004! What's going on with UK Garage?
Is this the biggest garage track of all time?
“The entire history of dance music is about the creation of potent clichés – sounds and effects so good that other people couldn’t resist copying them and caning them to death” - Simon Reynolds
In the age of Spotify, it feels like we hit a major milestone every month. As more people adopt streaming and the platforms finally become available worldwide, the bar only gets higher and higher, and the records get smashed like never before. When public Spotify records began, in 2014, the most streamed artist that year was Ed Sheeran, with 860 million streams. Eight years later, in 2022, Bad Bunny holds that title, with the slightly larger figure of 18.5 billion.
Last week, a new streaming record caught my eye. Korean artist (and BTS member) Jung Kook broke the record for the fastest song to surpass one billion streams in Spotify history, at a breakneck speed of sixteen weeks. On top of that, the song has been number one on the global chart for nine weeks, and is currently in the top ten tracks in over thirty countries. It’s broken two Guinness world records, and hit number three in the UK chart.
The song in question, “Seven” featuring Latto, is a UK garage song. Ok, it’s a pop song, but still, a garage song, produced by a Canadian and an American. As I mentioned in a previous newsletter edition, this song feels heavily reminiscent of the oeuvre of Craig David - not only because of its foundations in UKG, but it also feels like a strong nod to his hit R&B song “7 Days”.
It’s certainly not the first time a K-pop track has used a garage beat, it’s a trend that’s been going for years. There have been tracks like SHINee’s “Prism”, Twice’s “Oxygen” and more recently NewJeans “Cool With You”. It’s not surprising that when the Korean pop factory looks for an uptempo way to create a hit, they look to UKG - it’s a bona fide formula for combining energy with syrupy vocals.
But it seems as though Jung Kook’s success speaks to something larger in the pop sphere right now. We’ve seen waves of UKG come and go since the genre’s first entry into the pop landscape over twenty years ago - from Disclosure to AJ Tracey & Mabel to Jorja Smith. Since 2021, there has been a strong uptick in the pop-UKG track, particularly since the arrival on the scene of the UK’s biggest new star, PinkPantheress, and her hit “Pain” that samples UKG classic “Flowers”.
This summer, pop lad of the moment Troye Sivan released “Got Me Started”, which has an understated 2-step shuffle to it, and without reeling off a huge list, we’ve had garage interpretations from Fred Again & Future, Charli XCX & Rina Sawayama, ZAYN of One Direction fame, and of course Bad Boy Chiller Crew in the past 18 months. This Friday, PinkPantheress releases a new album, and the first single “Capable of Love” keeps the UKG flavour going strong.
Perhaps what’s most interesting about the UKG universe in 2023 is that the “underground” (if that’s something that even exists anymore) seems to be in its most healthy and thriving place in years. There are now countless young UK producers making garage, speed garage and bassline, new DJs and labels cropping up, and enough new music to prop up numerous UKG nights even here in New York. While it can feel like the speed garage remix is the new baile funk edit, it does generally feel like there’s a lot of fun back in dance music, and there’s enough diversity across the new school of UKG that you can find whatever taste you have in it: dark & brooding, saccharine vocals, drill features, ragga inflections. There are new figureheads in people like Conducta and Interplanetary Criminal, new labels to look to in Time Is Now / Shall Not Fade and Instinct, and even acts who can take on America - like Sammy Virji who just sold out over ~1200 tickets in Brooklyn.
I’ve been thinking lately about whether anything sounds “new” anymore and what that means, and whether it is really true that “culture has come to a standstill”, as this piece in the New York Times argues. When we’re in an age where ~50% of movies are reboots or sequels, and music catalogue marketing is at an all-time high, it can sometimes feel that stagnation is the status quo. Perhaps we have plateaued in the possibilities for technical innovation in music, for now?
While nostalgia for the ‘00s is riding high, the new school of garage doesn’t sound exactly like the old stuff, though. In a DJ set, tunes from 2023 don’t often sit well next to the old school - there’s a quality and cleanness to the tracks that can feel very different sonically. In the way that Amy Winehouse sounded undoubtedly inspired by the past, but not actually of that time, this new wave feels more like a synthesis, and a fun one at that. Does it need to feel resoundingly new if it simply bangs?
Don’t get me wrong, there is a bog of bad stuff to wade through, from things that sound just plain derivative, to using lowest common denominator samples, to downright cheesy-in-a-bad-way. I’ve waded through for you. Here are some recommendations from the new UKG wave. Listen to all of them in a playlist here, along with the pop songs mentioned above in the first half of the playlist.
Burial, but like you’re dancing instead of crying.
Instinct is a reliable UKG label that’s been around since 2017, and has released tracks from mainstays like Interplanetary Criminal, Soul Mass Transit System and Main Phase.
Americans inspired UKG in the first place, and now we have INVT (Miami), Introspekt (California) and Swami (NYC) doing their thing for the new generation.
Hudson Mohawke & Nikki Nair: Set The Roof
Released on Warp earlier this year. It’s so polished that it’s dirty.
Joy Orbison, Overmono & Kwengface - Freedom 2
There’s some debate about whether the hardcore continuum stopped (did it go backwards?) but if I had to wager what it sounds like to be on the continuum in 2023, it might be this - where contemporary UK MC and producer culture combine.
DKG (UKG from Denmark)
This Pangaea EP has to be one of the best dance releases of recent times.
This one came out on Locked On recordings this year, the label responsible for some of the biggest garage tunes of the late 90s + 00s (and releasing The Streets).
Interplanetary Criminal & Cosworth - Untitled A
Ok, perhaps this is more house with a garage bent!
If you want to stay up-to-date or just listen to some good contemporary UKG, I highly recommend Riz La Teef’s radio show on Rinse FM. And can someone let me know how you say “wot do u call it?” in Korean?
Thanks for reading. And now for some random things I’ve been enjoying this month.
This video from The Scene - a Detroit-based dance TV show in the 80s - of Model 500’s “No UFOs”
This compilation from Numero, exploring the “uniquely pivotal melting pot of early 90’s UK music, existing at the confluence of American and Jamaican sounds that formed uniquely British hybrids; from Sound System Soul to Bleep-And-Bass, Ragga-Techno, Jungle, Trip Hop, and 2step Garage”.
Oneohtrix Point Never + Caroline Polachek’s recent merch offerings.
PS. Last month I played at Nowadays in NYC alongside Yung Singh, if you’d like to hear the live recording, you can listen back to that here.