Nia Archives: Emotional Junglist Album Review

Within a few short years of debuting her youthful, meticulous homages to golden-era jungle, Nia Archives was opening for Beyoncé’s 2023 run of London stadium shows and jetting out to L.A. to write songs for Rihanna at Skrillex’s behest. These are not typical accomplishments for bedroom jungle DJs. There was a time when the odd chart slot and a feature on the soundtrack of the latest FIFA game would mark the mainstream zenith of a breakthrough junglist. Some might bend their arc toward pop, with compressed song lengths and more emphasis on daytime radio hooks than precision-engineered breakbeats. But Bradford-born Dehaney Nia Lishahn Hunt had managed to cross over without pandering or making concessions.

That Beyoncé slot came off the back of a firm but passionate letter Nia wrote to protest the lack of a dance-music category at the UK’s MOBO awards. She’d continued taking a hands-on approach to directing her own videos, and scored one of her biggest hits by sampling a Brazilian body percussion group. Fiercely protective of their culture, and almost uniquely self-sustaining within the wider UK dance-music scene, jungle and drum’n’bass have long tended to exist in their own siloed enclave. But Nia showed a talent for transmitting the scene’s legacy and ethos to a bigger, younger audience while pushing the envelope with her own sound, appearing current while earning crucial co-signs from scene elders like Goldie, DJ Die, and Randall. Her new position at the scene’s forefront came with considerable expectations, and her occasionally dazzling debut, Silence Is Loud, felt the weight of those demands. Its uneasy blend of jungle and Britpop ultimately carried unspent potential: vignettes of partying her way into isolation hinted at emotional vulnerability, but hid behind the immaculate clatter of drums. Then Nia fell in love, got dumped, had the cops called on her in a confrontation with her boyfriend—and produced her most heart-stopping work to date. On Emotional Junglist, Nia simultaneously accesses a new, emboldened register, and pushes jungle music into fresh, vulnerable territory.

Loosely tracing the hot burn of a new relationship, then the hollowing out of a betrayal and breakup, Emotional Junglist makes good on the promise of Silence Is Loud. The friction between thumbed riffs and flurried breaks is productive rather than awkward, opening up meaner, moodier, and brighter spaces for Nia to write into. With a heavier emotional anchor, Nia’s signature combination of soul-baring rave and spiky guitars coheres more boldly. Simple, direct lines like the bridge on “Vertical”—“I don’t wanna be/Away from you”—turn whole scenes on a weighted pause, and conjure the matchless intensity of a burgeoning relationship. “This Could Be…” mirrors the giddy frisson that accompanies a new romance, with anxious, fast-picked guitars and drum fills buzzing like the group chat in response to one of those, “Guys, I’ve met someone” messages. Early highlight “Danger” was one of the songs to come out of the Rihanna writing room—all skidding, swerving raunch—and is all the better for being released here under a wash of breaks instead. Nia will occasionally stretch the odd metaphor beyond its tensile limit (rivers, seas, crashing waves on “Vertical”), but for the most part her writing is spare and lingering as a kiss.