Jungle / Drum & Bass

early 1990s · London and Bristol, United Kingdom

Fast breakbeat music built on chopped drum samples and heavy sub-bass, from early 1990s UK rave culture (Wikipedia).

The sound

Chopped, sampled breakbeats at roughly 160 to 180 BPM over deep Jamaican-soundsystem sub-bass. No four-on-the-floor: the drums themselves are the lead.

Listen for: The rolling, chopped breakbeat where house would put a steady kick, and the sub-bass carrying the tune underneath. The drums are the melody here.

Things to know

  1. Jungle grew out of the UK rave scene in the early 1990s, on pirate radio stations like Kool FM and at London club nights like Rage, where Fabio and Grooverider sped breakbeats up over house and techno.

  2. Jungle and drum and bass run at roughly 160 to 180 BPM on chopped, sampled breakbeats over deep sub-bass, a rhythm engine completely different from the four-on-the-floor of house and techno.

  3. Jungle's signature drum sound is the Amen break, a few seconds of drum solo from the Winstons' 1969 B-side "Amen, Brother," which became one of the most sampled recordings in music history.

  4. Thirty years after 1994, jungle is back on the charts: Chase and Status's "Baddadan" went top five in the UK in 2023, and producers like Nia Archives lead a new jungle wave.

Key tracks

Family tree

  • Acid House: Jungle came out of the rave explosion that acid house set off in Britain. As the parties turned into hardcore rave, London DJs sped the breakbeats up, layered Jamaican sub-bass underneath, and by 1993 the sound had grown into its own genre.
  • UK Garage: UK garage exists because London clubbers raised on jungle wanted its energy on a different night. DJs pitched American garage house up to match the pace jungle had made normal, and the darker end of UKG kept jungle's sub-bass and its MC culture.
  • Dubstep: Dubstep inherited jungle's core idea: the bass is the lead instrument and the music is built to be felt on a soundsystem. Croydon's producers slowed the tempo and stripped the drums back, but the sub-heavy DNA runs straight through jungle from dub reggae.
  • Reggae, Dub & Soundsystem: Jungle grew straight out of the soundsystem tradition that UK crews like Jah Shaka, Coxsone, and Fatman Hi-Fi kept alive through the 1970s and 80s. Producers welded dub and reggae's basslines and remix techniques to chopped breakbeats, Jah Shaka's recordings turn up sampled on early jungle tracks by the Ragga Twins, and jungle's dubplate economy came straight from Kingston's exclusivity game.
  • UK Rave / Breakbeat Hardcore: Jungle is what breakbeat hardcore became once producers pushed the reggae bass and dub side harder than the piano-rave side. Through 1992 and 1993 the transitional records got filed as hardcore jungle before the shorter name stuck. Club nights like RAGE at Heaven, where Fabio and Grooverider held the decks, are credited as the exact rooms where that handover happened.
  • IDM: By the mid-1990s, Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, and Luke Vibert were chopping jungle and drum and bass breaks with the same obsessiveness they'd applied to ambient techno. The result, drill 'n' bass, is a genuine crossing point: as much a jungle mutation as an IDM one, with Squarepusher's 1995-96 releases as its landmark documents.
  • Footwork / Juke: Footwork and jungle both live around 160 BPM and share a taste for chopped-up rhythms, so DJs started blending the two live. DJ Rashad's 2013 album Double Cup folded jungle breakbeats straight into footwork, and UK producer Om Unit built sets and releases around the pairing, calling it a fusion that simply blends perfectly.
  • Happy Hardcore: Jungle and happy hardcore aren't parent and child, they're siblings, forking from the same breakbeat hardcore root between 1992 and 1994. Jungle took London and Bristol and the dub influenced, bass heavy route. Happy hardcore took Essex, Northampton, the North and Scotland, and doubled down on everything ecstatic: pianos, pitched up vocals, and a stomping kick. It's the same drum toolkit, just aimed at opposite moods.
  • Deep Dubstep: Mala has traced his own lineage back through jungle as well as garage. His 2008 Red Bull Music Academy lecture retraced his path joining dots from dub to jungle before he landed on dubstep. Deep Medi and DMZ-era tracks regularly borrow jungle's breakbeat chops and sub-bass pressure inside an otherwise half-time dubstep frame.

Go deeper