As far as the Northern Hemisphere goes, summer 2024 is officially over. Sorry about that. Before clubs start packing out again, though, this is an opportune moment to reflect on the season just gone. Dance music is too diffuse to crown a single ruling anthem, and Resident Advisor doesn't really have a dog in the Kendrick / Sabrina / Chappell fight for song of the summer, so we thought it better to ask: what took dance floors by storm? Which styles ran out of gas? And where to next?

For good or ill, people will look back at 2021-23 and remember it as a period of near-monomaniacal fixation with all things fast and furious. Even if you weren't personally over-indexing on turbo rave, you were still probably grousing about those types of tunes, particularly if a young audience was left unmoved by attempts to play anything else. The discourse reached a crescendo last summer, as commenters bemoaned the dominance of gauche maximalism with the nutritional value of a Slush Puppie and nuance of a monster truck rally.

Fatigue, and a smidge of self-admonishment, has now given way to rebirth. With edits a depreciating currency, online chatter has drifted to, say, dunking on The Dare, or riffing on the precipitating factors for what we might call Waft Summer (more on that in a minute). For the crowds who swerved lunchtime rinse outs, and for the DJs who'd like to pretend they didn't have a USB full of all-caps slammers ripped off SoundCloud, we're intrigued by what filled that space instead.

Obviously, no two experiences are alike; depending on your perspective, you might see festivals and summer parties as vital social gatherings, facing intense headwinds while requiring firmer protection. Alternatively, you might view them as places of comparative homogeneity that remain dispiritingly walled-off to working class punters and boundary-pushing global musicians alike. They are, at least, useful grounds to detect shifts in what we enjoy listening to in person.

On that note: this feature is very much about shifts. We've gathered RA staffers and contributors to zone in on what's moving up and down, but less so sideways, which is why we're not highlighting sounds that continue to roll spiritedly on—like Jersey, juke, jazz and jungle, to name just the Js—or omnipresent bookings enjoying the afterglow of a breakout moment, such as SHYGIRL and Brutalismus 3000.

There will inevitably be a mind-frazzlingly creative young DJ out there in the digital wild blending DJ Dayeh into 2Sdxrt3all, leaving us scrambling to play catch-up in 2025. And you can bet a boutique woodland microfest we haven't heard of is going down somewhere in the world this weekend, pumping out sounds that have yet to even receive a codified genre tag.

All of which to say, this isn't 100 percent representative. It never could be. Still, that won't stop us trying to bottle the essence of a season rapidly shrinking in the rearview mirror. – Gabriel Szatan

Safi Bugel

Less Edits

From ultra-fast reworks of Y2K pop hits to UKG flips of old Bhangra tunes, dance floors have been saturated with flashes of familiarity in recent years. Last year, the edit phenomenon became utterly inescapable.

Why did recycled tracks have us in such a chokehold? They were a playful "fuck you" to a too serious club landscape, but more sceptically, you could see them as an easy formula for creating that perfect viral moment. Whatever the motive, this flood quickly jeopardised the novelty and fun factor. There's only so many times I could hear that Da Hool melody or a Destiny's Child vocal creeping in before decamping to the smoking area. Maybe I'm a cynic or just hate having fun—as one pop-edit-obsessed friend suggested—but when every set starts to sound like an early '00s greatest hits compilation on speed, you start to ponder whether you may as well be in a carpeted club in the suburbs.

In 2024, though, things feel a little different. Across the six festivals I've been to this summer—a mix of large mainstream events (Glastonbury) and tiny independent weekenders (Three Wheel Drive)—I've found that the pervasive reworks of 2023 have faded out. I can probably count the number of edits I heard on one hand, and they were no longer eliciting hands-in-the-air delight. When I did hear them, the reaction was noticeably more tepid.

Too much sugar will give you a toothache; sooner or later, the dance floor was sure to pivot. The very nature of pop edits—short, snappy, gimmicky—reinforces the ephemeral lifespan of the trend. This is not to suggest that edits have disappeared altogether: deployed sparingly, at the right moment, they can spark perfect singalong moments. Still, it's hardly surprising they're darting away as quickly as they arrived.

Tom Gledhill

Complex Bangers

One of dance music's biggest discursive trends is the push and pull between maximalism and conservatism. It's a bit of a sham dichotomy, but it has made me think more critically about what makes the grade as "complex" or not. And at every festival this year, many head-turners stood out because of exactly that: their brazen weirdness.

From the abstract lead line on Verraco's "Godspeed" to the sci-fi gunplay of BFTT's "Welded," 2024's batch of club-ready face-melters seem optimally designed to make you feel even more off-kilter in the dance. We've been here before, of course. My mind flashed to the late '90s moment when tech-step and neurofunk's influence on jungle and drum & bass was becoming dominant—another split when offshoots bent away from subtlety.

