Delta Heavy's Love Letter to Drum & Bass: From Fake IDs and Smoky Rooms to the World Stage

Delta Heavy have waved the drum & bass flag for 15 years. Their ongoing global tour features the largest North American stretch of their career, and it seems the world is picking up on the same contagious rhythm that’s captivated them since youth.

“Nightlife, going out, clubbing, raving, going to a festival. It’s the perfect way to escape—a bit of a cliché but—from day-to-day life,” Delta Heavy’s Ben Hall tells EDM.com.

Hall and Simon James recently celebrated the 15th anniversary of their first record deal. Coincidentally, the former was 15 years old when he first discovered drum & bass. The sheer scale and technological marvels of modern electronic dance music festivals dominate social media in 2024, but the scene was quite stripped back in Hall’s youth.

“I went to this quite old, posh boarding school in the UK,” he recalls. “A bunch of us went to a tiny club called Bar Rumba… It’s not around anymore. It hasn’t been for years. You’re right in the center of London in the West End, in the theater district. Maybe 250-person capacity. You go down the steps to the sweaty little basement. We saw Bryan Gee, Shy FX and it was DJ Marky’s first-ever show in the UK.”

Equipped with patch-job fake IDs and can-do attitudes, Hall and friends found themselves in the center of London’s underground rave scene.

“We got in with these really ropey fake IDs,” he continues. “The bouncer kept grabbing us from the crowd and peeling the IDs open. Somehow mine passed the test. I don’t know how. Also, we all looked really young. There’s no way we looked 18.”

It’s unclear how many holes Hall had in his rave-punched card by this point, but he was already an electronic music enthusiast. Hall had been spinning vinyl on his Technics 1210 turntables since he was 12 or 13. Still, no amount of adolescent DJing could prepare him for the breakdance pace of drum & bass.

“I’d got into electronic music through trance, progressive house and new school breakbeat which was really popular in the UK at that time,” Hall said. “But then we went to this night and the energy and rawness blew me away. I never really looked back after that.”

Delta Heavy released their third studio album on August 23rd, their highest charting LP to date. Their love letter to the genre, Midnight Forever is a “cathartic” trip down memory lane and a deeply personal project that bottles their youth and presents it through a modern lens.

It’s the same philosophy that drives Delta Heavy’s visuals. Their global tour debuts a new visual experience intended to bridge the gap between different generations of ravers.

“When we first started going out, it wasn’t really a visual experience. It was very much dark, sweaty, smoky and underground,” Hall explains. “We wanted to capture a little bit of that feel and vibe in the album while also creating a little visual world.”

Drum & bass is now rapidly becoming destination viewing on lineups in North America. Acts like Delta Heavy and Chase & Status regularly fill out festival stages and venues. Hall sees the lightbulbs going off, much like it once did for him.

“It certainly feels in the last 18 months or so, a wider audience is listening to it and getting used to the rhythmic identity of the music,” he says. “I think the main difference a lot of people have found is that in the past when you’d hear drum & bass at a big festival, people didn’t really know what to do.

“I think in terms of the BPM, something like dubstep or trap has a lot of synergy tempo-wise with rap music,” Hall adds. “Drum & bass at 172, 174 or 175 beats per minute, it’s completely unique in electronic music. I think people were quite confused in the US initially. ‘How do I dance to this? What do I do?’ You can’t really head-bang at that tempo. But it’s honestly one of the most, most energetic music to dance to. People are getting that here finally.”

Watch the full interview below and purchase tickets to Delta Heavy’s remaining 2024 tour dates here.

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EDM.com Presents: Artist Choice 2024

In celebration of EDM.com‘s 10-year anniversary, we’re presenting a brand-new, first-of-its-kind initiative, the “Artist Choice” list.

While some annual lists and awards are dictated by fan voting and others are data-driven, the “Artist Choice” list was exclusively sourced from the scene’s actual musicians. Over 300 of the world’s biggest dance music artists, across a plethora of sub-genres, were contacted and polled in a months-long initiative.

The ongoing project is designed to cut through the noise and celebrate the enduring impact of electronic dance music as recognized by those who best understand the intricacies of the industry: the artists themselves. We sought out these artists to provide insights into the best festivals, music producers and many other distinctions to spotlight their peers’ impressive accomplishments throughout 2023.

Check out the inaugural “Artist Choice” winners below.

