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.
Modern dance music was born in places like Chicago, Detroit, and New York, but the UK has undeniably produced some of its most memorable variants. Hardcore, jungle, drum & bass, 2-step, grime, dubstep … They’re all iconic genres in their own right, but what about UK funky? That sound—a shuffling, syncopated and uniquely British amalgamation of house, broken beat, garage, and Afro-Caribbean rhythms like soca—first emerged in the mid 2000s, and it’s something that many dance music fans aren’t all that familiar with, especially if they’re A) not British and B) under 30 years old. Funky simply hasn’t gotten much sustained attention during the last decade-plus; though the genre never officially died, it’s largely disappeared from the spotlight. Press coverage is scarce, and on the rare occasions it does make it into the broader dance music discourse, it’s often framed as something purely historical.
Similar fates have befallen plenty of other once-trendy genres, but the casual dismissal of UK funky does minimize, and at times flat-out ignore, two very important things:
1. The genre’s seismic impact during the late 2000s.
2. The music is not only still being made today, but has also quietly been experiencing a significant resurgence—even if many of the artists involved don’t necessarily subscribe to the “funky” tag.
We’ll get to those contemporary funky practitioners shortly, but first, perhaps a quick refresher is in order, particularly for those who missed the genre the first time around. In the early days, it was often called “funky house,” and the music was first produced and championed by artists like Supa D, Fingaprint, and Apple. (The latter’s “De Siegalizer” and “Dutty Dance” were some of the genre’s first defining anthems.) Marcus Nasty, who’d initially made his name in the grime circuit as a member of N.A.S.T.Y Crew, claims to have coined the term “UK funky,” and played an instrumental role in its initial rise, spreading the gospel via his pirate radio broadcasts on Rinse FM. It wasn’t the only sound popping off in the UK at the time, but with dubstep fixated on deep and dubby bassweight, and grime increasingly prioritizing MCs and live shows, funky offered a danceable pathway back into the club.
Part of that was political. In 2008, London’s Metropolitan Police implemented Form 696, which effectively required promoters wanting an event license to detail both what sort of music would be played and the target audience expected to attend. It quickly made putting on nights devoted to grime and other genres with sizable Black audiences incredibly difficult. Funky, however, with its more dressed-up aesthetic, could more easily get around that. On a purely musical level, the music’s bubbly energy and soulful grooves were also something that, crucially, wouldn’t scare the girls away.
As funky’s momentum grew, so did the volume of quality tunes. Standouts included dark, drum-led bangers like Lil Silva’s “Seasons” and Roska’s “Elevated Levels,” along with poppier vocal fare like Donae’O’s “Party Hard” and Paleface & Kyla’s “Do You Mind? (Crazy Cousinz Remix),” which remains arguably the most defining funky tune of all time. At the same time, artists like Scratcha DVA, Cooly G, iLL BLU, and even Rinse FM founder Geeneus began tinkering at the edges of the genre, often taking it into deeper, weirder territory. That drew even more people, many of them dubstep and garage castoffs who’d taken an interest in the hybridized, bass-centric sounds being played at club nights like FWD>>. The soundworld they occupied is now usually referred to as bass music, but in the late 2000s, words like post-dubstep, future garage and even funkstep were being thrown around to describe this “new” phenomenon, which in some ways was just an evolution of the UK funky sound.
The music press had largely missed funky’s initial wave—probably because the genre first took shape in predominantly Black spaces, which had little representation among the tastemaker set. Once they caught on, funky’s originators were occasionally acknowledged, but it was newer labels/crews like Night Slugs, Hessle Audio, Hemlock, and Numbers that received the bulk of the praise and attention, from journalists and trend-chasing fans alike. (Hyperdub, which wasn’t a new operation, also benefited from the rush of post-dubstep hype, as its forays into funky were excitedly gobbled up by the same folks who’d previously fawned over the label’s releases from artists like Burial and Kode9.) None of these outlets could truly be described as funky labels, and were at best funky-adjacent, but what they were doing was deemed the “hot new thing.” And seeing as how they were largely run and populated by young, culturally savvy creative types who were mostly white and mostly middle-class (i.e. the same sort of people who made up most of the dance music media and industry), it’s not surprising that their ascent was so rapid.
Meanwhile, the public perception of “proper” funky was starting to deteriorate, partially thanks to the rise of what came to be known as skank tunes. Something of a precursor to today’s TikTok viral dance trends, these songs—which included Gracious K’s “Migraine Skank” and K.I.G.’s “Head, Shoulders, Kneez & Toez”— became bona fide chart-pop hits in the UK, but they were also gimmicky and tied to flash-in-the-pan dance crazes. As their popularity faded, so did the credibility of the genre, which was increasingly viewed as a vapid strain of kiddie music. Within what felt like a matter of months, both artists and tastemakers began to distance themselves from the term “funky,” and by the early 2010s, the genre was widely considered to be all but dead.
History, however, has shown time and time again that no electronic genre is ever truly dead, and as the decade continued, a handful of artists did continue to fly the funky flag. The London-based artist Roska, who got his start in garage and grime and grew up ensconced in bass culture—his father literally had his own soundsystem—was arguably the most prominent among them. After dropping his self-titled 2010 debut album on Rinse in 2010, he returned to the label with a second full-length, Roska:2, in 2012, and has continued releasing music ever since, mostly via his own Roska Kicks & Snares imprint. The label might actually be his most important contribution to the genre, as RKS kept its doors open throughout funky’s darkest days and is still active (and prolific) today. Over the years, it’s not only been home to Roska’s music and that of funky OGs like Champion, Fuzzy Logik, MA1, D-Malice, and Hardhouse Banton; it’s also been a launching pad for a new generation of talents, such as SPD, KTM, and Calm Stiege, the co-founder of the cheekily named Funky Adjacent radio show and event series.
