Inside the Hard House Garage Crossover
Nathan Evans' UK garage and club music column covers the latest songs, remixes, bootlegs, mixes and albums that capture his attention. This edition investigates the newfound sound that blends garage with hard house, plus mixes from Osmosis Jones, Anz, Pura Pura and Josi Devil, and EPs from INTHEHOUSE, Slaughter Mob and Chungo.
Subscribe to the KEYMAG Substack to receive email notifications on new editions of NUKG Monthly.
Hard House is Back, and It’s Thanks to UK Garage
“It’s about that time to bring the hard house back” squawks a looney toon voice in Cotto’s 2024 release “Bring Tha Hard House Back”, which weaves the titular genre into the piledriver rhythms of speed garage. Shortly after it was released in the summer, I watched Anz unload it at A Party Called: Ten in the White Hotel. The vocal sample got a vocal response from the crowd; the drop, a sustained kinetic one.
It was the sign of a new development in UK garage, a new generation rediscovering a hardbodied style that hit its peak in popularity around 25 years ago. Soundcloud hits such as Auramatic’s “Talk 2 The Deejay” and Bushbaby’s “Rock Upon the Mic” have none of the searing flamethrower bass of speedy g one may expect, instead using precise, pointillistic melodies. Club Angel connects the dental synths on Usher’s party-starter to the style with his “Yeah!” bootleg, and the walloping charms of “Rippin’ Bongz” by Soul Mass Transit System (under alias) are old-skool in a way unfamiliar to many new clubbers. Many of these tunes and classic cuts have been played out by the likes of Interplanetary Criminal, perhaps best epitomised by N4tee and Auramatic’s B2B rave tape from April last year, filled with era-defining names like Mass Medium and Da Klubb Kings.
“There’s a guy at my work who was a trance DJ back in the 90s and 00s,” says Nottingham producer N4tee, who, despite learning about the genre during the back end of 2023, has become a prime mover in the shift towards hard house with multiple remixes and tracks like “Riddim Runnaz” and “Pushin’ Soft”. “He introduced me to a whole new world of music, and it began with the likes of Tony De Vit’s “The Dawn” and BK’s “Revolution”. These recommendations from his work colleague, as well as watching Irish producer KETTAMA play DJ Speed’s remix of Paul Adam Walter’s “Brutal House” at Warehouse Project in 2023, pushed him to discover the sound for himself. Since then, he’s amassed a vinyl collection that features labels like Tripoli Trax, Tidy Trax, Queen Records, RAW and Action Records, as showcased in his 100% Hard House Wax mix.
The shift towards hard house in the garage scene has not slowed down in the months since last summer, and shows little sign of stopping soon. I’ve been kept firmly in the loop by VR Chat DJ Catdog, who has been a longtime fan of this sector of fast club music since growing up in internet spaces. “I probably first unknowingly heard hard house when I was a kid on Newgrounds, watching flash animations that had a mix of it, nightcore, scouse house and happy hardcore,” he says. “I then ended up going down a rabbit hole and eventually finding the first track that wowed me, ‘U Found Out (Tony De Vit Remix)’ by Handbaggers. The four-to-the-floor kick paired with an acid synth line, an M1 organ and a beloved 80s pop vocal. What's not to love?”
The original heyday of hard house can be split into two eras. It grew out of queer London club Trade in the mid-90s, as DJs like Tony De Vit hit upon a rapid four-to-the-floor style that rumbled with a defining mid-beat bounce and M1 organs, typically at 150bpm. Then, in the mid-2000s, the Europeans got their hands on it, specifically Dutch producers like Klubberheads, Signum, DJ Jean and Lock ‘N’ Load, who melted it into trance and progressive house forms, with Y2K textures like reverbed acid synths that could have soundtracked an action sequence from The Matrix. This second wave is inspiring most of this new wave of hard house garage today.
But the UK still had a hand in birthing second-wave hard house thanks to tracks like Tony De Vit’s aforementioned “The Dawn” from 1998, as well as influential Leeds label Tidy Trax. In a longread for DJ Mag in 2021, Joe Roberts predicted the label’s 25 anniversary would give way to a new dawn for the genre: “having worked its influence largely unseen, Tidy 25 will eventually provide a cypher for the re-emergence of hard house - accompanied by a hope that it won’t just appeal to those who lived through the glory days, but can capture the attention of a new generation, too.”
