Within a few short years of debuting her youthful, meticulous homages to golden-era jungle, Nia Archives was opening for Beyoncé’s 2023 run of London stadium shows and jetting out to L.A. to write songs for Rihanna at Skrillex’s behest. These are not typical accomplishments for bedroom jungle DJs. There was a time when the odd chart slot and a feature on the soundtrack of the latest FIFA game would mark the mainstream zenith of a breakthrough junglist. Some might bend their arc toward pop, with compressed song lengths and more emphasis on daytime radio hooks than precision-engineered breakbeats. But Bradford-born Dehaney Nia Lishahn Hunt had managed to cross over without pandering or making concessions.
That Beyoncé slot came off the back of a firm but passionate letter Nia wrote to protest the lack of a dance-music category at the UK’s MOBO awards. She’d continued taking a hands-on approach to directing her own videos, and scored one of her biggest hits by sampling a Brazilian body percussion group. Fiercely protective of their culture, and almost uniquely self-sustaining within the wider UK dance-music scene, jungle and drum’n’bass have long tended to exist in their own siloed enclave. But Nia showed a talent for transmitting the scene’s legacy and ethos to a bigger, younger audience while pushing the envelope with her own sound, appearing current while earning crucial co-signs from scene elders like Goldie, DJ Die, and Randall. Her new position at the scene’s forefront came with considerable expectations, and her occasionally dazzling debut, Silence Is Loud, felt the weight of those demands. Its uneasy blend of jungle and Britpop ultimately carried unspent potential: vignettes of partying her way into isolation hinted at emotional vulnerability, but hid behind the immaculate clatter of drums. Then Nia fell in love, got dumped, had the cops called on her in a confrontation with her boyfriend—and produced her most heart-stopping work to date. On Emotional Junglist, Nia simultaneously accesses a new, emboldened register, and pushes jungle music into fresh, vulnerable territory.
Loosely tracing the hot burn of a new relationship, then the hollowing out of a betrayal and breakup, Emotional Junglist makes good on the promise of Silence Is Loud. The friction between thumbed riffs and flurried breaks is productive rather than awkward, opening up meaner, moodier, and brighter spaces for Nia to write into. With a heavier emotional anchor, Nia’s signature combination of soul-baring rave and spiky guitars coheres more boldly. Simple, direct lines like the bridge on “Vertical”—“I don’t wanna be/Away from you”—turn whole scenes on a weighted pause, and conjure the matchless intensity of a burgeoning relationship. “This Could Be…” mirrors the giddy frisson that accompanies a new romance, with anxious, fast-picked guitars and drum fills buzzing like the group chat in response to one of those, “Guys, I’ve met someone” messages. Early highlight “Danger” was one of the songs to come out of the Rihanna writing room—all skidding, swerving raunch—and is all the better for being released here under a wash of breaks instead. Nia will occasionally stretch the odd metaphor beyond its tensile limit (rivers, seas, crashing waves on “Vertical”), but for the most part her writing is spare and lingering as a kiss.
As the record flips from the rushes of lust to crushing emotional collapse, the tone shifts. The refrain on “Lovers Grief” (“You look different from the other side of love”) is withering, cutting, and tragic in equal measure, and delivered with all self-evident emotional exhaustion—post-breakup clarity in slow motion. “There Goes Ma Head” dials up the tumult with a charging riff that sounds like Arctic Monkeys at their most melodramatic, or Blondie with sharper elbows, while the drumwork is pure, strobe-dappled escapism. That bite and raw intensity produce some of the album’s standout moments, transmuting jungle’s physicality across a wide emotional range with poetic verve and Nia’s woody, vulnerable, yet strident timbre.
Writing to extremes is, in many ways, the easy part: It’s the bits in between where real pop chops are earned. The sequence from Jorja Smith-featuring “Get Me Down” to the glorious, sunny keys and tumbling vocals of “Superlust” captures an everyday tenderness, with happiness hanging in the balance. Smith and Nia’s vocals combine like two sets of fingers slipped between each other. These softer moments bind the whole thing together, and inject the album’s emotional and narrative arc with a dose of easygoing warmth that makes the cathartic closing payoff of “Boys in Blue” all the more raucous. Recounting her boyfriend calling the police on her during their fraught break-up, the chorus rings out over rowdy snares like a brutal playground taunt. (It could have been blunter: “You’re a loser,” she said of her ex to the FADER earlier this year with deflating resignation.)
This is the first time that Nia has written an album with a live band performance in mind. While her DJ sets have always comprised old-school soundsystem toasting and live vocals over traditional turntablism, the widescreen approach of bringing in a broader range of instrumentation—and working more openly with other writers and producers, including Sampha, James Ford, Julia Michaels, and Ethan P. Flynn—has given more space for Nia to step out from her own shadow. She’s avowed in interviews that this isn’t a jungle album, but to dismiss the suggestion out of hand arguably underplays how far she’s broadened the sound that birthed her: not solely in the sounds applied, but in who she’s brought into the dance, what a jungle song can be about, and where it all goes from here. This is a relationship that keeps on giving.
