“Fucked,” it turns out, was an understatement. More than a year of closures, cancellations, restrictions and repeated ups and downs was on the horizon. Summer festivals that canceled their 2020 editions planned returns for 2021, only to put the kibosh on those too. And whether it was the catalyst or just the first link in a grim chain of misfortunes, COVID marked the beginning of massive economic changes in the industry. Around 31 per cent of UK nightclubs went out of business between March 2020 and December 2023. A report this spring tracked the continued loss of five UK nightclubs every week in 2024. Some commentators believe clubs are struggling because parties are reserved for festivals. (That was one of the reasons the owners of Berlin's historic Watergate club gave when they recently announced its closure, after 22 years at the center of the Berlin scene.) But festivals are struggling, too. Coachella ticket sales have fallen this year, as have many other major festivals. And, in the UK, 50 festivals were reported to be leaving in 2024.
For dance-music historians, the early 2020s may end up looking like the beginning of a lost decade, the blackened rings on the proverbial tree trunk where a fire decimated the forest. What's strange, then, is that just four and a half years after COVID-19 hit, it can be hard to remember that it happened at all. Musically speaking, the dance and electronic music scenes today seem pretty much business as usual. The lineups aren't much different from what they were five years ago. Take a look at Pitchfork's Best Electronic Music of 2019—Four Tet, Caribou, Joy Orbison, Overmono, Peggy Gou, Octo Octa, AceMoMa—and it'd be easy to assume it was a list from 2024. And vice versa: The Pitchfork's 2023 list—Aph Twin, Actor, DJ Koze, Four Tet, Everything But the Girl, Octo Octa, Overmono, Skrillex, Yaeji—honors major titles for established artists and sounds.
This shift back to business as usual is all the more strange when we consider the social upheavals and global upheavals of the past five years. In 2020 and 2021, the Black Lives Matter movement briefly seemed to herald a moment of reckoning in dance music, a scene rooted in black communities and traditions in the United States and globally, but the idea that dance music can to be a vehicle for social Change seems more distant than ever in 2024, in the context of Russia's war against Ukraine and Israel's aggression against Palestine and Lebanon. Torn between commitment and flight, nominally progressive dance music communities have struggled to agree on a meaningful response. Perhaps a heavily party-based scene is not a good vehicle for political organization in the first place. At the same time, it seems odd that in a time of social upheaval on many fronts—the right-wing assault on civil liberties and reproductive freedom in the United States. electoral victories of white nationalist and populist parties in Europe. the looming catastrophe of climate change – electronic music, on a macro level, seems to have barely noticed.
However, if any style has benefited from the dormancy of lockdown, it's ambient music. The environment was already on the rise, aided by a creative resurgence (marked by probing, atmospheric work from artists such as Oneohtrix Point Never, Emily A. Sprague, Huerco S. and Sarah Davachi, as well as the label's Music From Memory roster) and the growing demand fueled by streaming culture and mood-based playlists; But in 2020, as people found themselves confined to their homes, music that lowers mood pulses became a big mood indeed. Artists from across the genre got in on the action—Big Thief's Adrianne Lenker and James Krivchenia. members of Future Islands and Napalm Death. even trance maven Ferry Corsten and EDM chameleon Diplo.