EDM.com Presents: Artist Choice 2024 Winners

Music Festival: Tomorrowland

Venue: Brooklyn Mirage

Artist of the Year: Skrillex

Breakthrough Artist of the Year: Sammy Virji

House Artist of the Year: Odd Mob

Bass Artist of the Year: PEEKABOO

Techno Artist of the Year: Sara Landry

Drum & Bass Artist of the Year: Chase & Status

Trance Artist of the Year: Marlon Hoffstadt

Song of the Year: John Summit & HAYLA – “Where You Are”

Album/EP of the Year: Skrillex – Quest For Fire

Hall of Fame Inductee of the Year: David Guetta

Best Crowd: Chicago

Mainstream Song of the Year: John Summit & Hayla – “Where You Are”

Underground Song of the Year: Kevin de Vries & Mau P – “Metro”

Best Collaboration: Skrillex, Fred again.. & Flowdan – “Rumble”

Remix of the Year: Hamdi – “Counting” (Taiki Nulight Remix)

Event Organizer: Insomniac Events

Record Label of the Year: Armada Music

NERO and the Human Cost of Technological Progress

Remember when NERO warned us about the “promises” we made to technology? Well, we’ve broken them all.

The influential electronic band’s first two albums whispered of a looming disconnect via cinematic dubstep, but their long-awaited third full-length, Into the Unknown, roars with the realization of that grim forecast. And as they embark on an ambitious audiovisual tour kicking off this weekend, we’re now between two worlds, lost in the static of our own creation.

NERO’s Daniel Stephens, Joseph Ray and Alana Watson have called Into the Unknown the final installment of a trilogy. They said the album “feels somewhat like a bridge” between its predecessors, which explored the search for meaning in the face of dystopia.

The album doesn’t just continue the story—it rips open the festering wound of our digitally-induced detachment to the point of numbness. In the throes of the AI era and its existential threat to our livelihoods, NERO have written the soundtrack to the forbidden sense of freedom that comes with the human cost of technological progress.

And from a purely musical standpoint, Into the Unknown feels like a second skin.

“This is where we’ve always felt that we reside, stylistically,” the band said. “We wanted to make sure the album sounded quintessentially NERO and hopefully our fans will feel we succeeded in that.”

Within a nanosecond of the album’s haunting opener, it’s clear they haven’t lost a step despite nearly a decade between albums. The stentorian voice of NERO frontwoman Watson is a lightning rod, providing clarity and focus amidst the radiant chaos of Ray and Stephens’ electronic production. There’s a controlled power in her delivery, reflecting the symbiosis between the rod and the structure it protects.

The band is now set to take Into the Unknown on an expansive US tour sans Watson, who will take a step back after giving birth to her third child with Stephens. Her timeless vocals, however, will serve as the focal point of a brand-new hybrid live show.

You can purchase tickets to NERO’s tour here and listen to Into the Unknown below.

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Girl Math: How Nala and VNSSA Are Steeping Electronic Music in Feminist Punk

Before Nala and VNSSA ever started DJing together, they were exchanging oyster photos in a group chat they named, “We’re F***king Eating.”

Although the food photos have since slowed down and dachshund pics now reign supreme, the two continue to share not only a palpable chemistry, but also a companionship that has only grown stronger over the years.

The friendship began thanks to Dirtybird. They met in-person for the first time mid-pandemic, around 2021, at a drive-in rave. VNSSA, whose real name is Vanessa Barnes, arrived early to see Nala, Stefania Aronin, play her set. After crossing paths at the show, the two then started hanging out and DJing together.

“We would complain about the male-dominated music industry to each other, and share experiences with that and connect through that,” Barnes tells EDM.com in an exclusive interview.

It wasn’t long before Barnes and Aronin were booked for their first b2b performance together during Miami Music Week with Walker & Royce’s label, Rules Don’t Apply.

“[Walker & Royce] were joking that our duo name would be VaNala Ice,” Barnes recalls with a laugh. “That’s where it started and then we were getting more b2b offers, and we were like, maybe we should just make this a thing.”

As the demand for their b2b sets increased, the duo had to decide on a collaborative nom de plume. They were preparing for their debut performance at Coachella’s beloved Do LaB when the name finally materialized.

“There was a moment where I was like, it should be ‘girl’ something,” Aronin says. “It had that punk edge to it.”

“Our friend Nikki has this joke: four plus four equals ‘ate,'” Barnes adds. “So we were like, ‘Girl Math,’ that should be the name. But it’s more than just that… Having ‘girl’ in the name gives us empowerment and it feels like a feminist movement.”

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Girlhood means “everything,” Aronin and Barnes agreed.

