Shift Happens: The Year That Dance Music Decided to Be Sincere Again

a.k.a. The genre spent much of 2024 steadily backing away from its post-pandemic excesses.

At the start of 2024, I penned a column about minimal, observing that the genre was poised for a return after more than a decade in the dance music wilderness. The article was generally well received, particularly among older heads with an active Ricardo Villalobos fetish and a sprawling collection of Perlon vinyl, but to most people, the idea of an all-out minimal revival, or even a significant resurgence of the genre, seemed largely theoretical. Dance music was still in the throes of a post-pandemic silly season, and during the previous two-plus years, dancefloors had been overrun by an onslaught of pop edits and blistering tempos, many of them served up by DJs who actively flaunted their disregard for genre norms and established notions of good taste. If anything, maximalism was the order of the day, and even in dance music’s more thoughtful corners, styles like minimal and dub techno were often scoffed at as being too boring, too soulless and too European to represent the future of anything.

Less than 12 months later, the prevailing winds of dance music narrative has notably shifted.

Just yesterday, Resident Advisor turned over its weekly podcast to Huerco S. (a.k.a. Brian Leeds), and used it as an opportunity to cite One Day—the album he released earlier this year under his Loidis alias—as one of their favorite releases of the year. In fact, RA was so excited about his “emotionally-rich patchwork of dub techno and micro house” that the site’s staff were willing to break their own longstanding rule about not letting artists make repeat appearances in the podcast series. And while intros to this kind of content are always filled with laudatory language, this one felt more like a statement of editorial intent, particularly with passages like this:

… it should be no wonder that One Day was the soothing balm we all needed. After an overload of hard and fast sounds, the softer (and Leeds might argue, more sincere) stylings of minimal and dub techno experienced a welcomed second wind.

A highlighted quoted from Leeds himself put it even more plainly:

"The prevailing trends in dance music are more and more maximalist," Leeds said. "I missed restraint, subtlety and sensuality."

A lot can change in 12 months, but even in the ever-evolving world of dance music, this about-face represents quite the turnaround. To be clear, it’s not Leeds who’s changed, but the larger narrative about dance music—and, more specifically, what aspects of it are worth celebrating. In December 2023, Resident Advisor gleefully published a round-up of 2023’s best pop edits, emphasizing their “unashamedly fun” nature and further justifying their relevance with a Bored Lord quote that described pop as “a way to deter the pretentious dance music people real fast.”

Less than a year later, that same site—which, despite the feeble state of the modern music press, still stands as dance music’s most influential media outlet—is singing a very different tune. The aforementioned Huerco S. podcast included a brief interview, which ended in the following fashion:

What's one thing you wish to take into 2025, and one thing you want to leave behind?

In: love and sincerity. Out: all the bullshit.

Good news everyone! Sincerity is back in fashion, and the same industry that spent that past few years hyping (and monetizing) puddle-deep tunes and the influencerization of DJ culture is now ready and willing to sell it to you. The music press might be leading the charge—and already spent much of 2024 actively pivoting towards weirder and more “credible” artists and sounds—but it likely won’t be long before large swaths of the dance music world are actively touting their supposed realness and authenticity.