Last September, when Eliza Rose & Interplanetary Criminal's uptempo house track "B.O.T.A. (Baddest Of Them All)" became the first-ever UK #1 from a British woman DJ, it partly signalled the unexpected mainstream revival of a particular strain of UK dance music: bassline, a sub-genre of house that once took northern England by storm.

The track's producer, Manchester native Interplanetary Criminal, has been very vocal about its stylistic origins. As he explained in a TikTok video, the complicated organ melody was specifically inspired by a bassline classic: Micha's "Sexy Eyes (Organ Mix), produced by scene legend Big Ang. The anthem is considered an iconic moment in bassline, which originated at Sheffield's Niche nightclub in the early 2000s.

"I think that Niche sound has really stuck around—up North, anyway," said Finn McCorry, who frequently books sets from bassline veterans like Big Ang and DJ Q in Manchester. "It'd be a crying shame for this stuff to get popular and it just to get played by new kids when we've got a whole host of original talents who would enjoy the attention and the bookings and are also really, really good."

As McCorry suggests, a new generation of UK garage DJs and producers from across the UK have made bassline's stylistic signatures an essential facet of their sets and tracks. The sound can be heard in Brighton DJ and vocalist Bklava's "It's Your Time," Sharda's wild, breakbeat-hybrid bootleg "Tears in the Club" and in DJ sets by NUKG leading lights such as Conducta, MPH and Sammy Virji.

Bassline's history, though, is deeply intertwined with the maverick nature of Northern dance music, which has always gone its own way. Northern soul focused on harder, faster soul tracks being played at the Twisted Wheel and Wigan Casino. Madchester was the region's response to the rave explosion, and hardcore was answered with the bleep techno sound that spawned Warp Records. In the North East, a Sunderland club called The New Monkey spawned its own localised take on makina, a style of hard dance originating from Spain.

When speed garage arrived in Sheffield in the late '90s, a group of DJs and producers converging on the now-legendary club Niche—including Shaun Banger Scott, Big Ang and Jon Buccieri—began to adapt the genre to their own styles, alongside US and European house. As speed garage declined in London in favour of 2-step in the early '00s, Northern DJs and producers began making their own version of it, prioritising bold, pitched-up vocals and, specifically, the organ bass from the Korg M1 synthesiser, originally made famous in "Show Me Love" by Robin S. At first the sound was called "niche," in reference to its birthplace. It would later be called "organ bassline," "bassline house" or just "bassline."

In the early '00s, mixes from Niche DJs were distributed on cassette tapes. The club was one of many venues—Casa Loco in Leeds and Boilerhouse in Bradford among them—pushing the sound across the North. Bassline labels included Reflective Records in Sheffield, Jump Records and Ecko Records in Birmingham, and London's Northern Line. Specific clubs and labels developed their own unique, sub-regional traits.

Producers often included variations of a track on the same EP—one mix would prioritise organs, another would emphasise the warping LFO bass sound that also featured heavily in the genre. Record shops in Sheffield such as Studio Beatz, cofounded by Buccieri and DJ Veteran, continued to sell organ tracks on white labels as late as 2005. The majority came from Northern producers and labels, which surprised visiting Londoners who considered anything approximating speed garage to be passé following its late-'90s peak.

At the same time, a generation of kids were growing up on bassline, digesting the music in the pre-smartphone era by passing bootlegged MP3s via Bluetooth and uploading tracks to YouTube to play in school. One of the most popular videos from this era is a chopped-off, chorus-only version of Big Ang and Siobhan's "It's Over Now," titled after the song's hook, "You've been cheating and telling me lies." It currently has more than 39 million views.

"I think I first heard bassline when I was about 15, on the back of the bus," Murkz, an MC and producer from Manchester, remembered. "There was this girl in the year above me called Nadine. And she had hold of the tapes. She used to always come into school showing everybody the Niche tapes."

Some of these kids, like Murkz, ended up in the scene as part of a second generation of bassline producers. They began to incorporate grime and dubstep influences, speeding up the tempo to 140 BPM and sharpening the warp bass. Known as 4x4 bassline to differentiate from the earlier organ-driven sound, this sub-genre generated several radio hits, including T2's "Heartbroken" in 2007 and H-Two-O's "What's It Gonna Be" in 2008. Murkz’s own track "Manny Man" became a minor hit, featuring on the second volume of Ministry Of Sound's The Sound of Bassline compilation series in 2009.

By the beginning of the 2010s, bassline had declined significantly following its mainstream peak. Niche entered into a cycle of violent incidents and temporary closures similar to The Haçienda in Manchester, and suffered police raids over alleged drug trafficking on the premises. Much like its Mancunian counterpart, the site where the club once stood is now a luxury apartment building. The genre became stigmatised, unfairly chastised in the media for its supposed links with crime. According to one DJ active at the time, promoters began to pressure DJs into refraining from playing bassline for fear of attracting "the wrong type of person."

