When Did Dance Music Become So Fucking Boring?

I have been chewing on this one for months and it is finally coming out, so pour yourself something stronger than coffee.

When did dance music, our dance music, become so spectacularly bland?

I do not ask that lightly. I have given the better part of three decades to this thing. Vinyl in milk crates, sweat on the ceiling, train back to whichever city I was living in at the time, repeat. I have promoted it, written many times, promoted it, broadcast it, argued with strangers about it at four in the morning in cities where I did not speak the language. I love it. That is the only reason I am willing to say what I am about to say.

Run the test yourself. Sit down and try, honestly, to name the last anthem. Not a track you liked. Not something a friend who works at a label sent you in a panic on a Tuesday. An actual anthem. The kind of record that detonates across a culture, that you hear on a beach in Croatia and a kitchen in Glasgow and a car park in Adelaide within the same fortnight, that the pub DJ plays badly and the warehouse DJ plays late and your cousin who does not even like dance music somehow knows by chorus.

Go on. Take your time.

Now compare that struggle to the catalogue we used to live inside. Everything But The Girl, Missing, the Todd Terry remix that turned a tender piece of pop into the most weepy dancefloor moment of the decade (I’ll be honest, not my favourite track, but HUGE props for it being amazing). MJ Cole, Sincere, two stolen years of UK garage compressed into one phrase that everyone over thirty can still hum without prompting. Groove Armada, Superstylin’, a record that sounded like a Sunday afternoon and a Saturday riot at the same time, and ran on pure swagger. Moloko, The Time Is Now, Roisin Murphy doing what only Roisin Murphy does, the kind of song that made you stop talking when it came on. Crazy P, There’s A Better Place, the late hour anthem for the people who knew when the late hour started. Underworld, Born Slippy, the closing shot of a generation. Chemical Brothers, Hey Boy Hey Girl, the brothers in noise refusing to leave the room quietly. Daft Punk, One More Time. Faithless, Insomnia. Stardust, Music Sounds Better With You. Roni Size, Brown Paper Bag. Basement Jaxx, Where’s Your Head At. Layo and Bushwacka, Love Story. The list runs longer than this column and you can feel yourself nodding through every entry.

Each of those records did the same thing. They landed like a brick through a window. They forced the room to face them. They were not the result of a TikTok strategy or a quarterly content calendar or some growth hacker’s spreadsheet. They were the result of artists with something to say, producers with a sound that did not yet exist, and an industry willing to gamble on the lot of it.

Where is that record now? Whose brick is currently sitting on whose windowsill, ready to be thrown? I am asking honestly. If you have it, post it below this article and tell me, because I have been listening for it for years and I am starting to think it is not coming.

This is not nostalgia talking. I am tired of older writers blaming the present for not being the past. The past had its piles of nonsense too. The late nineties produced more rubbish than gold, and the noughties produced even more. Every great decade gets remembered for its top fifty and forgets its bottom five thousand. So I am not making the lazy argument that everything used to be better and the kids do not understand.

I am making a different argument, which is that we used to take risks, and we do not anymore.

Look at what made those records possible. A label with a hunch and a small budget. A producer at a desk for fourteen hours convinced they had something. A radio plugger who actually listened to the promo. A magazine, mine for instance, willing to put a relative unknown on a cover because the music said so. A DJ willing to drop the white label at the moment of maximum risk. A club booker willing to give that act forty minutes on a system that could carry it. A crowd willing to lose their minds to something they had never heard before, on the trust that everyone above them in the chain had earned the right to play it.

Almost every link in that chain is now operating at half power, and I want to walk through it, because if I do not name the rot we cannot do anything about it.

The producers are not the problem. Talented people make brilliant music every single day. I hear it, you hear it, it pours through Bandcamp and Soundcloud and the decks at every half decent club night in fourteen different countries. The talent is fine. What has changed is everything around the talent.

The labels have gone safe. They are signing what already streams, not what should stream. They are A&R’ing a Spotify chart, not a culture. They are obsessed with the fifteen second hook because the fifteen second hook is the only currency the platforms reward, and so we get an entire generation of producers who write the chorus and forget the rest of the bloody song. There is no second verse. There is no breakdown that breaks anything. There is no mood, no place, no time, no point of view. There is just a clip designed to soundtrack twenty seconds of someone’s morning routine before the algorithm pushes them to the next clip. That is not music. That is content. We have to stop pretending those are the same thing.

The platforms have homogenised us into oblivion. Every algorithmic feed, every recommendation engine, every playlist desk, every editorial slot is optimising for the same set of sounds. Tempo here. Texture there. Drop at the seventeen second mark. Vocal that sits in the centre of the mix at minus six dB. The result, predictably, is a flood of music that all sounds like everyone else’s music, because everyone is racing toward the same five reference tracks. Beatport’s front page in 2026 sounds like Beatport’s front page from six months ago, which sounds like Beatport’s front page from a year before that. The only thing that changes is the artwork.

Bandcamp, bless it, is still doing god’s work for the heads, but Bandcamp on its own cannot rebuild a culture. It needs allies, and it does not currently have many.

The DJs have become part of the problem too, and I say that as one of them. The same Beatport top hundred is being played at festival after festival, by acts who used to be the people you trusted to break records and now play the same set someone else played the night before. The pre-recorded set is the elephant in the room. The booking economy punishes risk. The warm-up slot has been killed, the closing slot has been killed, and the residency, where DJs used to learn how to break records, has been killed almost everywhere outside a small handful of clubs still doing it properly. None of this is the only reason the anthems have stopped landing, but it is part of the reason, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

The festivals have programmed themselves into a corner. The same forty acts cycle around Europe every summer, playing variations of the same set, drawing the same crowd response, generating the same fifteen second clip that gets pushed up the same algorithm. The risk has been engineered out of the lineup because the lineup has to recoup, and the lineup that recoups is the lineup that already worked last year. So we get last year again, with a different stage design, and we wonder why nothing new is breaking through.

