Drum and Bass
The 15 Best Drum and Bass
Tracks of All Time
Breakbeat-driven dance music built on chopped Amen breaks at 160-180 BPM over sub-bass, born from UK hardcore and jungle in the early nineties and still the most rhythmically inventive music the country has produced.
- Origin
- United Kingdom, 1992
- Tempo
- 160–180 BPM
- Also known as
- dnb, d&b, drum & bass, drum n bass, jungle
- Tracks
- 15
- Updated
- 2026-08-28
Listen to the whole list
Play it through here →One record after another, with the verdicts
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Opens the list on YouTube as a playlist you can save to your own account. We never see your account, and nothing is stored here. 2 of these records have no verified YouTube link yet, so they are left out rather than guessed at.
Number 1: Goldie / Inner City Life
1994 · FFRR / Metalheadz
The record that proved jungle could carry grief. Diane Charlemagne's vocal floats over breaks chopped into timestretched dust, and the whole genre grew up in six minutes.
Also on 1994, The Waxonia Desk — A Way In, The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred
Number 2: Shy FX & UK Apache / Original Nuttah
1994 · SOUR
Jungle's national anthem. Ragga vocal, air-horn, and a breakdown that still empties the bar and fills the floor thirty years on. Nothing else sounds this much like a specific place and year.
Also on 1994, Bass Weight, The Waxonia Desk — 160, The Waxonia Desk — Ghosts, The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred
Number 3: Omni Trio / Renegade Snares
1993 · Moving Shadow
The Foul Play remix is the blueprint: rolling Amen edits, a piano hook with real melancholy, and the discovery that breakbeat could be beautiful rather than only violent.
Also on The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred
Number 5: Roni Size / Reprazent / Brown Paper Bag
1997 · Talkin' Loud
The double bass line that carried drum and bass to the Mercury Prize and a general audience without softening a single edge of the drum programming.
Also on The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred
Number 6: Photek / Ni Ten Ichi Ryu
1997 · Science
Drum programming as swordsmanship. Photek treated the breakbeat as pure percussion sculpture, and no producer since has matched this level of rhythmic detail per bar.
Number 7: Alex Reece / Pulp Fiction
1995 · Metalheadz
The moment the two-step beat arrived and the genre stopped running. Half the tempo in feel, all of it in fact — a rhythmic trick that reshaped everything that followed.
Number 8: Dillinja / The Angels Fell
1995 · Metalheadz
Dillinja's bass weight is the reference standard, and this is the track where the sub stops being an accompaniment and becomes the lead instrument.
Number 9: 4hero / Mr Kirk's Nightmare
1990 · Reinforced
Predates the genre proper and contains its DNA anyway: a sampled police death notification over hardcore breaks. The dread that jungle inherited starts here.
Also on Dancing to Bad News
Number 11: Ed Rush & Optical / Bacteria
1998 · Virus
Techstep at its most malevolent. Distorted, mechanical and airless — this is the sound that pushed the genre out of jazz clubs and into something genuinely frightening.
Number 12: High Contrast / Return of Forever
2002 · Hospital
Liquid funk's finest hour. Soul samples and euphoric strings over rolling drums, made with enough craft to escape the sentimentality the style usually invites.
Number 15: Noisia / Machine Gun
2010 · Division / mau5trap
Neurofunk's technical ceiling. The bass is processed past the point of recognition into something percussive and physical, and it still grooves.