Like turning up the radio to drown out the sound of a jackhammer, a lot of the dance music that is resonating right now is fast, loud and high-intensity, as if to distract from … well, everything. UK ravers in particular are reaching for speed garage (Salute, Sammy Virji), cheerily high-tempo pop-trance (DJ Heartstring, Kettama) or doof-centric hard dance (Hannah Laing) to crowd out the horror.
The fastest and most relentless of them all is Sherelle, the 31-year-old Londoner who can reliably be found DJing at the most twilit hours of festival season and the clubbing underground. She’s like the bus from Speed, always keeping above 140bpm (and generally about 160) with steely determination as she swerves between footwork, jungle and garage. After her legendary 2019 Boiler Room livestream, Sherelle goading the crowd with arms stretched wide as she delivered titanic bass-drops, she’s become a reliable defibrillator of vibes at any club night – but she also has a keen eye for the utopian potential of this joyous pandemonium. Her low-priced shows seek to quell the stress of the cost of living crisis – tickets for her current UK tour cost just £10 – and she founded Beautiful, a project that nurtures Black and queer artists with studio time, label releases and more.
She began putting out her own tracks in 2021, and surprise-released this debut album earlier this week. Dance producers tend to bookend their LPs with earnest ambient tracks to make them feel grand and album-y, but not Sherelle: there’s just 10 seconds of eerie stereo whispering on opener Enter the Void before the kick drums come in, soon joined by an insistent junglist rimshot, making for a study in tension without release.
Then it’s into Don’t Want U, which shows how deeply schooled Sherelle is in dance music history. The brief vocal samples and two-note riff, seemingly hammered out on a particularly melodious bit of plastic plumbing, are classic footwork: the funky yet brittle and stuttering style born out of ghetto house in Chicago. But a skittering drum pattern underneath gives it the swing of British jungle, creating a sensual transatlantic hybrid. Throughout With a Vengeance, Sherelle is respectful of jungle’s building blocks – the breaks and tambourine-shakes – and doesn’t try to modernise them, and similarly preserves the profound oddness of footwork while making it more accessible and easily danceable.
She’s seemingly a magpie for any hard and fast sound from the last few decades. The relentless roll of XTC is topped with the kind of euphoric vocal warble that typified the classic rave era. Speed (Endurance) is ferocious acid techno with a fiendishly melodic 303 bassline and panel-beater claps. Ready, Steady, Go! is footwork guided by the heavy, black-gloved hand of minimal techno. The one vocal track here, Freaky (Just My Type), has George Riley singing about her omnivorous sexuality over a busy yet lithe dance-pop beat that a K-pop girl group might favour. Throughout, the bass programming nods to New Jersey’s twerk-friendly mode of high-tempo house; playfully swift southern African styles such as singeli, kuduro and shangaan might be other influences.
This is sophisticated production, and – if you’ll allow a little chinstroking on the dancefloor – positively postmodern in how it unites strands across continents, history, genre and sound sources. And the best tracks here do that boldly. Love Your Enemies evokes dubstep, with syncopated percussion sparring with a huge on-beat, topped by a saxophone melody that sounds like guitar feedback. Footwork is often quite spartan, but XTC Susp9nd3d renders it in shuddering overblown noise, and references the sirens used in dub tracks – albeit making them sound like a four-minute-warning for nuclear war (a trick that Sherelle repeats on the title track and elsewhere).
Just as in her DJ sets, the tempo stays high right to the end. There’s a kind of poetry in doing that, suggesting tenacity and resilience in a world seemingly designed to grind our spirits down. With her socially conscious projects that spread access and opportunity, Sherelle is building the future she’d like to see. Her music is charged with the same sense of determination.
This week Ben listened to
Jane Remover – Revengeseekerz
More high-intensity excellence here. After Ghostholding, her beautifully loping alt-rock album under the name Venturing, the US musician is back to her core project for her second LP in as many months: trap, hyperpop and breakcore forming a blizzard of digital information.