Music media, finally, has in great big handfuls abandoned its job. Tastemaking was once the entire point. You read the magazine because the magazine knew what was coming six months before you did. The magazine put it on the cover. The magazine sent its writer to a club at three in the morning because that was where the story was. The magazine got it wrong sometimes, and got it spectacularly right at other times, and you trusted the magazine because the magazine had skin in the game. Now half of dance music’s coverage is a press release passed through a translator. Now the cover is whoever is touring this month with the biggest agency. Now the long read has been replaced by a list. Now the editor is being told by some marketing executive in another timezone that Gen Z does not read. They read. They just do not read what most of us are publishing, because most of what we are publishing is not worth the screen it appears on.

This is where I lose my temper a little, so apologies in advance.

Underworld have not made another Born Slippy in over twenty years, and they are not obliged to, that is not the criticism. The criticism is that nobody else has either. The Chemical Brothers have not dropped another Hey Boy Hey Girl, and again they do not owe us one. They owe us their honest work, which they have provided, repeatedly, year after year. The fault is not theirs. The fault is that the entire ecosystem is failing to produce successors. There is no younger duo or trio or solo artist landing a generation defining anthem at the same scale. There is no equivalent of Born Slippy in 2026. There is no equivalent of Hey Boy Hey Girl. There is no Sincere. There is no Time Is Now. There is no Superstylin’. There is no There’s A Better Place. There is no Insomnia. There is no Music Sounds Better With You. There is no record that does to a club at half three in the morning what those records did to clubs at half three in the morning, and you can feel it on the dancefloor every single weekend.

Try to convince me otherwise. Use the comments. I want to be wrong about this. I would genuinely love to be wrong about this.

Now, before I get a thousand emails from readers correctly pointing out that I am ignoring half of what is brilliant about the present moment, yes, I know. Splintering is a feature, not a bug. We all love what scenes have done since the monoculture cracked. Bob Moses owning a sound that sits between heartbreak and house and turning that sound into a global tour. Jungle making albums that feel like the long take in a film where everyone is dancing in the rain. Boards of Canada still operating at the level of a half remembered dream, on their own clock, in their own little corner of the woods. Caribou continuing to be quietly excellent. Floating Points marrying the dancefloor and the conservatoire without anyone getting embarrassed. Romy doing pop the way pop should be done. Overmono. Skee Mask. Loraine James. There is a long list. I love all of it. We cover all of it.

But splintering is not the same as breaking through. A scene of brilliant niches is what you have when the centre has collapsed. It is not what replaces the centre. We need both. We need the deep, weird, properly nerdy corners of the catalogue, and we also need the act that ignites the entire room without asking permission. One feeds the other. The obscure becomes the mainstream, the mainstream funds the obscure, and the cycle keeps the whole thing breathing. Right now we have lopped one half of that ecosystem off and we are pretending it is healthy. It is not healthy. It is the music equivalent of someone telling you they live entirely on smoothies and seem surprised that they are tired.

There is, I should say, a rebellion already underway, because there always is. The crews still running unlicensed parties because the licensed venues will not let them programme honestly. The selectors playing six hour vinyl sets in basement bars to ninety people on a Tuesday because that is the only context in which the music can breathe. The kids running radio shows on Twitch and on community FM, who are playing records they paid for with their own money to listeners they do not know, just because the music is good. The Bandcamp Friday loyalists. The labels run by two people from a flat who put out twelve releases a year and lose money on most of them. The producers writing six minute records with a mood and an arc and a point of view, in defiance of every commercial signal pointing them in the other direction. None of this is the headline story. All of it is the actual story. And it is where the next anthem is going to come from, when it comes, because the official channels have proven structurally incapable of producing one.

Decoded is going to keep doing what we have always done. We are going to write the long form pieces. We are going to put the unknowns on the cover when the music demands it. We are going to argue, in (Digital) print, for the records that deserve arguing for, and against the ones that do not. That is not a marketing line, that is a personal commitment, and the team here knows it.

I am also as guilty as anyone, by the way. I have programmed safer than I should have on nights when the room would have forgiven a riskier choice. I have leaned on the records I knew worked rather than the records I suspected might. I have caught myself reaching for the obvious because the obvious was easy and the room was tired and so was I. Writing this column is partly a public reminder to myself that the obvious is the enemy.

So here is the question I want to leave you with, and the reason I want this comment section absolutely full by the end of the week.

What was the last record you heard that made you stop what you were doing? Not the last track you nodded along to. Not the latest thing your friend who works in a label sent you in a panic on a Thursday. The actual last record that made you put the kettle down and stand still until the breakdown finished. When was it? Who made it? Where can the rest of us find it? Because I think we are all hungrier for this than we are admitting. I think the music is being made. I think it is being smothered before it reaches us. And I want every reader of this magazine to put one record in the comments by Friday, by name, with a label and a year, so the rest of us can hear it too.

Send me the brick. Tell me where the window is. I will throw it myself. Support your local promoter pushing boundaries, support the new label coming up, tell your mate to fuck off playing the latest chart music!

by Damion Pell

• Share
• Tweet
• Pin it
• Share
• Email
• More