What is UK garage?

UK garage is a swung, soulful London dance sound: shuffled 2-step rhythms and four-to-the-floor grooves around 130 BPM, built from New York garage house with jungle, ragga, and R&B pulled through it.

It came up in London in the mid 1990s, when pirate radio DJs pitched up American garage records from producers like Masters At Work, Kerri Chandler, and Todd Edwards to around 130 BPM so they sat next to jungle. That habit hardened into speed garage by 1997, on records like Double 99’s “RipGroove”, and 2-step followed. From the late 1990s the Sheffield club Niche drove a heavier northern offshoot, bassline, built on hard 4×4 kicks and a dominant sub-bass line. T2’s “Heartbroken” carried bassline into the charts in 2007.

UK garage is the parent of a lot of UK bass. Grime and dubstep both trace back to it.