That prophecy started to come to fruition in late 2023. Those within the hard dance scene were starting to creep into the grey area between speed garage and hard house with slower-than-usual ragers like Kyle Starkey’s “Your Party” and Ollie Lishman’s “Dial In”. Interplanetary Criminal perhaps doesn’t get enough credit for using his success to introduce unheard sounds, and this is typified by his landmark 2023 Dekmantel set in which, draped in a graphic tee that read “HARD HOUSE”, he mixed many gems from the genre on vinyl without using headphones - the most popular moment was a spin of Crisp & Chewy’s “Rockin the House”.
On the release front, the watershed moment that signalled a sea change came when Leeds producer Soul Mass Transit System unveiled his kitschy European evil scientist-sounding alias ‘Fritz Schnackenpfefferhausen’ in January 2024. While the tongue-in-cheek quality of his usual speedy g twizzlers remains, his WÜRST EPs lay M1 organ and Nokia ringtone-style leads over extended atmospheric breakdowns with spiky drums. “That was the first time I noticed hard house and speed garage meshing together, on his first release WÜRST01,” Catdog told me. “I remember hearing ‘Head in the Cloudz’ and my jaw just dropping.”
Now, the scene has a number of key players, including N4tee, Soul Mass Transit System, Auramatic, Shuffa and Paul Sirrell from the UK; IsGwan, Cotto and Club Angel from Australia; Mance repping the Netherlands and even a few tracks from Second Guess and C-Motion from Croatia. That’s one cracking World Cup group stage.
The brawny stompers they make have adopted many of hard house’s traits, starting with the long, hanging string note at the base of the build to signal its impending arrival. “People are bringing heavier kicks, straightening their hi-hats, and leaning the structure of their tracks away from the modern speed garage style into something closer to hard house. Longer run times, longer build-ups and big, delayed releases,” lists Catdog.
N4tee started producing hard house when he began ripping his vinyl collection into digital files, reworking the mixes for added boost and gaining an innate understanding of the style in the process. “The dynamics of the master file on vinyl is so different compared to the masters we have today so I needed to tweak them so that they could be played in my sets,” he explains. “I started layering drums and effects and started understanding the foundation and structure of these tracks. So I thought, why not give it a whirl by incorporating some of the sounds I use?”
Hard house garage has authentically recreated the crowd-pleasing sounds from the biggest songs from the era, like the slanted, horn-like chord stabs that come from the aforementioned “Brutal House” remix and DJ Jean’s “The Launch”. Above all, one particular sound has become the apple of the scene’s eye: a hyper brand of gurgling organ, shipped from second-wave tracks like Mass Medium’s “Gotta Have It” and their remix of Hammer House’s “The Jumper”. In each, the otherwise-standard organ leads add duplicate stabs that skip around the beat. These new tracks, like N4tee’s “Riddim Runnaz” and Shuffa’s “Want My Luv”, take that skipping sensation over the edge, sometimes tripling up notes and stuttering as frantically as a Sony Ericsson dialpad operated by a caffeine junkie.
In terms of labels, confidant Bristol outfits ec2a and Hardline have been huge progenitors of hard house garage, with the former hitting upon a signature combo that adds speed garage reese basslines. Mance’s “Ethereal Pulses” evolves at its peak with longing machine wails that almost resemble Eurodance, and “Dominator Dub” by Croatian producer Second Guess is one of the most unique tunes in this bundle of tracks for how deep it is, with a dark bass growl and Space Invader gun blasts firing at will.
(Full disclosure: I do regular writing work for ec2a.)
So why has this mutation emerged? For one, we’ve hit a moment of speed garage fatigue in the culture. The term “speed garage bootleg” was clamoured-for a couple of years ago, but saturation from so many bedroom producers has led to diminishing returns. The feeling of desperation that hangs on quickly turned-over bootlegs of the hottest new tracks has been the subject of ridicule as of late. “I think with the reemergence of speed garage has kind of cooked people’s attention spans a little bit,” Austrian/Manchester producer salute illustrated the mood to me back in December.
