Shawn Reynaldo is a Barcelona-based writer and editor who specializes in electronic music. His First Floor newsletter often zeroes in on developments in the genre’s corresponding industry and culture, but the Second Floor column is designed to spotlight the music itself, examining trends, recommending releases, and keeping tabs on what’s happening both on and off the dancefloor.
The history of jungle dates back more than 30 years, and in that period, the genre has been declared dead many times. Some of that can be chalked up to interscene bickering—from jump-up to clownstep and everything in between, junglists do seem to have a unique knack for hating on every new iteration of the music that comes along. But during the late 2000s and early 2010s, the “jungle is dead” narrative was even more prevalent among the press and electronic music’s wider tastemaker set, which assumed that the music’s disappearance from fashion-forward social circles meant that the genre had run out of steam everywhere. A 2009 Wired article perfectly captured the sentiment of the time, opening with the lines, “The jungle music sub-genre of drum-and-bass has been widely thought to have been played out. Just about the only place it has been heard of late is on the Ali G show.” That was not an accurate assessment. While the days of Björk running around with Goldie were indeed long in the past, it’s telling that during this supposed low point, acts like Andy C and Pendulum were still headlining festivals and drawing massive crowds all around the globe. Jungle may have been supplanted by the harder, techier, and more aggressive sounds of drum & bass in those days, but neither sound had disappeared, or even declined all that much, regardless of what the self-appointed cool kids were saying.
For quite some time now, jungle has been regenerating, often right under the nose of those who previously dismissed it. The signs of life should have been obvious, but even when the electronic music vanguard fawned over the jungle experiments on Machinedrum’s 2013 album, Vapor City, or applauded the appearance of Paul Woolford’s hardcore- and jungle-indebted Special Request alias, the projects were usually framed as engagements with history, not contributions to a still-vibrant genre. The tastemakers, simply put, weren’t digging deeper; they had to catch up, and it took them years to do so. Perhaps that’s why they've now spent more than half a decade loudly declaring that jungle is back, repeatedly hailing a “new generation” of artists who are supposedly returning the genre to its former glory. In 2018, DJ Mag heralded the “Return of Jungle”, and Beatportal invited readers to “Meet the Artist Defining Jungle’s New Era” two years later. The Guardian declared in 2021 that “The Jungle and Drum’n’bass Revivial Is Upon Us,” and earlier this year, Clash gave us a list of “Seven Jungle Artists Carrying The Torch For The NewGen.”
Considering the speed with which most contemporary music trends blink in and out of existence, the current jungle “revival” has been going on for an unusually long time—and significantly longer than the genre’s oft-celebrated golden era, which ran from approximately 1993 until 1996. Adding to the bizarreness of the situation, the cadre of artists held up as jungle’s “new generation” has remained remarkably consistent over the years, with names like SHERELLE, Nia Archives, Tim Reaper, Coco Bryce, and Sully popping up again and again. That’s not a knock on their talents, which are well established at this point, but with each passing year, the industry’s ongoing insistence that these artists are “new” does become a bit harder to swallow.
Tim Reaper, for instance, has been following jungle and drum & bass since he was a teenager. (As it happens, his love for the music was first triggered by an Andy C mix CD that came with a copy of Mixmag.) Over the past 15-plus years, the London artist has obsessively followed the genre, to the point where he’s now a veritable jungle encyclopedia—it’s not a coincidence that he got a near-perfect score (and bested some verifiable legends) in a blind test of 90s drum & bass tunes. In his own productions, there’s a clear reverence for golden era sounds; that same sensibility extends to the curation of his hyper-prolific Future Retro London imprint, which has become a platform for both fresh faces and established veterans alike. And yet, Reaper, maybe more than any other artist, continues to be touted as a generational torchbearer. Just last month, his collaborative full-length with Melbourne-based producer Kloke, In Full Effect, arrived via Hyperdub. It had the distinction of being the first-ever jungle album in the storied label’s 20-year history, but the accompanying promo blurb also made sure to describe its creators as “two big guns from the new wave of junglists.”