In a 1997 The Wire column entry, Simon Reynolds laid out what he saw as a separation in production methodologies: "If No U Turn-style techstep is defined by deliberately dirty production, bombastic riffs and an explosive psychosis, this new sound is about obsessive-compulsive cleanliness of production, eerie electronic blips 'n' blurts, ultra-complicated basslines and an implosive neurosis. Techstep classics such as Trace & Nico's "Squadron" sound like a maniac running amok; neurofunk tracks sound like a stalker, furtive and morbidly fixated."

What's interesting is the idea that detail-oriented productions might be exclusively for "headnodders and trainspotters." It's fair to say we've moved past the peak of abstract electronic music you might enjoy while seated in a middle-class cultural venue, but thankfully we haven't sacrificed the kind of rave-igniting tunes that manage to be both meticulous and wild. The shared appetite for rhythmically and texturally challenging music right now is strong. Whether you're in the mood for an industrial take on Korean folk music, lush organic neurofunk or 170 bassline hybrids, what's clear is this: so far, 2024 has been an exceptional year for weird and wonky electronic music.

Matt McDermott

Dub Techno

Last May, before closing the side stage at Four Tet's Brooklyn bridge party, Huerco S. interrupted his soundcheck to film a quick promo video. As a track off his then-unreleased Loidis LP drifted into the undergirds of the Kosciuszko Bridge, he called his new album "minimal dub tech emo." In his trademark insouciant manner, he'd unknowingly articulated a wave in dance music.

The album he was hyping, August's RA-recommended One Day, resembles nothing so much as Vladislav Delay's masterpiece for Force Tracks and dub techno blueprint Chain Reaction. Later that night, Huerco S. dropped Skee Mask's "Dub Schneider," a track that brilliantly combines dub techno with austere, rolling hardgroove.

Is 2024 the year dub techno becomes cool again? Not entirely. But out in the fields, you're far more likely to hear those telltale delayed stabs mixed in with the wiggly, muscular tech house of the moment. "It feels like a response to the hard and fast sound that's been dominating dance floors the past few years," Nick León told me, while referencing Australian DJ Kia's tendency to lean into the hazy style in her transportative sets. The contrast to, say, Khia and Justin Timberlake donk mash-ups couldn't be more clear.

But what's cool about this dub techno ripple isn't just that it feels diametrically opposed to what came before—it's that the range is palpably expanding. For a while, dub techno was a niche, orthodox concern predominantly evangelised by Subwax Bcn types. Now, I hear the sound in Toumba's immersive atmospherics and Levantine rhythms, the drifting ambience of Purelink and the myriad decelerated records that have flooded Bandcamp in recent years. These slower yet propulsive tempos exhibit a desire to find a middle ground between exploratory soundscapes and blistering big-room—for dancing and tripping out simultaneously.

Gabriel Szatan

House

Let's get the obvious out the way: this is like saying water had a big summer, or sandals had a big summer. House and summer go hand-in-hand—it's dance culture's lingua franca, by far the most accommodating church in town. You can slot everything under its roof, from the proggier end of Animalia and Love On The Rocks, to Charli's ostentatious electro reskins, to the type of Groovy & Deep & Melodic Living Room Vibes filler clogging up YouTube. I am essentially cheating.

Being a tonal match for both light drizzle and blazing sunshine gives house an in-built advantage, but crucially, there's no shortage of immortal jams available to be pulled out of storage. Closer Musik's "One Two Three (No Gravity)," Apple's "De Siegalizer" and the lusher end of Shed's tools all got airings this summer, and each time felt like running into an old friend.

A notable proportion of DJs who could, or recently would, crank the intensity declined to do so, instead strutting through peak-time sets in second gear. Loopy, reduced cuts were highly effective, triple-lunged diva vocals made a splash and a rich seam of new, vaguely shoegazey downtempo crept in. Though it's been a minute since "house" was detached from "house and techno" in bookers' minds, my hunch is that the needle will shift. Case in point: where the techno hangar at one popular multigenre festival was often stubbornly two-thirds empty, across the site, you'd find a huge outdoor crowd prancing around with mile-wide smiles as Ogazón dropped Junior Jack's "Thrill Me."

Step back and the cycle looks palindromic; if you take the pattern as bumping > uptempo and pumping > fast and pummelling > pumping and uptempo > bumping, we're hovering around the fourth stage now. As DJs scanned for an off-ramp from Mount Euphoria, the ambrosial hooks and mass compatibility of house were right there. Will indulgent runtimes and mid-110 BPM froth be back on the menu by summer 2025? Honestly, why not. After all: follow the road marked Pacha for long enough, and sooner or later, you'll end up at Pachanga Boys.

