Nia Archives’ second album ‘Emotional Junglist’ pushes past the dancefloor into guitars and heartbreak. Our review of her boldest work yet
Nia Archives spent five years dragging jungle into the center of British pop, and on her second album she warns you not to expect a jungle record. “This is an alternative record. It’s not a jungle record,” the Bradford-born, Leeds-raised producer told The FADER ahead of Emotional Junglist, and she means it as a challenge to herself as much as a heads-up to the purists.
The follow-up to 2024’s Mercury-shortlisted Silence Is Loud, the album traces the full arc of one relationship, from first spark to messy collapse, and it finds Archives writing at tempos she says she never DJs at. The title is the thesis: to be an emotional junglist, in her words, is to feel everything and nothing all at once.
The most audible change is the guitar. Where her breakbeats once did all the heavy lifting, Emotional Junglist foregrounds analog textures and rock grooves, and the record is stronger for the friction. Opener “Feelingz Go Numb” is the cleanest fusion of her two instincts, string samples and vocal loops driven by a punky bassline, blowing the album’s doors open with genuine abandon.
“Around Tha Bend” rides a tense, almost surf-rock guitar riff, and “Lovers Grief” leans into gloomy indie-rock chord changes as Archives drinks to forget and asks an ex how he lives with himself. These are indie-pop songs built on a dancefloor foundation, not raves with feelings bolted on.
Heartbreak at Every Tempo
What keeps the record from being a simple genre pivot is how far she follows the sadness. The album’s back half strips away her signature drums almost entirely: “Almost Always” is icy and beatless, Nia pleading until she has nothing left, and “Tha Darkest Hour” sets falling tears against dark synth pads and sharp bursts of percussion.
“Train of Thought” is nearly a single repeated idea, her heart riding off in her lover’s train carriage, while “Superlust” draws shimmering synth textures out until a kiss turns two people to dust. Critics have reached for Amy Winehouse to describe the new rawness in her vocal takes, and the comparison holds; there is a lived-in ache here that Silence Is Loud only gestured at. Several writers have also clocked the thematic overlap with Olivia Rodrigo’s breakup records, though where Rodrigo sits in the melancholy, Archives injects it with pure kinetic energy, and that tension powers the whole thing.
The album is not flawless, and its flaws are the same ones that shadowed her debut. For every door-blowing high, there is a mid-tempo stretch in the tracklist that risks blurring into the song before it, and listeners not already sold on Archives’ world may find the melodic palette wearing thin by the end. But the peaks are worth the lulls, making the intensity of getting blown into and out of love sound as climactic as it feels in the moment.
The Architect of Post-Rave Pop
The larger point is what Archives is building. Across club nights like Up Ya Archives, where she has platformed unsigned bedroom producers, and a catalog that folds ’90s rave drums into Brazilian choirs and stray film dialogue, she has been quietly writing the wall text for future museum exhibits about this exact moment in British dance music.
Emotional Junglist reads like the big sister to Silence Is Loud: a stronger sense of self, a more sophisticated record collection, melodies airlifted from indie-pop and R&B and re-situated inside syncopated breakbeats. The risk of being an artist first and a DJ second has paid off. It sets a stage she can only keep growing into, and on this evidence, the ceiling is still a long way up.