Nature abhors a vacuum, and in the search for new ways to evolve speedy g, hard house has bowled over a younger generation who weren’t around when this sound was popular, so it feels new. Plus, it’s a natural fit. It’s an open secret that speed garage is rhythmically closer to house than 2step garage, and hard house even borrowed from SG back in the 2000s. Take Klubbheads’ “Kickin’ Hard”, which applies the recognisable stretched vocals at the top of the build. “I feel like hard house and speed garage were meant to be,” Catdog tells me. “I'm just surprised it hasn't melded together sooner.”
It’s a positive sign that younger listeners are taking to the longer builds and breakdowns of hard house garage, and could be used as a counter to the view that attention spans on the dancefloor are forever unsatiated. “Longer build ups and tracks that aren’t drop oriented is something that can be a little hit or miss in UK crowds,” N4tee admits, “But towards the end of a night, I find hard house hits the best.” However, there is a danger of producers retooling that more patient structure in a race to the bottom for more immediate gratification, as we’ve seen in speed garage.
Hard house garage comes in the midst of the wider revival of trance and progressive sounds in club music. “I'd say trance is a major reason for hard house getting the limelight again,” Catdog reckons. “It’s a really good midway point between speed garage and trance. You can keep your trance synths, add a speed garage bassline and a hard house 4x4 under it, and you'll have an instant classic. Take IsGwan's edit of “What's A Girl To Do”. That tune sets the floor on fire.”
N4tee agrees with this, and that modern hard house is very similar to trance just as the Dutch second wave was. “Especially with the likes of KETTAMA, I think his stuff is a perfect blend with those hard house driving drums and rolling basslines paired with more euphoric, airy synth sounds.” Other examples include tracks from Paul Sirrell like the sickly-sweet Eurodance of “Blue Ozone” and Prozak’s remix of trance house producer Pretty Girl’s “Higher”, which warps hoover synths to mellifluous effect. Add to all this the hardgroove revival of recent years, and it was inevitable that hard house would get a look in.
It’s not the only route through which producers have arrived at hard house, either. It seems as though there are two streams that have led to the genre from chronologically opposing directions: one from trance and progressive, and the other from donk and Niche bassline, which have been more prominent thanks to the likes of the Belters label Silva Bumpa respectively. Interest in bassline has led back to interest in donk, and donk’s mid-beat bounce was an evolution of that same bounce in hard house. And while the integral Trade nightclub was in London, Tidy Trax, Tony De Vit and a host of club nights came from Leeds, Manchester and Birmingham in the Midlands. Its origins lie in the Northern as it does in London, and in a UK club scene that is pushing harder for genres with roots in the working-class North to be recognised on bigger stages in recent times, hard house chimes with this.
Hard house garage is another example of UK garage’s ability to shapeshift and eat up other genres, Kirby-style, and take on their aesthetic. It’s putting a new generation to recognise greats like Tony De Vit - N4tee remixed “The Dawn” in late 2023 - and is no longer waiting to be found in internet animation communities like Catdog did. As with all new trends, there’s a danger of it becoming the soundtrack for desperate bootlegs, but the stronghold of devoted producers championing it is a good sign that hard house garage will fold into the expanding continuum of modern UK garage.
Mix of the Month: Osmosis Jones - Triple J Mix Up
Over the last half-decade, Melbourne’s Osmosis Jones has become a venerable figurehead in Australia’s hotly-growing garage scene. He’s partly responsible for Aussieland’s reputation for making some of the most hellbent speedy g in the world and as of late, OJ (not that one) has been bringing hard house into the equation, south of the equator. Invited to guest mix for Triple J, the Australian equivalent of BBC Radio for music, Jones used it as a valuation of his USB, mixing all unreleased tunes from not just himself but Oldboy, Auramatic, Merker, fellow ozzie IsGwan and more.
Jones has a reputation for being a speedy g vinyl digger, and this is a characteristically gem-rich set from him: upright house-like shuffles, dusty cymbals and agitated leads compounded with sharp track switches. Insistent on similar drum patterns throughout, the mix takes you through tracks so straightforwardly, it’s like a Soccer AM Skill Skool showcase of the shape of bangers to come. Auramatic’s “YGMH” finds a hulking low bass grunt that both hammers out and winds up to notes in its short loop, and Jones and Oldboy’s “Get Nasty” has a roaming bassline unchained from any percussive weight that performs a deliciously sly loop-de-loop.
