She Called It the Summer of Jungle

Nia Archives put Forbidden Feelingz out on her own label, HIJINXX, from Bradford, without waiting on a London A&R to bless the tempo. She has talked about a West Indian family background as part of why the music sounds the way it does. In the early 2020s she put out jungle — breakbeats at a speed British dance music had associated with the early 1990s — that did not sound like a reissue and did not ask London’s older gatekeepers for a license. “Ode 2 Maya Angelou” is a title that tells you the license she was interested in. A poet in the name of a rave track is a claim about who the room is for.

Jungle, for anyone who met it late, is the mid-1990s British music built from chopped breakbeats, often the Amen break, run fast, with bass that moves independently of the drums and with samples from reggae, soul, and anywhere else the editor was looking. It was dance music and it was a culture: pirate radio, specific shops, a tension about race and ownership that has never been resolved and should not be smoothed over in a capsule definition. Drum and bass grew out of it and, in plenty of its later forms, ironed the feeling flat in favor of a cleaner kind of athleticism. Archives’ early records were heard, correctly, as a refusal of that ironing. The hiss, the raggedness, the sense of a tape that had lived in a bag — these were choices about which era’s idea of fidelity mattered. Fidelity to the break, not to a modern loudness standard.

“Forbidden Feelingz” as a title track does the other half of the job. The joke in the spelling is that someone decided girls, or tenderness, or a certain kind of pop clarity, did not belong at that tempo. The decision was wrong when it was made in the 1990s and it was wrong when it was repeated by people who thought they were protecting a culture. A vocal that a new room can actually sing, or shout, is not a betrayal of the break. The break was always full of voices. Congo Natty, a producer whose own work sits in that history, publicly backing a younger artist is a better piece of continuity than a lecture about what jungle was. Continuity is a person saying: this counts.

The self-released label is part of the music’s meaning. HIJINXX is the infrastructure. A Bradford artist with her own imprint is in a different position from a Bradford artist waiting for a London A&R to recognize a tempo. The last decade of British club music is full of artists who did not wait — PinkPantheress with short garage songs, Eliza Rose with a chant that reached the chart, a wave of jungle and breaks records that circulated online before they circulated in clubs. Archives is a central name in that wave because the records are producer records, not just vocal records. The breaks are edited by someone who wants them ragged on purpose. You can hear the editing as the authorship.

What a review should not do is turn her into a symbol of a summer and then stop listening. “Summer of jungle” was a headline this desk used, and headlines freeze a year that was actually a practice. The practice is: write at the tempo, sing if you have something to sing, put the record out on a label you control, cite the people you mean to cite. Maya Angelou in a title is a citation. It asks the dancer to know, or to go and find out, that the sample of feeling in the culture is wider than the last white-label they bought. That is a bigger demand than a revival, and it is the interesting one.

Heard next to the jungle word on Club Copy’s own pages — a word LT Drifta’s bio uses and his priced genres mostly do not — Archives’ record is a reminder that the word is a practice with a history, not a texture to sprinkle. The old heads who said the girls don’t play it were describing their own rooms. Forbidden Feelingz has a hometown, a label, a poet’s name, and a break willing to sound like a tape.