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The Zoomer Embrace of Drum ’n’ Bass

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Reimagined by young artists like PinkPantheress, piri, and Vierre Cloud, UK club styles from the 1990s have found a new audience on TikTok.

PinkPantheress
PinkPantheress is leading the drum ’n’ bass revival on TikTok. Photo by Brent McKeever, treatment by Maddy Price.

In late August, Charli XCX went on BBC Radio 1’s Future Sounds and introduced one of her favorite songs of the moment: “I run to this song at the gym sometimes … it’s called ‘soft spot,’ and it goes so hard.” A sweet pop tune set to skittering drum ’n’ bass percussion, “soft spot” was made by two 22-year-olds in Manchester named Sophie McBurnie and Tommy Villiers, who met on a date earlier this year and hit it off. The song is about the nervousness and affection McBurnie, who performs under the moniker piri, felt toward her now-boyfriend: “I can’t help it,” she sighs in the chorus, “you’re in my soft spot.”

Defined by fast, syncopated breakbeats and heavy basslines, drum ’n’ bass emerged from UK underground rave culture—specifically the jungle scene—in the early ’90s and influenced later subgenres like dubstep and grime. Villiers has been making tracks in this style since he was 17, DJ-ing house parties and sharing instrumentals to SoundCloud. While he and piri had experimented previously with disco, “soft spot” was the result of piri toying around atop a drum ’n’ bass beat. Her vocals are light and hazy, and she skims over the fast-paced melody in the verses in a way that resembles Ariana Grande. The single was officially released on June 4, and while the initial reaction was modest—Villiers and piri were elated when a local radio program played it—attention began accelerating after a few weeks. Spotify spotlighted “soft spot” on its Fresh Finds playlist, and the song started taking off on TikTok. It now has 5.6 million Spotify streams and over 130,000 TikToks featuring it.

Cloud posted “moment” to SoundCloud in July 2019, but it really ascended in 2020. A 17-year-old British gamer named benjyfishy, arguably the best Fortnite player in the world, used the song as outro music in his streams that spring; according to data from Chartmetric, “moment” began surging on TikTok several months later in October 2020. The song has been circulating on the app for over a year, incorporated into various edits (anime, K-pop) and featured in an “aesthetic” trend (users recording themselves organizing icons on their iPhone home screen); a similar song that borrows its drums and uses the same vocal sample, HeathcliffTheBandit’s “Bus Ticket,” also gained steam. PinkPantheress’ rise has also renewed interest in “moment,” which currently has 61 million Spotify streams.

The song is essentially a flip of “A New Kind of Love,” an unreleased recording by the early 2000s British electropop duo Frou Frou, comprised of Imogen Heap and producer Guy Sigsworth. Like many young internet dwellers, Cloud had first heard Heap on Clams Casino’s legendary cloud-rap instrumental “I’m God.” Heap’s voice is an amazing instrument—earthy and tactile, yet so pristine that it feels almost synthetic. On “A New Kind of Love,” she does something between yodeling and exhaling, pushing out air in wordless stretches. Cloud pitched and sped up her vocals, layering them over a rattling drum ’n’ bass pattern. “I believe drum ’n’ bass and UK garage are going to be the next big genres, or at least rhythms,” he tells me, explaining that “trap is getting very played out right now.” He has experimented with a variety of genres, previously finding success making lo-fi beats, and his production of “moment” reminds me of several YouTube editing styles: In the middle, the song briefly quiets like you’ve stepped into the bathroom at a party, and near the end, it decelerates and dips down in pitch like a slowed + reverb video.

At the center of this wave of interest in drum ’n’ bass is an exceptionally ordinary story: a song—or several—goes viral and it exposes a mass of people to a sound they previously didn’t know. If you look at the artists associated with PinkPantheress on the “Fans Also Like” section of her Spotify—which is determined by the share of fans artists have in common, plus whether they have overlapping descriptions in music sites and forums—the top two results are Eyedress, a Filipino singer-songwriter whose biggest hit is post-punk, and Luci4, a glitched-out trap experimentalist. The three artists don’t have immediate sonic commonalities, but they’re all young and “alternative,” with viral hits in the past year or so on TikTok. Planet Rave may be organized under the loose heading of bedroom-oriented dance music, but it reflects Spotify’s belief in “curat[ing] for culture” rather than genre; selections runs the gamut from “moment” to Isabella Lovestory’s reggaeton and Shygirl’s horny raps. 

You can be cynical about this kind of strategy, but it also reflects a basic reality: that fidelity to one sound or cultural ecosystem is a thing of the past, and the future hinges on endless collisions and recombinations. Piri and Tommy Villiers also make house music; Vierre Cloud is starting to produce future riddim; PinkPantheress has said she wants to explore R&B. Even the faces of this new wave of club music aren’t insistent on staying with it.

 

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