For Fans of Drum and Bass

A double album from a jungle producer at the peak of a singles-driven scene, released in 1995, anchored by a 21-minute centrepiece track. Every rule said it would fail. Instead, Timeless became one of the most celebrated electronic albums of the decade. Goldie understood something other producers did not: drum and bass could hold a listener for the long form if the emotional arc was there. The orchestral sweeps, the pitched vocal samples, the tension held across side-length compositions, all of it proved the genre had range beyond the dancefloor. No album before or since has made the same argument as convincingly.

When Psygnosis licensed tracks from Leftfield, Orbital, and the Prodigy for the original WipEout in 1995, something clicked into place. Speed as theme, speed as soundtrack. By WipEout 2097, the pairing with Photek, Underworld, and The Chemical Brothers made the soundtrack inseparable from the game's identity. The franchise effectively introduced a generation of console players to the drum and bass and breakbeat world, making the music feel native to a visual language of velocity and gleaming surfaces. That relationship has never really been replicated anywhere else in gaming.

New Forms, the 1997 double album from Roni Size and Reprazent, did something the genre had rarely attempted: it brought live instrumentation into the construction of drum and bass, with jazz bass, live drums, and soul vocals woven through the breakbeats. When it won the Mercury Prize over Radiohead's OK Computer and The Prodigy's The Fat of the Land, people outside the scene had to pay attention. The win did not push drum and bass into the mainstream in any lasting commercial sense, but it expanded the genre's ambition. It proved the music could be judged by the same standards as any other serious contemporary recording.

Justin Kerrigan's 1999 film is not a drum and bass film in a strict sense: the soundtrack spans jungle, garage, and house. But it is the most honest screen depiction of the culture that surrounded the genre: the group of Cardiff friends navigating a weekend from Friday night comedown anxiety to Sunday morning wreckage. No moralising, no tragedy arc, no villain drugs narrative. Just the actual texture of what it felt like inside those years. The film is inseparable from the music even when the music is not drum and bass, because it captures the communal emotional logic that drum and bass was built for.