Dance music tends toward characteristics like fast, bouncy, energetic, epic, aggressive, big. Most people associate dance music with festivals, namely raves. What’s fascinating about UK House (this is my general name for it, but RateYourMusic calls it a mix of Outsider House and Deep House) is that it’s slower, hypnotic, sad, and personal. It’s the equivalent of someone who has access to a dance floor and a pair of headphones; they decide to dance their heart out to The Cure.

I saw Ross From Friends at San Francisco’s Portola Festival, which had one of the strongest electronic lineups I had ever seen—and the weakest execution of a festival I had ever seen as well. Ross From Friends is for the small club—no, fuck it—for the 30-person dive bar with huge speakers. You ever gone to Plush in Austin? Think of a 20 by 40 foot dance space, and the bar takes up a good swath on the right side of the entrance. And at the end of the floor, there's a wall of speakers and passionate DJs playing dub, DnB, and house. And a select three or four that get to stand in front of those speakers and be surrounded by music, nothing else—except the occasional light of the no-lock bathroom to the side of the speakers.

Highly personal dance music doesn’t do entirely well at a festival tent. The acoustics can’t bounce off any walls—the subtleties of minor key music evaporate into thin air. To some in the crowd, Ross From Friends appeared as a jam band with some dance sensibilities rather than being an electronic band with a quirky use of guitar and saxophone. This is an individual/group made for the basements and small venues—their sonic immediacy could barely be felt in the back center of a festival tent.

I first found Mall Grab with his track Pool Party Music, which was an unabashed banger but to a fault—it had the energy of a pitbull running into a wire fence—a huge amount of momentum, a defiant lack of grace, and truly fun to dance to, but I’d have a headache if I kept on listening to it for too long. Pool Party Music is on the outer edges of UK House—it is nearly punk on how kitschy it is, how to the point it wants to be: Let’s dance, hard.

But Pool Party Music is an exception, not the rule of Mall Grab, who has tended toward the bittersweet, atmospheric side of UK House. His most popular track by far, Liverpool Street In The Rain, interprets lo-fi as applying a low-pass filter on all instruments. It’s not my favorite track of his, but it was a defining track of Outsider House several years ago. 

Love Reigns is the most recent Mall Grab track that helps define UK House for me—minor-keyed, hypnotic, light vocal sampling, piano-driven with syncopation. I have also found very little music that sounds like it. And that’s key to UK House right now: The genre has an essence to adhere to, but not a sound. For all the words I’ll use to describe UK House, it’s the feeling of being alone on the dance floor that I believe is genre’s sonic objective. The best of UK House right are artists that have contributed to this spiritual essence without being stuck in the sounds of a particular dance genre. In UK House, I’ve seen touches of DnB, Garage, House, Techno, and anything in between. I simply call it “X House” because the artists appear to most commonly use the four-on-the-floor as a foundation.

Barry Can’t Swim is taking the cake as a quintessential UK House producer. Tracks like Sonder, El Layali, and especially Lone Raver hit all the checkboxes of a more personal dance music. Barry Can’t Swim has achieved in just a couple years what Ross From Friends and Mall Grab have built up to for half a decade. This doesn’t mean that Barry Can’t Swim somehow beat anyone to anything, but he’s sharing a slice of UK House history that is the current-and-now (similar to how Fred again.. has set the dance music crowd on fire in the past couple years).

Considering Barry Can’t Swim and Fred again.., alternative house music continues its quirks and intimacy, but has refined their production techniques to punch above their weight. Listen to the alternative house scene in America, like Footwork/Juke, and you’ll here productions that are rough and sound as if mixed right in the hardware. This gives personality and uniqueness to such genres, but Fred again.. shows the mass market appeal of a weird production done cleanly. Just like auteur directors with large budgets, alternative house with clean production can slide its weirdness into the festival EDM ears without outright rejection.

Remember how PC Music was one of the first to the Hyperpop scene, but still had the edges lower-fidelity production. When these producers started working with alt-pop artists like Charli XCX, they were able to bring weird Hyperpop sensibilities to a larger audience, who finally ate it up because it felt so much acceptable due to the sheen of the product. Never underestimate the power of clean production.

I already linked a Jesper Ryom track in the beginning of this article, another great contender for capturing the feeling of UK House. While there are the go-to conventions for festival dance music to elicit a feeling of grandeur with extended build ups and spacey drops, a track like Beaches can reduce those structures and still achieve a similar space. But like I said before, the humility of UK House can fill up small venues, where a festival track would feel like overkill. In a sense, UK House is tuning itself acoustically for the small, for the intimate, when we have headphones on or are at an open mic DJ night that doesn’t demand for the largest sound, but for the most connection.

Maybe there’s something missing in UK House, and that’s why it doesn’t move everyone. Maybe it’s too repetitive, maybe there’s not enough structure, maybe vocal melodies are really needed to elevate a track, not just partial vocal samples. I think that UK House requires the right imagination; perhaps the missing pieces of genre are exactly where you come in. I need headphones or two large speakers surrounding me to achieve the other-worldy effect that I get from UK House. I need to be surrounded by the music to be hypnotized by it, to move. Playing a UK House track on your phone or laptop for your friend is going to end in a small disappointment. It’s a type of dance music that is introduced by discovery or in private—when the sharee chooses to listen for themselves.

I can dance and sleep to this music. I can forget that it’s in the background and then be taken back by its presence from one moment to the next. This music is an ear worm that can elevate anything you’re doing while wearing headphones. Maybe some people want to compartmentalize dance music from their living life. I’ve been past that distinction for years, and now it is part of my process to determine if a track can accompany in all walks of life. I’ve certainly annoyed my friends and partner with playing the same song over and over again without knowing or caring. 

I encourage anyone that loves dance music to consider “UK House”—whether you call it Outsider, Lo-Fi, Deep, etc.—because it has the potential to be part of your lived life, rather than the dance outings at night. And maybe I’ll stop calling it UK House, when Londoners stop making such good dance music.