The self-described “emotional junglist” Nia Archives sings cursive melodies over a few of the most relentless breakbeats you’ve ever heard. It’s the sound of 100 ideas racing by your head while you notice your situationship lied to you. A couple of years in the past, she was balancing college with a job on the UK pub chain Wetherspoons, paying out of pocket for Instagram adverts to advertise her first tune. Quickly, she grew to become a frontrunner of a widespread jungle and drum’n’bass revival alongside artists like dazegxd and SHERELLE. The scene has had a slew of TikTok hits and bite-sized EPs, however no defining venture—till now.
Silence Is Loud injects jungle with the glittery immediacy of pop ballads. It’s emo and elated, a diary blown up into glossy but delicate anthems made for arena-sized catharsis. Nia is a jungle obsessive, however she’s extra involved with honoring its tradition and historical past than imitating any one of many myriad strains spawned in its ’90s golden age. In one interview, she describes her broad interpretation of the style as “modern-day punk music in a dance house.” This unfastened understanding explains why her model has all the time been so malleable and unruly (for starters, on her final EP, she rewired the style with bossa nova and sped-up Brazilian physique music).
She’s eager to reshape a style traditionally piloted by males, by which producers hardly ever reference their private lives. Nia sings fiercely about issues like unrequited want, spinning out into soulful melodies and gleaming trills. The percussion concurrently buries and intensifies her voice, giving her cowl to unleash distressing fears. On “F.A.M.I.L.Y,” Nia talks about feeling alienated from her family members, however the molten bass and singalong refrain practically trick you into pondering it’s a constructive power-bop. “Nightmares” possesses the vitriol of a novella-length hate textual content: Nia disses a mendacity man with such jaunty keys and cheeky moxie that it’ll make even the fuckboys smile.
Whereas the music aspires to really feel each clubby and confessional, many songs provide solely imprecise sketches of emotional conflicts, buying and selling concrete particulars for catchy rhymes. This works on “Playing cards on the Desk,” the place she somersaults throughout the guitars’ spindly groove. However it could actually additionally really feel too neat and radio-packaged; the sleek vocal rhythm typically misaligns with the prickly worries she’s sharing. Within the absence of nuanced insights or anecdotal texture, her struggles can come throughout trite at occasions—like, who hasn’t felt lonely in a crowded room?
However perhaps emotional specificity isn’t the entire level. As an alternative, it’s this combo of party-hard sincerity that makes her music so punchy, like she’s animatedly telling secrets and techniques to a good friend whereas wildly raving. And in contrast to the madcap cyber junglists of at this time, who adorn beats in delirious fuzz and frazzled digi-chaos, she hews carefully to the pristine angularity of basic jungle percussion, every drum hitting with a satisfying sharpness. She’s the trendy hyperlink between the style’s previous and current, palling round with new-gen producers and ’90s pioneers alike; Goldie makes a short cameo on the dizzyingly lovesick “Inform Me What It’s Like?” to pump her up.