“There’s this implied thing with girlhood that’s like, we’re great at everything and we hold it all down, and sometimes that goes without credit,” Aronin explains. “So girlhood is about getting shit done, even if it means not totally getting acknowledged for the work that went into it.”

Nala and VNSSA, each of whom are star DJs and producers in their own right, found that girlhood in the music industry was inextricably linked with isolation and disillusionment. The opportunity to collaborate cultivated a sense of unity and comfort, they said, that ultimately aided in their creative process and tightened their bond.

“Touring by yourself, it’s really easy to get burnt out and it’s just boring alone. So it’s a lot more fun having a partner in crime,” Barnes says. “Playing together, you have another person where you can bounce ideas off and instead of just trusting yourself, you have someone else that you can rely on. So it’s just nice to have that kind of support.”

Girl Math have now performed at Bonnaroo, Electric Forest, Splash House and other major music festivals. They’re now gearing up for their first headlining show, which is scheduled for November 1st at the Chocolate Factory Theater in New York City.

Drawing inspiration from their respective backgrounds in rock music, the pair found common ground in live instrumentation and began to infuse those shared interests into their music with a punk twist. Aronin said she’s great at “coming up with random sound design concepts” while Barnes provides a lot of Girl Math’s “structure, stability and direction.”

“It’s just my anxiety,” Barnes says with a laugh, blushing over the compliment.

While Aronin brings her affinity for Riot grrrl-influenced vocals to the table, Barnes offers drumming skills with a metal focus. It was a match made in heaven.

“I thought being a drummer in a metal band was the coolest thing you could ever do prior to being a DJ,” Aronin gushes. “So I was like, we need to incorporate this history on both sides and turn this into something that’s rowdy and fun and chaotic. That’s where we met in the middle—a rock-focused approach to music. And when I say structure, I really mean drums. She brings the drums on a really solid, structured level.”

“We want to take as much live music inspiration as possible,” Barnes adds. “I think you’ll be able to hear that in our production as well. Because there’s a lot of live drum elements along with synths and Nala’s vocals. It gives it a very gritty, rebellious sound. It’s the mix of us together.”

Through the singular lens of Girl Math, Aronin and Barnes say they ultimately hope to inspire other female producers in the electronic music scene.

“Do whatever the fuck you want and make whatever the fuck you want,” Barnes says with a grin. “Don’t worry what anyone else thinks. Do whatever makes you feel good.”

“Surround yourself with people who are supportive,” Aronin adds, “and fuck everyone else.”

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“My Smallest Show Ever”: Inside Zedd's Secret, Sweat-Soaked NYC Bodega Rave

Zedd shrunk his stadium-sized spectacle into a synth-fueled sardine tin of euphoria over the weekend, turning a humble NYC bodega into a secret rave he called his “smallest show ever.”

Just 25 people shuffled into The Little Shop, a tiny corner store that lives up to its name in the South Seaport neighborhood of Manhattan. The bar was high thanks to MUNDO, whose renegade reggaeton and amapiano raves have been taking the Bronx by storm.

EDM met ATM at the shop, the location of which had been kept secret as part of an elaborate scavenger hunt initiative hosted in partnership with 5 gum. Fans had to decipher a series of hints and clues on social media, then show up to receive a Zedd-branded, glow-in-the-dark pack of 5 gum, which doubled as their ticket. One attendee even said he camped out overnight to ensure access to the rare rave.

The event’s development took place over a period of 10 months, according to Maria Urista, Vice President, Gum & Mints at Mars. Her team, she says, set out to “deliver an extremely stimulating sensorial experience fans could get nowhere else” while celebrating dance music culture.

“We kept coming back to the energy and excitement around secret raves, performances for a group of fans dedicated enough to seek them out,” Urista tells EDM.com. “It’s what led us to developing an underground event of our own, but adding the tension of hiding it in plain sight, with one of the genre’s most recognizable talents, in a location where 5 gum can already be found.”

“From there, the toughest part to navigate was the ingenuity of our and Zedd’s fans—they dug into each clue we dropped so deeply, sharing theories with each other, and using some incredibly novel ways of piecing everything together,” she continues. “We actually ended up changing our clues and the cadence of information we doled out in response to the fervent fan response.”

The scene was surreal for those who found themselves in Zedd’s pocket universe. And the irony was palpable—a man accustomed to commanding crowds at the world’s biggest festivals was now locked in a within-arm’s-reach interplay with barely two dozen fans.