When it comes to music industry improprieties, stretching the truth about an artist’s newness isn’t exactly a grave infraction. In a hyper-competitive marketplace, it’s hard to blame anyone looking for a promotional advantage, especially when said advantage is relatively harmless. (And for what it’s worth, these not-quite-accurate storylines are far more likely to come from journalists, promoters, and publicists than the artists themselves.) Still, when it comes to this particular wave of jungle, the narrative of “new” does seem to be unusually pervasive. Take Sully, a UK artist who I not so subtly said “might be the best producer in the world” in a Second Floor column earlier this year. His first record came out in 2007, and he began experimenting with jungle sounds with 2014’s Blue EP. Like Reaper, he routinely takes cues from the 90s in his work, and in the past several years, he too has repeatedly been celebrated as one of jungle’s most exciting new voices.
There are exceptions, of course. Nia Archives is only 25 years old, which is probably why she’s more comfortable than many of her junglist peers when it comes to experimenting with pop and refashioning the genre for the TikTok generation. PinkPantheress goes even further in that direction, and there’s a sizable cohort of internet-pilled young artists poised to follow in her footsteps. Certain veteran junglists might not like it, but these artists are bringing new audiences into the proverbial tent, and surely some of those listeners have made the leap into headier material, both past and present. That process is ongoing, but within the confines of what’s often referred to as “underground” dance music—a space which, ironically, tends to be pretty conservative when it comes to aesthetics—the “new-ish faces perpetuating old-school sounds” dynamic is much more common, particularly when it comes to jungle.
Rupture London, headed up by Mantra and Double O, is arguably the most important jungle- and drum & bass-focused club night in the world, and is known for showcasing the genre’s most essential new sounds. It’s also in the midst of celebrating its 18th anniversary. Kid Lib, a UK producer who’s made several appearances on Future Retro London and also runs the hotly tipped Green Bay Wax imprint, has releases dating back to 2013. Dutch artist Coco Bryce, who heads up the Myor label and its various offshoots, has been making jungle for more than ten years, and that began after he’d already spent another decade-plus dabbling in other corners of dance music. Berlin-based Samurai Music, led by New Zealander Presha, is one of modern jungle’s key outposts, and it’s been going since 2007. UK producer Alex Eveson, better known these days as Dead Man’s Chest, put out his first record that same year, but since his acclaimed Western Lore imprint wasn’t set up until 2017, it technically qualifies as one of the younger labels that routinely gets lumped in with jungle’s “new wave.”
Instead of referring to these artists as “new,” perhaps “new to people who usually don’t pay much attention to jungle” would be a better characterization. When asked about what sparked the current surge of interest in the genre, Tim Reaper has repeatedly pointed to the moment when Lobster Theremin, Sneaker Social Club, Unknown to the Unknown and other labels that weren’t native to jungle suddenly took an interest in releasing music from him and his contemporaries. Were these imprints hopping on a trend, at least to a certain degree? Probably, but that’s part of the curation process at most record labels, and what’s ultimately most important is that in this instance, they served as a sort of gateway, introducing jungle to listeners who otherwise might not have paid the genre any mind.
Though the “jungle is dead” narrative from the 2000s and 2010s was inaccurate, large swaths of the electronic music sphere—including much of the media—swallowed it wholesale. It now seems that undoing that process has required the distribution of an equally inaccurate narrative about the appearance of a “new generation” of junglists. That’s not ideal, but since it seems to have gotten a lot of people—and a lot of young people in particular—to start listening to jungle again, maybe it’s not the worst thing in the world.
New-school jungle may sound a lot like old-school jungle, and few of its most prominent practitioners are wide-eyed rave rookies, but it seems that historical precision has, not surprisingly, taken a backseat to a good story. Nevertheless, if the electronic music world insists on perpetuating the idea that jungle has undergone some sort of generational changing of the guard, a better effort can at least be made to do more than just highlight the same handful of names ad infinitum. In that spirit, I’ve put together a selection of five recent-ish tunes from “NextGen” producers whose work has so far flown beneath the radar of most casual jungle fans. Although I can’t guarantee that everyone listed is legitimately “new,” I can say that all of these tracks are well worth a listen—even the ones that sound like they’re 30 years old.