Syndey’s own Scrappa shows how speedy g is mining nuance from blaring hoover bass as of late; on his tune, it sounds weakened, almost out of breath and wheezy in the first breakdown, the off-beat vocal ululation instead taking the role of rhythmic counterweight. When Pablo Aristimuño’s “The Return Of The Hardcore Junglist” turns the hoover bass to full power, it feels like another set of speakers has just been switched on, lighting up an already-adrenalised room. In this showreel of what drops and breakdowns are being cooked up in the scene, Osmosis Jones offers a solution to the speedy g fatigue.
Various Artists - FULLHOUSE02
Another offering from Osmosis Jones, FULLHOUSE02 is a playing card-themed four-tracker on his nascent Oceanic garage label INTHEHOUSE (even though real poker heads know that a full house needs five cards, but I’ll let it slide).
Carrying on from his Triple J mix, the EP is funked-up by tech house bass and spun dizzyingly by squeaky record scratches. Scrappa’s “Bassline Vandal” deposits a Headie One-style drawl amongst stretched and abbreviated organ tones that are sonic caramel, and OJ himself rounds out the EP with a taut wiper, “Lock On”. Perhaps the standout, joshi’s “Mum The Cops Are Outside” clips a breathless rap and tunes it make it sound like Crazy Frog riding a hard house ricochet. Adding to the sugar rush is yelping vocal hits and cartoon sounds that hit like Batman’s onomatopoeia cards. You can practically see SMACK! BANG! POW! KER-PLOOSH!, which is an apt microcosm of what INTHEHOUSE is seemingly about.
Anz - Boiler Room 100% Production Set
Anz’s first bit of major activity since her Spring/Summer Dubs 2023 mix shows that her relative quietude over the last few years is only amplified by how sensationally inventive she is when she does make a grand appearance. This 100% production set in Manchester features some of the hometown hero’s very latest ideas - she was hurriedly saving tracks four minutes before she was due to start.
With her party compatriot MC Chunky injecting his own circular vocal loops on the mic, she starts with the classic cocktail of organ house and speed garage and goes on to explore grime, ball house and Miami bass. Every transition is a venture into a new rhythm, all coupled together by Anz’s ability to lean into the strength of a simple melody or an ascending bassline arranged well. No matter the genre, her melodies are so loyal to any particular genre’s feel that they seem familiar, like they should have existed already. Take the angular bassline on the track at 11 minutes in which could have come from Wookie, or the dubstep groover at 40 minutes which frankly needs to be put on a white label and sent to Dimeshift HQ immediately.
15 minutes in, Anz lifts the lid on a garage shuffler that swivels into one of the hardest bass frequencies I’ve ever heard - an answer back to Verraco’s mind-bending drops as of late (which themselves are indebted somewhat to UK bass). Earning a rewind, she continues in this vein for a stellar ten-minute workout, bringing in ramshackle grime and pumped breakbeat. Then, she lands for a gentle one-track layover - an edit of deadmau5 and Kaskade’s “I Remember” with a Korgan that somehow lifts Haley Gibby’s spiring vocals even higher. She may hoard her productions like a dragon on a mound of gold, but it means that when Anz pops out, it’s mandatory listening.
Chungo - DBGI007
You can make out a track from Chungo as soon as you hear the vocals. The UK producer masks any vocal in his signature watery filter, which he uses for dot painting in the form of music. This musical thumbprint is clearest on his brazilian funk trunk-knocker “Solo Per Te” last year and his gossamer midtempo bass EP DBGI006 from 2022. Its sequel, DBGI007, comes over two years later, consecrated with a much more minimal visual identity and walking with a newfound swagger.
In a purely 2step context, his signature shares a similar principle to the breakdown vocals of a Sunship tune, but here, it creates something warbled and alien, like Alia Seror-O'Neill’s drained, intoxicated vocals on a.s.o.’s “Cold Feeling” made lighter. “Corsa” hooks a baby-voiced tune onto sharp-snared 2step with an octave-climbing bass, until he chops the vocals even further into little colonies that spring tunefully in the breakdown section.
The second track “Pupazzo” borrows the Italian word for “puppet”, giving insight into the theme of the EP: the idea of rhythm as control, the groove being a puppeteer and the listener the puppet. He exemplifies this in how he structures tracks to have a coaxing lead-in before pulling the rug; tracks start with a darkly-dreaming atmosphere before being dry-iced with the factory-feeling percs and bubbling bass.