Remember 5 gum’s wild commercials? The ones that showed the world “how it feels to chew 5 gum,” which apparently meant spontaneous levitation, the ability to taste colors and the uncontrollable urge to parkour? Crammed into a single narrow bodega aisle and dripping sweat as Zedd performed the most intimate show of his career, we finally understood what they meant.

“This is just such a fucking unique experience for me,” Zedd said at one point. “So I can’t say ‘thank you’ enough because I never get to do this.”

We experienced an exclusive nosedive into the stratospheric Telos, Zedd’s first album in nearly a decade, which releases on Friday. As never-before-heard music and generational dance anthems like “Clarity” and “I Want You to Know” reverberated off linoleum floors, The Little Shop transformed into a hypnogogic dream where the ordinary collided spectacularly with the extraordinary.

In this minuscule slice of raving heaven, Zedd proved that true musical magic isn’t measured by the size of the venue, but by the electricity shared between artists and their fans.

“It far exceeded my expectations and the energy and vibes were unmatched,” said attendee Flo Patino. “From Zedd thanking us for being there, to talking to us, the new songs that haven’t come out yet, everything was incredible—it felt like having a best friend in front of me playing. It was so beautiful that I got home, thought about everything that had happened and had teary eyes from the emotion because it felt like a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

The rave capitalized on 5 gum’s long-latent goal of harnessing the energy of electronic dance music to appeal to their consumers, according to Urista. The partnership, she says, was the latest in the brand’s mission “to be part of life’s most thrilling moments” through music events and activations with beloved artists.

“Music means so much to our consumers, and our product can be found at concerts, festivals and shows across the country—it’s only natural for our brand to look for ways to amp up that experience,” Urista explains.

After a number of compelling brand activations in the hip-hop world, like a unique jewelry collection featuring actual 5 gum chewed by Yungblud and a custom cassette track with J.I.D that only five fans could listen to just five times before the tape shredded, it was time. So they called on Zedd, one of the world’s most influential electronic music producers.

“We have wanted to play in EDM for years, and partnering with Zedd for this year’s campaign was a no-brainer,” she continues. “His fandom and our audience perfectly overlap, he’s been creating some of the most thrilling music moments for more than a decade and he’s on the verge of releasing his first new album in almost 10 years—the perfect moment for the brand to celebrate.”

Fans of Zedd can pre-save Telos here. The album is scheduled to release on August 30th, 2024.

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Flour Power: Inside the Creative Oven of Sofi Tukker's Steamy New Album, “BREAD”

Sofi Tukker and bread: an unlikely pair, yet strangely kindred spirits in the all-you-can-eat buffet of life.

Both rise to the occasion, one on stage and the other in the oven, fermented by time and heat. One feeds our souls, the other our bodies. Sofi Tukker’s new album BREAD, however, does both.

BREAD is an acronym for “Be Really Energetic And Dance.” We’re ironically breaking bread over brunch on a sweltering Brooklyn summer afternoon, the kind where the subway grates spew dragon’s breath and even the pigeons seem sluggish.

Much like a fresh baguette, the album is best devoured immediately, still hot from creation. But with spicy imagery of assless chaps, microphone vibrators and fingers tracing tempting paths through hair, what happens to your stomach afterward—or, ahem, other body parts—is none of Sophie Hawley-Weld and Tucker Halpern’s concern.

However, for them, embracing outlandishness isn’t artistic masturbation—it’s evolution in action. Despite their album’s not-so-subtle erotica, they are proof of the magic that happens when raw talent and vulnerability meet.

“I feel I’m always on the edge of confidence and doubt,” Hawley-Weld says. “I can sometimes feel really confident about things and have a lot of doubt about them at the same time. I just feel both of them, maybe to the extreme honestly.”

It’s difficult, however, to scent even a scintilla of doubt when looking at the gown Hawley-Weld wore for the cover of BREAD. A masterstroke of surrealist fashion, the dress was developed by CHRISHABANA, whose pieces have been worn by Rihanna, Lady Gaga and Madonna, among other music icons whose legacies are canonized by ornate, dreamlike outfits.

But even with a pedigree like that, the East Village-based creative studio was caught off-guard by Sofi Tukker’s request to materialize their perception of bread, which the duo believes “conveys decadence, sex and making yourself happy.” That’s according to its eponymous founder, Chris Habana, who worked alongside stylist Anastasia Walker to bring the look to life.

“In our six or so years of doing costuming, we have been thrown a lot of intriguing requests and I have to say this one initially threw us for sure,” Habana tells EDM.com. “But after the first talk, it became such a fun project to dive into.”

