The 15 best Drum and Bass tracks of all time
Drum and Bass
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.
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Goldie / Inner City Life
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.
Shy FX & UK Apache / Original Nuttah
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.
Omni Trio / Renegade Snares
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.
Roni Size / Reprazent / Brown Paper Bag
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.
Photek / Ni Ten Ichi Ryu
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.
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Alex Reece / Pulp Fiction
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.
Dillinja / The Angels Fell
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.
4hero / Mr Kirk's Nightmare
Predates the genre proper and contains its DNA anyway: a sampled police death notification over hardcore breaks. The dread that jungle inherited starts here.
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Ed Rush & Optical / Bacteria
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.
High Contrast / Return of Forever
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.
Noisia / Machine Gun
Neurofunk's technical ceiling. The bass is processed past the point of recognition into something percussive and physical, and it still grooves.