Ask most producers working in jungle what they were listening to and the answer runs through Goldie, Roni Size and the mid-nineties Metalheadz catalogue. Nia Archives named Blur, Pulp and Saint Etienne.
Emotional Junglist arrived on 17 July through Hijinxx and Island, running forty minutes and fourteen seconds, and went to number one on the UK Dance Albums Chart. It is a breakup record, and it is a jungle record, and the two facts pull against each other in ways the album makes productive.
A Jungle Record Built on Britpop Records
The stated influences are worth listing in full because of how little they overlap with the genre: Blur, Pulp, Saint Etienne, Massive Attack, and Madonna’s Ray of Light.
Only Massive Attack sits anywhere near dance music, and even they belong to a different tradition. The rest are British guitar pop and one late-nineties pop record made with electronic producers — reference points about songwriting and mood rather than rhythm.
That shows in the tracklist. The album contains jungle and breakbeats, but also R&B, Britpop, indie pop and alternative rock, and the transitions are not smoothed over. “Around Tha Bend” has a surf-rock groove and reggae inflections over guitar-forward production. “Train Of Thought” pairs liquid drum and bass with indie pop. “Almost Always” is a ballad with a post-punk guitar line running over a trap beat.
The opener stays closer to home — “Feelingz Go Numb” is a jungle beat with string samples, staccato hi-hats and a punky bassline under layered vocal loops — which makes the subsequent detours read as choices rather than confusion.
A producer with a hit formula generally protects it. Doing the opposite on album two, immediately after a debut that worked, is the decision the record hangs on.
The Producer Who Made the Blur and Pulp Albums
The influence list is not just aspirational, because one of the people who made those records also worked on this one. Nia Archives produced primarily alongside Ethan P. Flynn and James Ford, with further contributions from Jakwob and Sampha.
Ford’s production credits include both Blur and Pulp, alongside Arctic Monkeys, Depeche Mode, Gorillaz, Fontaines D.C. and the Pet Shop Boys. He is also a member of Simian Mobile Disco, which puts him on both sides of the divide this album is trying to cross.
That is a more meaningful hire than a name-check. Citing Britpop as an influence is easy; bringing in the person who actually built those arrangements means the reference has to survive contact with someone who knows what it entails.
Ethan P. Flynn and Sampha pull in a different direction again — both are associated with a kind of unhurried, texturally detailed songwriting that has little to do with a dancefloor. On a record about the collapse of a relationship, that is the useful thing to have available.
Two Halves, One Relationship
The structure is unusually explicit. The album was written across a year in which Nia Archives fell in love with a man who then ended the relationship, and it splits accordingly: the first half filled with love and the crackle of a new relationship, the second dealing with the fallout from an abrupt break-up.
She has explained the title as a state rather than a genre allegiance: “To be an Emotional Junglist is to feel everything and nothing all at once. It’s to be calm yet chaotic, sane yet manic — up, down and sideways.”
That description does double duty, because it also describes jungle itself. The genre is built on a tension between frantic chopped breakbeats and slow, heavy, almost still basslines — calm and chaotic simultaneously, by construction.
Framing a breakup album around a rhythm that already contains that contradiction is a neater idea than most concept records manage. It means the emotional argument and the musical one are the same argument.
It is also a risk. Dance music is generally consumed in fragments — a track in a set, a track on a playlist — and a record that only fully makes sense played in order from the first song to the last is asking for a kind of attention the format rarely gets.
A Song Written for Rihanna and a Bird Sample
Four singles preceded the album. “Danger” came first on 26 March, followed by “Boys in Blue” on 29 April, “Vertical” on 4 June and “Get Me Down” on 10 July, the last featuring Jorja Smith.
“Danger” has an unexpected history: it was originally written for Rihanna. The finished version carries sexually charged lyrics and pulls in dancehall and industrial elements, which is a reasonable description of a song built for somebody else and then reclaimed.
“Get Me Down” contains the record’s best piece of trainspotting. It samples tropical bird sounds from a recording called “Wind Chimes Bird and Streams” — the same source popularised by 808 State’s “Pacific State”, one of the foundational British dance records.
Reaching back to 808 State on a track built around a contemporary R&B vocal is the whole album’s method in miniature. The lineage is acknowledged; it is just not the only thing in the room.
The Reviews and the Charts Said Different Things
Critically it landed well. The album holds a Metacritic score of 80 from fifteen critic scores and 7.7 out of 10 at Any Decent Music, with four and a half stars from both NME and DIY, 7.9 from Pitchfork, and four stars from AllMusic, The Guardian, musicOMH and The Arts Desk.
Aimee Cliff in The Guardian described it as an “ambitiously expansive and quintessentially gen Z project that puts jungle in conversation with a myriad of other genres, weaving a narrative through them all”. Will Pritchard at Pitchfork wrote that she “accesses a new, emboldened register, and pushes jungle music into fresh, vulnerable territory”.
Not everybody agreed on the scale of it — The Skinny gave three out of five and Slant three and a half — but the aggregate is unambiguous.
The chart result is the more interesting number. It went to 1 on the UK Dance Albums Chart, 21 in Scotland and 30 on the UK Albums Chart. A record that reaches the top of its genre chart and the lower half of the general one has found its audience precisely and not much beyond it, which is the normal shape for dance albums. Our piece on why dance music streams badly and sells well covers the mechanics behind that gap.
From a Bootleg Copy of Logic to Number One
The route here is worth stating because it is not a normal one. Dehaney Nia Lishahn Hunt was born in Bradford in September 1999, moved to Leeds at seven, left the family home at sixteen and spent time in a hostel in Radcliffe, Greater Manchester, with a social worker, before working at KFC and as a cookery teacher.
The music came from her family. Her grandmother had moved from Jamaica to Bradford at fourteen, ran a pirate radio station with one of her sisters, and owned a sound system she used to soundtrack family gatherings with Goldie, Roni Size, Shy FX, gospel, soul and R&B. Her ex-stepfather ran a dancehall radio show and set up a studio in the house, introducing her to Logic Pro at twelve.
Without ID she could not get into mainstream clubs, so she went to squat raves and house parties instead, carrying a Handycam and using it to start conversations. She watched the jungle documentaries — LTJ Bukem’s Modern Times, the Metalheadz film Talkin’ Headz, Channel 4’s All Junglists — and paid particular attention to the women in them, Kemistry & Storm and DJ Flight among them.
In 2017 she downloaded a bootleg copy of Logic Pro, found herself instinctively speeding her music up, and worked out afterwards that what she was making was jungle. Three self-released EPs followed, the last of which topped the dance chart, then Silence Is Loud in 2024, which reached 16 on the UK Albums Chart.
She is now routinely described as being at the front of the post-2020 drum and bass revival, which is a heavy thing to carry into a second album. Making that album about a breakup, and filling it with guitar bands, is one way of declining the job description.
Emotional Junglist is out now on Hijinxx and Island.
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