Gqom
early 2010s · Durban townships, South Africa
Durban's DIY answer to house music: broken, asymmetrical kicks, dark synth drones, and chanted vocals, built on bedroom software and spread phone to phone before any label noticed (FACT, Red Bull Music Academy).
The sound
A broken, asymmetrical kick in two or three-step groupings around 120 to 130 BPM, replacing house's straight four-on-the-floor, built over drawn-out synth drones, tom rolls, chants, and whistles instead of a conventional bassline.
Listen for: The kick refuses to land where a house track would put it. Listen for how the groove feels tense and off-balance rather than locked, with vocal chants and whistles doing the job a bassline usually does.
Things to know
FACT Magazine defines gqom as house music with broken beats, sliced vocals or chants, high tempo, and mostly no bassline, a description Durban producers themselves use to separate it from more conventional South African house styles.
Producer Citizen Boy traces gqom's direct precursor to a four-step style called sgxumseni, credited to DJ Clock and DJ Gukwa, before Naked Boyz pushed the beat into the fully broken two and three-step pattern that defines gqom proper.
Beyoncé personally selected DJ Lag to co-produce My Power for The Lion King: The Gift in 2019, after his instrumental Trip to New York had soundtracked an interlude during her 2018 Global Citizen Festival performance.
Key tracks
Family tree
- House: Gqom comes out of house music, but by way of kwaito, South Africa's slowed-down, chant-heavy take on house. Around 2011, Durban producers already mixing tribal house with Zulu drumming and vocals started pulling the four-on-the-floor kick apart entirely. A four-step precursor called sgxumseni, credited to DJ Clock and DJ Gukwa, gave way to Naked Boyz's fully broken two and three-step pattern, the moment most producers point to as gqom's real birth.
- Afro House / Amapiano: Gqom and amapiano are cousins, not parent and child. Both grew out of South Africa's township house and kwaito scenes on parallel timelines, gqom in Durban's broken-beat underground, amapiano in Pretoria and Johannesburg's jazzier log drum scene. DJ Lag has called them sonic siblings on his own record, and by the 2020s the two scenes actively cross-pollinate, producing gqom-amapiano hybrids and the emerging 3-step style.
- EDM / Big Room: Gqom's clearest brush with global pop came through Beyoncé, who personally selected DJ Lag to co-produce My Power for The Lion King: The Gift in 2019, after his instrumental Trip to New York soundtracked an interlude at her festival set the year before. The track's broken rhythm and drones carry gqom's DNA straight from Durban's underground into a chart-facing record, a rare direct handoff to global pop production.