“While drum and bass is associated with the United Kingdom of the early ’90s, its roots are back to the United States in the 1980s. Early forms of breakbeat manipulation were pioneered by hip hop DJs in New York and Miami, who sampled funk, soul, and electro tracks to create rhythmically complex beats. The raw energy of breakdancing culture and the evolution of Miami bass and electro-funk laid the groundwork for the breakbeat foundations that would later define jungle and drum and bass. These American innovations eventually crossed the Atlantic, where UK producers blended them with reggae, dub, and rave sounds to form what we now recognize as drum and bass.”
Drum and bass has never been a monolith. It has always evolved along different emotional and sonic axes—some aimed at the heart, others at the gut. While casual listeners might lump all high-BPM breakbeat music under a single label, within the community, the fault lines have always been clear. And one of the most enduring divides is the one between liquid and deep DnB on one side, and techstep and neurofunk on the other.
In the mid-to-late 1990s, as jungle evolved into drum and bass, two major forces emerged. One was a shift toward darker, mechanical sounds—techstep—driven by artists like Ed Rush & Optical, Trace, and Dom & Roland, for example. Their tracks were taut, sci-fi, paranoid. Built around precision and pressure, this was music engineered for dark rooms and hard systems.
But at the same time, there was another path forming—one that prioritized atmosphere, soul, and melody. LTJ Bukem, through his Good Looking Records, pushed a style that rejected tech aggression in favor of warm pads, jazz chords, and euphoric emotion. It wasn’t soft—it was spiritual. This became the seed of liquid DnB, and later, through minimalism and restraint, the deep DnB lineage.
These weren’t just stylistic preferences—they were two different understandings of what drum and bass should be.
In the early 2000s, neurofunk arrived as techstep’s sleeker, heavier descendant. It took the dystopian ethos of techstep and added a polished, ultra-technical aesthetic. Noisia, Black Sun Empire, or Konflict took the lead, and soon the scene began to orbit around increasingly complex sound design, rolling mid-bass, and hyper-tight drops.
For many listeners, this was a high-water mark of DnB’s technical potential. But for others, it marked a philosophical break. The focus had shifted from emotional depth to mechanical impact. The grooves felt synthetic. The storytelling had been replaced with structure.
Meanwhile, artists in the deep and liquid camps were creating their own counter-movements. Deep DnB—through pioneers like DBridge, ASC, Skeptical, and Instra:mental—explored minimalism, space, and subtlety. Liquid producers like Calibre, Lenzman, and Artificial Intelligence kept the genre human, warm, and emotionally resonant.
These weren’t just underground alternatives. They were statements of intention: drum and bass could still be cinematic, personal, and soulful—without sacrificing complexity.
Today, the divide remains—but it’s often blurred by marketing. Large festivals and algorithm-driven playlists tend to flatten the landscape, labeling anything with a halftime beat and a reverb-drenched vocal as “liquid,” even if it lacks the genre’s core ethos. At the same time, deep DnB is often sidelined as too abstract, too subtle for mass appeal.
In these spaces, neurofunk and other tech-heavy subgenres thrive. They offer the adrenaline and spectacle that big stages demand. But what’s often lost is the cultural weight that deep and liquid DnB have carried for decades—the emotional intelligence, the storytelling, the restraint.
Too often, events and promoters try to blend everything into one sanitized DnB experience. But this erases the values that set deep and liquid apart. They are not just “softer DnB.” They are genres that prioritize emotional resonance, human depth, and sonic space over brute force and complexity for its own sake.
What unites liquid and deep DnB is a refusal to follow the louder-is-better mentality. These styles don’t beg for attention—they invite you in. They don’t hit—they move. They don’t aim to impress with sound design—they aim to communicate through sound.
This is music for those who want to feel something—and who understand that not all depth is visible on the surface.
To talk about deep and liquid DnB as some kind of new reaction to neurofunk misses the point entirely. These sounds have always been in dialogue, often in tension, with the harder edges of the scene. And that’s a good thing.