Fahad Akinsanya

Different Shades
of Hard

Pop edits weren't the only dance floor trend caught up in the discourse last year. Modern techno, The New York Times said, was "music too fast for feet." Has that changed this year? Yes and no. We've identified that softer, dubbier forms became more prominent, as Aurora Halal and Polygonia spun their own takes on psychedelic techno to eager crowds.

On a harder tip, DJs like Akua are custodians for the classic sound, while US artists like 1morning and Max Watts are roughing up dance floors on both sides of the Atlantic in their own style. Oh, and the noisy, hardstyle-adjacent strain is still around, too. You get the point: techno isn't monolithic. But when I think about what's been most impactful at festivals this year, it has to be hardgroove.

Hardgroove has become a bit of a slippery buzzword; tracks with percussion that resemble anything "groovy" are often misidentified as such. (Looking for the authoritative definition? Speak to Ben Sims.) Still, after somewhat of a reawakening last summer, this wave of hardgroove reached new heights in 2024. The tunes are classy enough to satisfy seasoned heads, but not too headsy for a wider audience. Thanks to its masterful balance of muscle, funk and syncopated rhythms, it's the perfect tool for DJs who eschew capital-T techno but want to add grit into their set, without compromising danceability—and crowds were lapping it up.

Rachel Grace Almeida

Latincore

From the ashes of "Latin club" and "Latin bass" emerged the even more nebulous "Latincore." When Bogotá-born producer CRRDR coined the term around 2022 and began spreading its gospel online, eyebrows raised and discourse followed. What is it, and haven't we moved past flattening diasporic music into palatable bites?

This time the call was coming from inside the house, and a young generation of ravers were all too eager to pick up. Latincore folds Afro-Colombian musical traditions—guaracha, champeta, aleteo—into more riotous strains of dance music such as gabber, happy hardcore and hard trance, hammering away at 150 to 160 BPM. What started off as a playful portmanteau of cultures has expanded into an underground sub-genre that's bulldozing into more and more festival sets.

Mala Junta cofounder Hyperaktivist, who shook festivals from Wire to WHOLE this summer, has become known for her scorching sets filled with tracks from similarly high-powered Latine producers like Brenda, Carlycore and Rattlesnakke. And when Latin rave advocates Toccororo and Safety Trance shared the booth for Dekmantel's ten-year celebrations, they nearly blew the speakers with CRRDR's flip of '90s rave anthem, "Hardcore Vibes."

So: a Latin take on harder, faster, stronger? Not quite. By nature, Latincore has a far more complex rhythmic base: elements of dembow, son, cumbia and tambora drums are arranged into pummelling, club-ready bangers. It's a youthful, DIY and, more often than not, queer counter-scene fighting the homogenous techno that still dominates the LatAm festival circuit (strap in: Creamfields Chile has begun its ascent).

CRRDR, privy to the constant decontextualisation of Latin electronic music, has already mischievously winked at Latincore's imminent downfall with last year's EP, RIP LATINCORE 2K24. Perhaps he knows that playing up to pop identity politics isn't the fast-track booking hack some think it is, and what sounds Global North festivals celebrate today can be easily discarded tomorrow. But when you notice the likes of I Hate Models hogging valuable room at both DGTL Santiago and Bogotá's Baum, isn't it about time we took some space back?

Bella Aquilina

Waft

A flick of the wrist, bobbing up and down in wave-like fashion: in English-speaking club circles, you'll call this motion a "waft," but it's evident the move traverses language barriers. As waft commands more real estate across European festivals and clubs and becomes more of a fixed genre in its own right, the fault lines are worth keeping an eye on. Where does the ceiling of popularity lie for a close-knit community that prides itself on preservation?

Throughout the 2010s, waft usually brought to mind the kind of taut, rolling tech house popularised by Jamie Jones and East End Dubs. Nowadays, it's more a byword for a scene led by DJs such as The Ghost and Gene on Earth. It's an assortment of artists and fans all deeply invested in vinyl culture, favouring a variety of different tunes in varying levels of subtlety, but predominately a mix of Wiggle-like tech house, '00s US deep house and skippy UK garage.

