The music of Rotterdam/Kent trio DANCEHALL has always existed in the margins: too spiky for pop, too self-aware for grunge. On ‘100% MUSIC’, their second album, singer/bassist Tim Smithen, guitarist Craig Sharp and drummer Dave Keeler double-down and sharpen their edges to deliver the band’s most dialed-in, deliberate work yet.

Written as singer/bassist Tim Smithen became a father and embraced sobriety, the record confronts his own childhood, addiction and neurodivergence. ‘100% MUSIC’, a joke-turned-album-title, became a manifestation, with the band approaching each song as a single, standalone monument to their time together, while reflecting on the bigger events that shape their lives. They dedicated evenings and weekends to tracking and overdubbing, throwing everything they could at the recording process, resulting in an album that reflects the joy the self-declared 'brothers' find in forming DANCEHALL.

As a wide-eyed teenager, guitarist Craig Sharp unashamedly fanboyed over singer/bassist Smithen’s previous band Kill Keneda. In a sort of UK-based Almost Famous-esque story arc, Sharp went from building GeoCities fansites, to meeting his radio hero DJ Zane Lowe and being noticed by the band when Smithen stage-dived directly into Sharp’s face - leaving him with a black eye and  an entry point into the band’s inner circle, where he ended up designing artwork and plugging their music to radio. 

Years later, the two reconnected in London. What started as a nostalgic meet-up turned into a demo writing session. Passing a guitar back and forth like a game controller, they began layering riffs and vocal melodies in GarageBand. After months of demoing, they added the metronomic, powerhouse drummer David Keeler, and formed DANCEHALL, self-releasing cassettes and records via their own Vibe/Anti-Vibe label and touring across the UK and Europe.

Opener ‘FUN’ sets the tone with sardonic reflections on childhood and neurodivergence, while ‘SLIMER’ combines guitar scrawling, lo-fi verses with Akira bike-fight neon choruses, set against Smithen's compulsive vertical scrolling in a bid to find meaning. ‘MODERN AGE’ and ‘MOUTHS’, whilst at polar opposites of style, both confront the rise of misinformation and bigotry. The former via introspective Sleater-Kinney-like melodies and Fugazi inflected harmonics, the latter with pensive hardcore. Album closer ‘EAST V WEST’ takes aim at the endless cycle of the West inflicting pain on the world, from Vietnam to Iraq to Palestine, through an expansive motorik krautrock beat.

DANCEHALL’s 2018 debut ‘THE BAND’ was a snapshot of a live band, ‘100% MUSIC’ is a technicolour sprawl of intentional chaos. Referencing albums by Blur, the Beasties Boys and Pavement, they aimed to explore similarly expansive territory across their own record, keeping the recording sessions playful but still somewhat productive.

The production by longtime collaborator Christopher Smith at Kluster, London, and mixed by Hank Sullivant (MGMT) gave the record a turning point that shifted it from DIY fuzz to vivid clarity: “It went from sounding like a live band to full-blown technicolour,” says Sharp.

The record's vivid, neon-saturated artwork mirrors the record’s high-contrast production. The result is crisp, abrasive, and full of detail, even in the noisiest moments. “We wanted it to sound 'full'. Neon-bright. Playful. Weird, but approachable” they explain.

With ‘100% MUSIC’, DANCEHALL wanted to do more than just capture a moment but to make a record of themselves reacting to life with humour, urgency and zero pretension.