However, few of these producers, old or new, would strictly describe themselves as funky artists. The rise of post-dubstep made a virtue out of hybridity, and while echoes of funky have occasionally been heard in the output of labels like Livity Sound, bass music on the whole has spent the past 15 years activity splicing together bits of seemingly disparate sounds. Even among those artists who were some of funky’s earliest supporters, the genre lost much of its initial luster during the 2010s as UK clubs, particularly those with predominantly Black crowds, were greeted by a rising tide of African dance music. Continuing a dialogue that had already been going on for decades, DJs and producers began picking up on deep house, gqom, amapiano and other sounds from the African continent, and before long, they started putting their own, distinctly UK spin on them.
Much of this energy has been concentrated toward the housier end of the spectrum, where Supa D and his houSupa events have taken the lead in a scene that’s increasingly billed as Afro-house. Marcus Damon is another key figure in this circuit, which actively pulls from amapiano and other African rhythms, but is also informed by funky and, more generally, a distinctly British love of soundsystem culture. The houSupa label, which Supa D runs in collaboration with several other artists, was launched in 2019, and has since become an essential outpost for all things Afro-house, releasing music from hotly tipped acts like Scotti Dee, Mr Taffa, and DJ IC, amongst many others—the catalog even includes a record from funky veteran Apple.
Afro-house is slinky, sexy, and soulful, but for those interested in bassier exploits, there is longtime Hyperdub affiliate Scratcha DVA (a.k.a. Scratchclart). The London artist, who’s always been guided by a playfully adventurous spirit, has assumed a kind of leadership role in recent years. Inspired by the loping rhythms of gqom and amapiano, he’s spent years crafting UK-South African hybrids, many of them as eccentric as the London producer himself. Scratcha’s own DRMTRK imprint has been the primary vehicle for these club experiments, and the label has also been home to music from Dutch talents JSXND7RS and Wes Lee, South African acts Menzi, Mxshi Mo, and Omagoqa, and fellow Brits like Ossie, the aforementioned Scotti Dee, and NKC. (The latter is also an excellent writer, and has done more than most to not only actively document the current Afro -house landscape, but also speak to the ways that the musical exchange between the UK and South Africa is often far from equal.) What DRMTRK is doing isn’t technically funky—to be honest, it’s not really any one thing, which is a big part of its appeal. But with its affinity for crooked drum patterns and rubbery basslines, not to mention the music’s often-effervescent vibe, there’s no question that the funky is in the label’s DNA.
DRMTRK isn’t alone on that front. Club Djembe, a party and label based in Bristol, celebrates African and Caribbean rhythms, along with the UK sounds inspired by them. Its growing catalog contains releases from funky (and funky-adjacent) British artists like PIGMNT, fiyahdred, Ronnie Loko, and DJ Polo. (The latter has also appeared twice on Livity Sound, once in collaboration with London duo Tribal Brothers, whose lively, percussion-led music actively builds on the legacy of UK funky.) Moving further afield, UK-based outposts More Time (headed up by Ahahadream and Sam Interface) and Nervous Horizon (co-founded by TSVI) are two of the most celebrated contemporary labels in all of bass music, and while they both apply a global lens to their curation, there’s no question that the off-kilter rhythms and big drums of first-wave funky informed their musical worldview. The same could be said for the prolific Scuffed and the still-young re:lax; the latter is intriguingly bringing elements of techno into the mix, and reached a new high-water mark with the recent Despair EP from Berlin-based Brit Harba.
Speaking of producers, UK riddim specialists like Hagan, Karen Nyame KG, and Murder He Wrote are just a few of the modern artists who can be found on the funky family tree, and countless others are following in their footsteps, both inside and outside of the British Isles. (Down in South Africa, a new house variant called 3-step has been gaining steam in recent years, and though it’s more directly related to amapiano and Afro-house than the UK hardcore continuum, it also bears traces of funky lineage.) A full-blown funky revival has yet to occur—in truth, the amapiano and Afro-house scenes are much bigger at the moment, both in terms of popularity and the sheer number of artists involved. But the funky flame, which at one point had been reduced to little more than a flicker, does now appear to be burning bright, or at the very least, holding steady.
As exciting as it is to see fresh faces finding their way into funky, it’s worth noting that a few older heads have returned to the fray as well. Marcus Nasty is heading up a new collective and label called The Nasty Bros, and Night Slugs co-founder Bok Bok has been channeling a bit of funky magic with his ongoing Hardbody Dubs EP series, on which he infuses club classics with low-slung, stutter-stepping rhythms. His former label partner L-Vis 1990, who recently returned to that moniker after taking an extended side quest into big-room-ready house music, has also clearly been reading from the funky playbook on some of his most recent productions. Even the mercurial Donae’O, who’s had a tendency to disappear from the public arena for long periods of time, recently hopped on Twitter with talk of bringing funky back. (In fairness, making that sort of proclamation is something he’s done every year or so for the past decade-plus, so take his words with a grain of salt.)
Whatever ultimately happens, funky is a living, breathing genre, not a historical footnote. It’s true that the music has evolved and expanded, and many artists are hesitant to wholeheartedly embrace the funky tag, but when has that not been the case in electronic music circles, particularly when it comes to bass-centric sounds? (The fact that the ultra-generic “bass music” descriptor is still in widespread circulation, more than a decade after it first surfaced, is downright laughable, and shows just how reluctant most artists are to be placed in even the flimsiest of genre boxes.) At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what name is used; this music is being made, and played, and a lot of it is quite good. And just to make that clear, I’ve compiled a selection of tracks, all of them from the past few years, that demonstrate just how potent this sound can be.