Hard Drum

Hard drum is a British club-music style coined in London in the mid-2010s, named by producer *NKC* for its near-exclusive concentration on percussion. An experimental deconstruction of UK funky, it rebuilds dance music from drum sounds alone: log drums, toms, rimshots, congas and found percussion are arranged in irregular, syncopated patterns drawing on kuduro, gqom, batida, dancehall and dabke, with bass and melody reduced to a minimum. Labels such as #Her Records# and #Nervous Horizon#, and producers including *TSVI*, *Wallwork* and *Scratcha DVA*, defined a sound of stark, physical club tracks engineered as rhythm studies.