year it asked for bigger rooms. A park in Milton Keynes, an amphitheatre in Colorado, a Viennese concert hall and a pop-adjacent albums chart all hosted the music in the same twelve months, while the label catalogue behind it was being repressed and rediscovered.

The mood was confident rather than frantic. The year's most talked-about records came from artists who had been releasing for a decade or more, and the younger names stayed close to the clubs rather than reaching for a crossover.

Sub Focus was the year's dominant name in the club data. "On & On" with bbyclose, released in March, was Beatport's best-selling drum & bass track of 2025, and the producer finished second in the artist ranking behind Bou, with several more tracks in the top ten, including "Go Back" with John Summit and Julia Church and "Original Don" with Fireboy DML and IRAH. Jungle Cakes topped the label table again, with Critical Music, Gossip, UKF and Positiva behind it.

His fourth album, Contact, followed on 21 November on Positiva, fourteen tracks with guests including Grimes, John Summit, Katy B, bbyclose, Fireboy DML and IRAH. It entered the Official Albums Chart at number ten and went to number one on the Dance Albums Chart, according to the Official Charts Company. The album was announced in late September with a short trailer that gave the release date.

The live side of the story was a Colorado stage. On 30 October the WORSHIP collective of Sub Focus, Dimension, Culture Shock and 1991 played Red Rocks Amphitheatre near Denver, a show billed as the first official drum & bass headline night at the venue. That claim comes from press coverage and a concert review rather than from the venue, so treat it as billing, but the sell-out crowd of American fans was real evidence for how far the music had moved since drum & bass in the United States was a niche concern.

Pendulum released Inertia, their first album in fifteen years, on 22 August through Mushroom Music. It brought in guests from rock and metal, including Bullet For My Valentine, AWOLNATION and Scarlxrd, and it reached number eight on the Official Albums Chart and number one on the Dance Albums Chart. Music Week reported that the release had been moved a week earlier, from 29 to 22 August, after Sabrina Carpenter announced an album, a reminder that drum & bass acts now schedule against pop.

Two weeks earlier, on 9 August, the band headlined Milton Keynes National Bowl. Music Week described it as their first headline slot there and as their biggest hard-ticketed show, with 30,000 tickets sold. For fans of the group's early records the new material was divisive in the way big comebacks are, but as a commercial event it showed there was still a large audience for an act with roots in the 2000s drum & bass boom.

The 160 bpm and jungle underground produced its own highlights. Sherelle's surprise debut album With A Vengeance arrived on 9 April through her label Method 808. Resident Advisor counted ten tracks, one guest vocalist, George Riley on "Freaky (Just My Type)", and a sound it called a "rally cry for the 160 scene". UKF's year-end artist piece picked her out for a run that included Glastonbury and The Roundhouse.

Other names that UKF flagged: Badger, certified UK gold according to the site, Neffa-T, Eluun and Verbz, whose mini-album with Zar, In Time, was a high point for melodic drum & bass.

Vienna provided the year's most unusual setting. Camo & Krooked premiered Red Bull Symphonic: Johann Strauss 2025 Edition at the Danube Island Festival, then played two sold-out concerts at the Konzerthaus in September with the Wiener Symphoniker and conductor Christian Kolonovits. A live album came out on 21 November. It followed their earlier Red Bull Symphonic performance in 2020 and tied drum & bass to a Strauss anniversary rather than treating it as a novelty.

Old records got a second life as well. Goldie and London Records issued a thirtieth-anniversary edition of Timeless, his 1995 debut album, on 7 November, with remastered double-vinyl and cassette editions, plus a 500-copy hand-pressed run made with The Vinyl Factory. Ten percent of the proceeds from that run were pledged to War Child, according to coverage of the announcement.

In the Netherlands, the generation that followed Noisia's break-up regrouped. Thys, formerly of Noisia, joined Holly, Machinedrum and Salvador Breed in VIER for the album IIII on VISION Recordings in the autumn, while Nik Roos and Former released as Ring Noord. Elsewhere, TF Word noted a dedicated drum & bass festival in Bali, Locus, and Dimension on the bill at EDC Thailand, and Pendulum playing a back-to-back set with Deadmau5 at Ultra Miami.

On 29 October Dillinja confirmed the death of Clarky (Dean Clark), a London jungle DJ and producer who had worked at Soho's Blackmarket Records and played Metalheadz's Blue Note parties, as Mixmag reported the next day. He had records on Monta Music and Rewired and an Eruption FM residency where Stevie Hyper D joined him.

The year set several dates in the calendar. In December, Reading & Leeds named Chase & Status among the headliners of the 2026 festivals, a bill of six in which an electronic act sat beside Charli xcx, Dave, RAYE, Fontaines D.C. and Florence + The Machine. Hospital Records, founded in 1996, was heading towards its thirtieth year.