“Imbarco” ditches his trademark vocal filter in order to service a purring spoken-word hook: “jump high, jump in, I’m waiting to begin / no cloudy heads, no thunder skies, come over and we’ll swim”. It repeats like a hazy memory with a square bassline that has a bit of melodic unresolve. You’re implored to straighten it out with your body.
Slaughter Mob - I Can't Sleep / All In My Head
Dubby garage label GD4YA has been pulling off some tricks by uncovering lost files from a rogue's gallery of veterans. Now, the label has gone one step further, dropping the first new release from Slaughter Mob in 14 years.
A four-piece made up of DJ Bandit, DJ Silverfox, MC Vicious and MC Dangerous (operating as producers here), Slaughter Mob were forever mentioned during the early days of Dubstepforum, and were residents at formative dubstep night FWD>> at Plastic People. Their return is more garage-leaning than ever before, with drum patterns that are able to imply so much rhythm with just a shaker and very physical rim clicks. If you like the shuddering internal rhythms of Introspekt, this takes them from the pitch-black club to the pitch-black streets. It’s as conceptually dark as it is sonically, calling to mind Semtek’s Denny Island EP from 2023 in how cryptically elaborate they make their atmosfears.
“I Can’t Sleep” is nervously on-edge, with percussion and bass entering just a fraction quicker than the beat. From between the drums and low-end, shadows move - the sound of hallow halls, ghosts of burning embers, cold water dripping and Tesla coil science zapping. “All In My Head” continues with more immediate drama, as bass croaks out from behind each ear, not overshadowing the sounds of rattlesnakes, empty milk bottles, squeaky door hinges and wind that tickle the ear like whispered voices. Judging from the title, these are hallucinogenic sounds, but they also play like the sounds of a long-abandoned space coming alive, swelling in and out in a tuneful, organised order but sometimes thrown in without warning, like a quick head turn revealing your worst nightmare. As a credits sequence, a house-ish remix from El-B adds a midtempo jazz drumkit to “All In My Head”.
Pura Pura - Piñata Radio 29.01.25
Pura Pura’s latest show on Montpellier platform Piñata Radio caught my attention from a clip of the Montpellier DJ mixing Introspekt with Ceechynna’s unimpeachable findom anthem “Peggy” - a match made in heaven if there ever was one. The full show is cross-genre mix that goes to Baltimore club, ghettotech and emotionally torrential footwork, but the best moments come when he creates UK garage mashups.
Pura Pura starts up with the best garage tune of 2024, Nisk’s remix of Barcode’s “Entreat”, blending it with French trap rap, before moving from night to day slowly with classic 2step and 4x4 - through the transition, a vocal croons, “don’t make me wait all night”. After tunnelling towards a hypnotic section of house and speed garage, he throws a mammoth bass signal half an hour in, dropping to groggy dub halftime. Through it, he trades back and forth between UK dubstep and aggressive US rap, creating a dialogue between the two that makes sense knowing he’s collaborated with the Raprave crew in the past.
Over the two hours, he regularly deploys a trick where he brings back echoed clips of the previous track for added garnish, bringing tracks closer together than your average radio mix. It makes me wonder - what happened to the mashup? It seems like edits and bootlegs have made DJs feel like they’ve filled their quota for bringing a new variation on something familiar in their mixes by reheating work produced by someone else. But Pura Pura remembers when this was an unexpected idea found and executed in the moment, and all the thrill that came with it.
Josi Devil - SWU FM 14.01.25
Bristolian prodzilla Josi Devil is causing Hessle Audio to steer into UK garage for the start of 2025, thanks to his upcoming EP with the iconic label. The latest episode of his regular slot for SWU FM introduces the world of the EP aptly, with hard and dark garage that makes the oppressive world of Drangleic seem bright and humane.
Hour one sees plays of Jay Bee’s “Mysterious”, a 2step edit of DJ Bigga G’s “Mind, Body and Soul” and Significant Other’s “I Get Such Bad Headaches” (played about 30bpm quicker to create a dubstep rhythm), while Chalé’s dub of YEИDRY’s “KI-KI” and INVT’s “Presha” invites a conversation between it and latin diasporic rhythms in a similar vein to what the latter duo are doing. The second hour ventures down into smokey dubstep and crunching, red-zone hardgroove, until it winds down with a lounge jazz boom-bap rendition of DJ Dweller’s “Romantic Call”.