The Zoomer Embrace of Drum ’n’ Bass

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.

In recent months, young artists offering more delicate, bedroom pop-inflected spins on drum ’n’ bass and other ’90s UK club styles like garage have seen exceptional interest from their generational peers. This is true even, or rather especially, in the U.S., where drum ’n’ bass never fully lodged itself in the mainstream, meaning young listeners are likely encountering these sounds for the first time. Spotify’s Planet Rave playlist—which includes songs like “soft spot,” Nia Archives’ “Headz Gone West,” and Take Van’s “Time Goes By”—is the platform’s fastest-growing playlist for the 18-24 demographic. Launched in July, the playlist builds on viral momentum from TikTok, which has amplified quite a few songs with brisk breakbeats, female vocals, and a lo-fi sheen.

In fact, piri had been convinced that “soft spot” was a “Tik Tok-y song”—a label that once evoked cocky, meme-filled rap tracks—and actually tried paying a few creators to promote it upon release. “After PinkPantheress’ success, it was clear that people liked that vibe,” she explains, noting how the speed of drum ’n’ bass is conducive to a quick, frame-by-frame montage style common on the app. “The song is also dance-y, and chill, and pretty girly.”

It’s impossible to talk about the rising zoomer affinity for UK club music without invoking PinkPantheress. A semi-anonymous university student from Bath, England, she started sharing 20-second song loops to TikTok late last year. In early breakthroughs like “Pain” and “Break It Off,” she sings nimble topline melodies over garage and drum ’n’ bass classics, namely “Flowers” by Sweet Female Attitude and “Circles” by Adam F. Her other influences—explored to various degrees on her debut mixtape, to hell with it—include K-pop, pop-punk, and that zone of 2000s British alternative pop occupied by artists like Just Jack, Lily Allen, and Imogen Heap. She had virtually no following when she started posting, and her clips were visually unremarkable, with her face blocked out by big text. But these loose reworks quickly accumulated hundreds of thousands of views. TikTok named her Craig David-inspired garage-pop single, “Just For Me,” 2021’s “breakout track of the summer”; it’s featured in over 2.2 million clips and has gotten both a lighthearted drill remix and an unnecessarily soppy Coldplay cover.

PinkPantheress’ fast-paced ascent has been distinct from other TikTok sensations. Her music was not propelled via flashy trends where thousands of people iterate on the same dance, nor was it shrouded in a highly relatable backstory or amplified by any pre-existing online fame. (PinkPantheress hasn’t even revealed her real name.) If you want to get clinical about it, you can map her songs at the intersection of several separate online trends: bedroom pop, hyperpop, pop-punk revival, 2000s nostalgia, ’90s rave revival. But broadly, her popularity seems to signal a more casual turn on TikTok; the music feels particularly suited to low-key lifestyle content like make-up tutorials and thrift hauls, the soundtrack to the day-to-day lives of young women. Notably, 80 percent of the artists featured on Planet Rave are female, and the majority of listeners are also female, says Ronny Ho, Spotify’s Head of Dance and Electronic Development.

Aside from her sample choices, what makes PinkPantheress distinctive is her voice, which is angelic and slinky, almost winsomely flat like Clairo. Like the breathy, childlike trills of vocaloid Yameii Online on “Baby My Phone” or the satin purrs of Doja Cat on hits like “Kiss Me More,” it fulfills a desire for a softer, more feminine delivery style on TikTok. The airy and—for lack of a better term—girly atmosphere of PinkPantheress’ songs makes them more accessible entry points into the harder music she’s referencing; although drum ’n’ bass is far past its subterranean, pirate radio era, and there are more tranquil variants of it, the genre can still seem severe and insular.

Because the buzz around PinkPantheress has been so intense, some listeners have erroneously assumed that other young artists dabbling with drum ’n’ bass and garage are merely crude imitators of her. (“Using a drum sample =/= me sounding the same as her,” wrote L.A. artist Take Van in a recent TikTok.) PinkPantheress has distanced herself from any claim to ownership, noting in a recent NPR interview that it’s important for “people overseas to realize that [these genres] weren’t started in my bedroom,” but was started “yonks and yonks ago by artists like Shy FX.” But even before she exploded this year, there were a few songs whose zealous reception already indicated growing youth interest in drum ’n’ bass, or some variation of it. These include “Pretty Cvnt” by the DnB/breakcore artist Sewerslvt, and even more significant, “moment” by the 20-year-old Sydney producer Vierre Cloud, who previously went by the moniker lildeath.

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 ’00s 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.