EVERY GENRE PROJECT - May 21 - Hard Dance
Genre of the Day - Hard Dance
Album of the Day - Une nouvelle chance by Ascendant Vierge (2023)
May 21, 2024
You may think you know a thing or two about the global supply chain. But you may not know the key component driving the global music economy: countries around the world from the UK and US to Japan and Denmark work hard to make the best, crispest speakers and music equipment. The next step in the chain—Europeans absolutely destroying them with their dance music. Yesterday, we experienced a Polish dance genre from nearly 200 years ago: it might give you whiplash listening to a mazurka and then hard dance consecutively. It’s safe to say European dance music has evolved a bit.
As I’ve found in researching EDM genres, they exist as their own offshore worlds more than other genres. This is primarily due to the fact that most EDM is intended to be enjoyed in the environment of, well, a dancing setting, and there’s also less academic literature describing the particularities of many niche genres. They exist as amalgamations and continuums with other near-identical takes on EDM, so definitions can sometimes be elusive.
This is somewhat true of hard dance, which is more an umbrella term encompassing a bunch of high-intensity, potentially ear-splitting little mutations—a few of which we’ve actually covered before. The key word is right under our nose, though: it’s harder than the house and techno that came before. Hard dance’s common denominator is those distorted, violent kicks that would be more aptly described as roundhouse kicks.
Hard dance arose in the late ‘90s, combining the euphoria of trance with the offbeat bass and hard kicks achieved through drum machine overdrive. Though the use of offbeat bass gives it a characteristic swing, the four-on-the floor-kicks, amplified to sonic excess, are the ultimate key to the genre’s sound. As I mentioned, hard dance was a fruitful idea: it’s given us genres like gabber and hardstyle and all their crazed siblings, mostly different in how much they emphasize melody and whether those melodies are tonally darker or happier. While this video focuses on gabber in particular which features even more aggressive kicking than hard dance at its inception, it’s a nice introduction to its core. Headphone users, beware. Plus, there’s a litany of cute dancing cats that take you right back to 2015.
At the genre level, hard dance is something of a sonic playground: each little genre within is like a play structure for producers to hang out in. Thus, it gives DJs a vast palette to work with, ensuring its continued popularity and output—1.21% of releases in 2024 are characterized as hard dance, according to RYM. Today’s album is one of just three so far in this column dating from within the last year, coming from the Belgian duo of DJ Paul Seul and singer-songwriter Mathilde Fernandez. From the opening track “IRL”, Fernandez’ inimitable siren call makes her the perfect vocalist for this trance-influenced set, a spectral, porcelain-like contrast to the distorted kicks and Eurodance keys of the chorus. “Je suis un avion” recalls the euphoric chaos of Madonna’s “Ray of Light”—if only the pop singer had chosen gabber rather than acid electronica. “Au Top” is one of the definitive statements of the album as a balancing act between hard dance styles and art pop, pairing ambitious strings with sizzling acid house. Their experimentation knows no bounds, with the pair even dipping into gradually-collapsing dub on “Aimer sur le longe terme.” It’s a dynamic quest of an album, and an exercise in tact as it balances hard dance’s kick-and-synth detonations with Fernandez’ soaring vocals, providing space for the lyrical journey to coexist with the head-banging experience.