Habana says the dress needed to travel, so his team couldn’t use real bread. They wanted to create each adornment by scratch, but with limited time, they had to purchase artificial food displays and ultimately sourced a selection of fake croissants, baguettes and other bread varieties.

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Like dough leavening in real time, a particular challenge arose when Habana had to carve up the “bread” in order to engineer the gown’s intricate breastplate.

“Manipulating the bread to create the arched breastplate was a challenge that my team thankfully figured out how to achieve by slicing the foam bread and wiring it on the inside,” Habana explains. “The sliced bread used in the floor length skirt that came in were all also one-tone white bread. I figured it would be more interesting to give them a toasted look. I ended up mixing various brown tones of paint and rolling and layering them over lightly on the textured surfaces. It looked like realistic toast in the end.”

In the end, it inconceivably took only 10 days for Habana and his team to design, construct and ship the daring dress to Brazil for the shoot. Hawley-Weld didn’t even know at the time if it would fit, she tells me. Maybe it was her unapologetic soul or her icy blue eyes that pierced through the veil of its absurdity—but she somehow pulled it off.

The gown delivered their vision while beautifully reflecting the vibrant music of BREAD, a sultry song-cycle of radiant house music and funk carioca with Brazilian and Portuguese influences. It also served as a reminder that music, fashion, food and sex each lose their savor when bound by too many restrictions.

To that end, the new album is what happens when artists embrace and submit to the most creatively unhinged versions of themselves. If “BATSHIT” was Sofi Tukker’s postcard from the edge of sanity, BREAD is their leap off the cliff.

With the ability to brazenly explore taboo concepts through a cerebral lens, they’ve become masters at transforming fun, irreverent subject matter into transcendental experiences for fans. Look no further than the wild music video for the album’s lead single, “Throw Some Ass,” where Halpern and Hawley-Weld bleed confidence and morph into piquant provocateurs before our eyes.

As hips gyrate and bare butts bounce in the video, the profane somehow becomes the profound.

“We’ve typically taken risks in videos,” Hawley-Weld says. “When I decided to have an orgasm on the side of a mountain with just my guitar for a video or when we decided to do a ‘Center For Asses That Don’t Move Good’ with our asses out, we’re putting a lot of our own resources into these absolutely crazy ideas.”

“And then I always get really, really nervous and I feel like, ‘Oh my God, what have we just done?'”

Filmed at the stunning Palácio das Laranjeiras in Rio de Janeiro, the audacious video is a reminder of why rules are meant to be broken. The same goes for the racy music video for the BREAD single “Spiral,” in which Heidi Klum co-stars.

Boldness is, after all, the yeast that makes timeless music rise. Consider David Bowie’s chameleon-like transformations or Björk’s alien soundscapes—weirdness is a weapon if you wield it with intention and purpose. That axiom rings especially true in 2024, a time when algorithm-approved playlists and focus-grouped releases make music irretrievably stale.

No one knows this more than Halpern, a former basketball star who says he often felt out of place in the locker room as he struggled to balance his love for the game with his desire for self-expression. He became his high school’s all-time scoring leader and a McDonald’s All-American nominee before playing college ball at Brown, where he captained his team.

“I was in a jock world,” he recalls. “I always had tendencies of being a little flamboyant with my style and out there and different from the other athletes, but I was still in that world and I had a lot of self-consciousness. I think about those sides of me and I’d get a lot of shit about it.”

“Seeing myself as an artist… it was a hard transition,” Halpern continues. “When I first told people, ‘I want to make music, I want to be a producer, I want to be a DJ, I want to be an artist,’ they kinda laughed. They’re like, ‘No, you’re in this box. You’re an athlete, you can’t do that.’ And it wasn’t until there was enough people believing in it that accepted me as an artist or accepted that I wasn’t just an athlete pretending to be an artist. Then I started feeling the freedom to dress how I wanted, to do my hair as I wanted, to just take risks and not give a fuck.”

It paid off. When Halpern and Hawley-Weld each hacked out their own convictions like deranged surgeons, they set Sofi Tukker up to scale heights reached by few in the dance music scene. They prophesied this captivating delirium through the first lyric of “Benadryl,” a haunting track they released back in 2018: “I lost my sanity with my socks.”

Just how far they intend to go from here remains to be seen and heard, but one thing is for sure: they are living proof that the most satisfying things in life often come from daring to deviate from the recipe.

BREAD is out now. You can listen to the album below and find it on streaming platforms here.

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