But in many places across the North, the appetite for bassline never subsided. The hit tracks continued to get airtime in multi-genre sets in commercial clubs and alongside pop house and Eurodance at fairgrounds. Some of the scene's veterans kept DJing and making new music, with selectors like DJ Q—who hosted a late-night slot on BBC 1Xtra—providing fans with a much-needed outlet during its quieter years.

"The people who were originally into bassline still needed to hear it somewhere," he said of the slot, which ran from 2007 until 2012. "So my show was kind of the place for that."

One group that exemplifies the way bassline has persisted as part of the cultural fabric in the North is Bad Boy Chiller Crew. Hailing from Bradford, the group began as a hybrid MC crew and comedy troupe, posting videos on the now-defunct Facebook page "itzmefraz," started by Kane Welsh and Kieran "Fraz" Durkin. (Durkin left the group in 2019 along with fellow member Lewis "Molegrip" Lock.) Styling themselves as a sort of working class, Yorkshire answer to Odd Future's Loiter Squad, they would post amateurish, crassly satirical comedy skits alongside music videos featuring blistering organ tracks full of wild, thickly accented raps about women, drugs, cars and crime.

Currently consisting of Welsh, Gareth "GK" Kelly and Sam "Clive" Robinson, the group has joked in interviews that, while they were raised on bassline, their affinity for it is due to their hometown being "20 years behind" the rest of the country. They style themselves as "charvas," embracing the stereotype of tracksuit-wearing, quad bike-riding, powder-sniffing, working-class street characters who still listen to bassline despite it falling out of favour with the rest of the country. Bradford was ranked one of the most deprived cities in England in 2019, and Bad Boy Chiller Crew's comedy could be considered a humourous response to the social issues that have permeated throughout the region. In other words, Northerners laughing at themselves.

"Those kinds of guys would be doing bassline from back in the original days," said DJ Q, who has worked with the group in the past. "It was just that a light wasn't shone on them. But that sound is very big in Leeds, Bradford—that's like their bassline. So it's fun to see that side is getting the spotlight as well."

And Bad Boy Chiller Crew might just have the last laugh. After years of being marginalised, bassline and its practitioners are back in full force. Bad Boy Chiller Crew have become stars: their music is thoughtfully considered by US publications such as Pitchfork and BRIT Awards performances. Fans of the sound are posting TikTok videos dancing to bassline tracks, while many older DJs from the scene have also reemerged. Murkz, along with friends SubZero and TRC, started getting re-involved with the scene during the pandemic. They soon decided to team up and start For The Bassline Culture, a party focused on the 4x4 sound.

"We've all individually had quite successful careers in bassline," TRC said, "and obviously, throughout the pandemic, we were doing our live sets, which were going really well, and [we] just thought, you know what, let's all come together and start something, let's build this thing we've got going into something even bigger."

The crew has held successful raves in Birmingham and Leeds, with audiences ranging in age from 19 to 49, according to data they've collected. They plan to hold future events in Sheffield and Manchester, as well as release new music.

Many Niche veterans are also more active now. Jamie Duggan began livestreaming during lockdown. Big Ang is back in demand as a remixer and is currently remastering her back catalogue. She also recently toured with UK garage star Interplanetary Criminal. DJ Q released an album, Est. 2003, last year via the well-regarded London label Local Action, and is making new music with TQD, a group he formed with Royal-T and Flava D.

"I reckon it's definitely emerging again. I see it myself," DJ Q said. "DJs are busier, [I'm] getting more songs by DJs now—DJs that weren't making music before—because of the interest of getting back into it and pumping new, healthy music into the scene."

Big Ang, possibly the most well-regarded of the original Niche producers, feels similarly. "It's definitely lifted my spirits somewhat and inspired me to continue to produce music," she said. "I'm so happy younger people are pushing the sound and supporting the nights and productions. Maybe they had heard [their] parents playing [bassline] and are now old enough to make the scene their own."

Certain younger producers and DJs have also taken to exploring the genre from a historical perspective. Finn McCorry has put his own spin on the organ sound in his music and dedicated specials on his NTS Radio show to bassline. He also organised the station's UK Garage Evolutions series in 2021, adding a separate episode on bassline featuring an interview with Big Ang.

"They sort of left it up to me how to do it," he said. "Garage is sort of hard to split out into, because it all feeds into each other. The lines you draw are obviously a bit arbitrary. But when we were doing it, I was really keen that we did a whole episode, a whole focus on bassline, because in my view, that's the sound that is still the most influential. If you listen to what people are making now in terms of garage vibes, it's all hyperactive, a bit high-impact."

Joe Caithness, a mastering engineer who produces and DJs under the name Littlefoot and runs the Bassline label Wot U Sayin?, agrees. "The main reason I think the organ thing is getting really popular at the moment is that it's a really nostalgic sound. So in lockdown, a lot of people are going back to… the fun side of dance music."

