24 For 2024 Tips: 5/24 – The deep house & disco revival

Zach Buggy sees glitterballs in his crystal ball

While the past decade has seen a mass increase in the popularity of minimal, almost stoic forms of house and dubbed out techno swathed in layers of unsettling ambience, it appears the tide may be shifting again towards the more positive, retro stylings of deep/disco-house and nu-disco reimaginings.

Whether it be a desire to return to more uplifting and less grimy stylings of dance music, or a sense of pretension fading from the latest wave of DJs and producers, general festival sets appear to be catering to the boogie far more than the punch. Look at the DJ Seinfeld collab ‘Now U Do’ with Australian electro-pop duo Confidence Man, that saw a shift away from his earlier techno machinations and exuded a push beyond his reliable approach to chilled out deep house into an almost Balearic sense of tropical disco.

Or straying even further away from house fusion, the phenomenal ‘Turn Down The Lights’ single from Parisian funk outfit Jeroboam serves up a slice of classic, retro-fitted disco so vintage sounding you’ll be astounded to discover that not a single second of the cut features an edit of any sort.

Yes, disco died, came back, and we’re not even touching the constant synth-laden Italo-disco drops here, but the rigid box the disco revival has been kept within appears to be splitting at the seams more and more as we press further into the 2020s. Mark our words, upbeat house and unpretentious disco are cool again, while all black industrial-tinged technoid “coolness” is currently being lifted out by disgruntled bouncers.

Zach Buggy