This summer's waft explosion appears to be stemming from two factors. Firstly, increasing recognition of the cheeky fun this scene has to offer. See Gene and The Ghost's unison as Coast 2 Coast—2024's incarnation of Apollonia—packing out Glastonbury, Horst and Panorama Bar, rather than holding it down at, say, Hoppetosse. Secondly, its growing audience: the backbone of this year's Dimensions was waft, and the festival sold out for the first time since 2019. Nor are the audiences solely drawn from Zip and Nicolas Lutz devotees. You're just as likely to hear Peach draw for straight-up tech house as to notice classic Eddie Richards or Terry Francis cuts in a Ploy set now.

But as the scene goes supernova, I wonder how the diversity that contemporary electronic music strenuously works towards will factor in. A majority of the key players—as well as, taking stock of festival crowds, its fans—are straight, white men, and one of the scene's abiding features is gatekeeping by any other name, AKA protecting precious "digs" and favouring tradition over futurism. Waft is surging, but where that runaway momentum leads remains to be seen.

Tom Gledhill

Wobble

Huge, shuddering leads have the evident power to send the dance floor into hyperdrive like little else. You can usually mark the year in club culture by which wobbler ruled supreme: Fis-T's subaquatic "Night Hunter," Objekt's quaking "Cactus" and Piddy Py's "Giggle Riddim" have all done the business in my clubbing memory.

One of the most revitalising consequences of the post-Covid-19 turbofication of dance floors has been hearing these types of tracks more often. Nono Gigsta's freaky Freerotation set was the best surprise of this kind. After 80 minutes of freewheeling music spanning everything from jazzy drumfunk to Led Zeppelin, she blended Mala's "Curfew" into a lairy dubstep tune. Then followed Chediak & Crosstalk's "5am," an excursion into wub from two São Paulo-based producers blending baile funk with UK influences. There's also material in the set from a collaborative EP between Japanese duo Herbalistek and Boston's Symbiosa, which takes the calling cards of brostep and moulds it into tracks worthy of simultaneous chin-stroking and gun-fingering. Notably, these projects dropped in the last 12 months.

This midrange bombast is emanating from all corners of dance music, from the breakout popularity of DJs like Neffa-T, MJK and Oblig to the output of Beatrice M.'s Bait and other emergent imprints. Stalwarts like Champion and Joker have recently released some of their biggest tunes to date, going off at clubs and festivals alike. Not to mention Mia Koden playing what we felt was one of Glastonbury's best sets at IICON this year, fusing jazz, dub and reggae with murky bassbin botherers like Conzi's "Kway".

Anyone that's tapped into rowdier club music will know that a good, thick bassline has remained a dependable tool—so while 2024 isn't a renaissance, it has been novel to hear a wider spate of artists from around the world seamlessly find room for wobblers in unexpected, thrilling places.

Gabriel Szatan

Hit Em

Day 59, no sign of hit em in the wild yet—hang on, stop the presses! The dams have burst.

OK, this is still some way short of season-defining, but listen: taken alongside Tet-on-'techre, it might be time to load up on IDM stocks ahead of 2025. The market feels bullish.

Zoë Beery

Local Talent

It's peak-time on Saturday at a festival and the headliner's set is packed. Too packed, claustrophobic, even. Somehow all the drunkest, loudest people have congregated, ruining the vibe for hundreds or thousands of others. In moments like these, a wise raver cuts their losses and diverts to a smaller stage, where the DJ is a local whose set turns out to be the best of the weekend. Or maybe you skipped your disco nap, left your snoozing friends behind and took a chance on the opener. Either way, it's a spectacular feeling, stumbling across a DJ you've never heard of, who you might never have seen otherwise, ingeniously blending tracks that you can't stop Shazaming.

Most festivals depend on headliners to sell tickets, but each year, I've increasingly seen locals driving the buzz—and bookers are paying attention. At Horst and Sustain-Release, the festivals I've attended most often (full disclosure: I work on the awareness programmes at both), at least half the lineup is local, and those artists often open—and occasionally close—most of the stages.

The supportive friends-and-family vibe in the crowd transforms any spot in the timetable that a local plays. Usually-dead opening sets become busy dance floors that crackle with energy (see Yibing's set opening the Grove stage at Sustain-Release this year). Headliners have home turf, too, and at festivals where they themselves are the locals, the same warm enthusiasm from familiar faces encourages bold, authentic sets free from the heavy expectations of strangers. And when an entire stage focuses on locals, like Horst's Moon Ra, word travels quickly that it's an essential addition to your festival itinerary.

As the global club scene begins to confront its climate impact, much of which comes from flights, seeing local DJs at festivals can (paradoxically) encourage us to rethink how far we have to travel for a great dance floor. Being exposed to fantastic performers, all hailing from somewhere we don't live, reminds us that talent comes from everywhere, and we'd be smart to value what we have in our own backyards.