Wot U Sayin? started during the pandemic after Caithness and some friends began noticing old organ bassline tracks starting to climb in price on Discogs. Many of the classics were either pressed to vinyl in small quantities, released as white labels, or were remixed bootlegs of tracks with samples that weren't cleared or cleared retrospectively, resulting in a rush on the rarest records.

"We called it 'org-flation,'" Caithness said. "A lot of those tracks are now, like, £50, £60, £70 or £80 on Discogs, because all the Gen Z people have clocked it and they're starting to buy it all up really quickly."

The label's solution is to feed the demand for euphoric bassline tracks with new music, drawing on the nostalgic aspects of the sound while packaging it for a new generation. Their branding draws on hyperlocal expressions: the name is a common greeting in Nottingham, while the logo takes inspiration from the "frowning smiley," a GIF character who would appear on YouTube uploads of bassline tracks in the mid-late '00s and has become a symbol of the genre. Caithness, who has a tattoo of the character, said the implication of the symbol is that "you can't help but dance because the tune's so good."

Many of the label's releases are edits of pop songs such as "Boy's A Liar Pt. 2" and "Call Me Maybe," issued as free downloads via Bandcamp. The practice hearkens back to the genre's strong tradition of club edits, and Caithness uses them as a tryout system for new producers on the label.

According to Caithness, the label and his own embrace of bassline is motivated by certain principles around dance music and the kind of environment it should foster.

"Especially because of the lockdown, people weren't able to communicate," he said. "It was this whole idea of bumping into people physically, and being able to meet at a rave, or at a house party or whatever. And I wanted to make music that was suitable for that. Stuff you'd be singing along to and getting yourself out of breath and dancing, really melodic and catchy."

"These are good records, and they're good records on their own terms," said McCorry about the original Sheffield tracks, arguing that bassline's sense of emotional directness is central to its enduring appeal. "I think a few years ago people started talking about 'functional club music' as if it was like, 'functional means dark, no emotion, technical,' functional as in, it's just a kick drum, it's just percussive. And that's just nonsense. It's a really stupid idea of what function is in club music. These tracks are all functional. We want everyone to put their hands in the air, so here's a massive a capella and big piano breakdown. There's a real honesty in it. It's not self-conscious."

That may explain why bassline is seeing interest from outside of the UK. In Poland, DJ De Layna has found success with livestreams and events such as Bassline Night. Wot U Sayin? has looked to local producers such as Spooner from Sheffield or L'adilla from Leeds for their marquee releases, but plenty of international talent has released on the label. Germany is represented by Decoded Flows, while New York producer Vurb has made several edit packs for the label in addition to his own EP, chunes. The label's most popular release by far, though, has been the J-Organz Vol. 1 EP, a team-up with the Japanese collective SPRAYBOX. Caithness, who discovered the group on a playlist of Japanese bassline tracks, remembered being especially impressed by their production standards.

"I contacted one of them—Nizikawa—and said, 'Would you be interested in doing a strictly organ bassline release?' And they were like, 'Yes, we've been investigating this sound. We don't really fully understand how to produce it,'" he recalled. "kyo, who'd made 'How Can I Live,' sent me that track and it was done. The demo was what is out there. And that's now a festival track out in the UK. Conducta and Sammy Virji end their big sets with it."

SPRAYBOX was founded by four DJs and producers from the Tokyo area: Genick, Nizikawa, Oblongar and Jacotanu. kyo and That Fancy I are also considered core members. The group first came together because of their shared love of UK dance music.

"We usually produce a wider range of genres such as UK garage, speed garage, and breaks," said Jacotanu via email on behalf of the collective. "Although our tracks are based on UK music, they often incorporate Japanese elements in the melody and sound."

While SPRAYBOX hasn't hosted any events under its own name, its members are all actively involved in promoting parties. Genick organises a garage and bassline event called RIP. Attracting up to 200 people a night, it's the largest event of its kind in Japan. There's also crossover between the Japanese UK garage scene and local parties that focus on anison (anime theme songs and soundtracks) and video game music. "Catchy melodies and sounds are favoured in these parties, and as a result, bassline from labels such as Off Me Nut Records and Mutant Bass Records has become popular in these scenes." Jacotanu said.

Still, the North remains the genre's heartland. In Sheffield, one can find as many as three bassline nights per week. Clubs like Hope Works are recruiting new residents such as Sterling Trax boss Silva Bumpa from within the community, while long-standing labels such as Wub Club and Off Me Nut continue to push their own takes on the sound. Wherever bassline goes next, it will never leave the North.

"Those were like religions to people," said McCorry, of Niche and Casa Loco. "Niche reunions, all that kind of stuff—they're huge, absolutely massive. It will survive, regardless of people like me and you talking about it for RA. This stuff doesn't need the dance music media. There's a really strong sense of community and people."