The Bass Music Yearbook: Stories That Defined 2025
We’re going down the bass music memory lane of 2025 one last time and revisiting some moments that made the year an incredibly special one for the scene.
We’re going down the bass music memory lane of 2025 one last time and revisiting some moments that made the year an incredibly special one for the scene.
The beauty of bass music over the last few years has been its relentless, cyclical evolution. Almost every year across the past half-decade, we’ve seen at least one strand of the culture surge back into the limelight or hit the global stage. Since the start of 2021, we’ve witnessed the high-velocity rise of drum & bass and jungle music’s long-awaited revival, as well as UK garage.
The past couple of years, we’ve seen dubstep and trap (in some capacity) regain their lost popularity, but something constantly kept telling us that 2025 for bass music would simply hit different. This year became a global celebration of a scene that has finally outgrown its traditional borders of Europe and North America and reverberated across the map.
As we look back at this transformative period, it is clear that 2025 was the year when the bass music underground proved its resilience and its capacity for mainstream pedigree. So, to truly understand how we reached this point, we decided to take a trip back to the start of 2025, rewind the year, and pick out the moments, big and small, that defined what will likely be remembered as a special year for the scene.
The Return of Fred Again…
We kick things off with one of bass music’s most beloved figures, Fred Again…, who delivered an explosive year packed with genre-defining moments that stretched across the entirety of 2025. While there were some murmurs suggesting he might be easing off the throttle a bit, it was never quite a hiatus. But in true Fred Again.. fashion, any notion of Fred slowing down was emphatically dismissed through a run of statement releases and unforgettable performances.
Musically, his output was prolific, but two specific releases, his collaboration with Skepta and Plaqueboymax on ‘Victory Lap’ and ‘Winny’ alongside Sammy Virji and Winny, shattered every metric of virality. These tracks were big cultural moments for bass music that dominated both the club circuit and social media feeds. Crucially, his tour schedule went past the usual strongholds of Europe and North America with performances across Asia in Singapore, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, and Thailand.
For all the talk of Fred again.. slowing down, 2025 instead delivered a beautifully emphatic response, and he reclaimed his throne at the very heart of contemporary bass culture.
The Year of Bass Music Albums
When you see full-length albums being released across an entire spectrum of a genre, it’s usually a clear sign that the genre is operating at peak confidence, and that’s exactly what is happening with bass music at the moment. 2025 became a landmark year for long-form, bass-heavy storytelling; first came Dubstep icon Skrillex when he randomly dropped a 34-track album, followed by Subtronics with his ‘Fibonacci’ LP, while Sub Focus dominated the drum & bass airwaves with the emotional, dancefloor-ready anthems of ‘Contact.’
PhaseOne followed with ‘Terranova,’ a metal-infused dubstep album that merged the extreme ends of recorded music. On the more left-field end, experimental wizard DjRUM delivered the stunning ‘Under Tangled Silence,’ a genre-bending release that weaved dubstep textures through IDM, ambient, and broken-beat frameworks.
These albums from heavy hitters are just the tip of the iceberg. While the mainstream achieved massive visibility, the true victory for the underground was the sheer versatility born from this year’s unprecedented cross-pollination that we witnessed in 2025.
Bass Music Festivals in Asia
For the longest time, the biggest celebration of bass music would always be confined to parts with the highest visibility, and of course, because of the consumption at all levels. But over the past couple of years, that tide has clearly turned; in 2024 and 2025, we witnessed the rise of LOCUS Bali, a fully dedicated drum & bass festival hosted in Bali, while the Thailand edition of the globally renowned Electric Daisy Carnival, aka EDC festival, brought some of bass music’s biggest names, like Skrillex, Subtronics, Hamdi, and Dimension, to the region.
As 2025 comes to a close, one of the UK’s biggest drum & bass outfits, DnB Allstars, has announced its massive Thailand debut with a fully packed line-up and it’s all set to go down in the first month of 2026 itself. Simultaneously, LOCUS Bali is preparing to unveil Phase 1 of its 2026 edition after a hugely successful 2025 leg. Bass music is currently experiencing a historic gold rush across Asia, and if the giant leap of 2025 is anything to go by, 2026 is set to be the genre’s biggest year yet in the continent.
Andy C Finally Making His Boiler Room Debut
When it comes to drum & bass DJing, Andy C is truly a total freak of nature. For over three decades, ‘The Executioner’ has been crafting definitive moments in his sets and giving people memories that they will cherish for the rest of their lives. He has rattled the foundations of the world’s largest festivals with his legendary selection and triple drops, but for years, one milestone remained unticked: a Boiler Room showcase, a space that is known for letting artists strip things back and express themselves on their own terms.
Not that Andy C ever needed permission to do so. When the moment arrived, he delivered exactly what you’d expect from an Andy C set: fast-paced, thumping, and purely entertaining. It was a performance that captured the very essence of the genre he has been championing since its inception, proving once again why he remains the gold standard of drum & bass.
Return of Nero and Skream and Benga
If dubstep is making a big step back into mainstream prominence, it’s only fair that we see the creators of the genre teaming up again as well as the champions of the modern dubstep sound who we thought we’d never see again. For nearly a decade, the electronic world waited for the third chapter of the NERO trilogy. That wait ended with the release of the ‘Into The Unknown’ LP, which was released in 2025. NERO carried the same momentum in 2025 with two singles that were trademark NERO: cinematic, heavy, melodic, and unapologetically dramatic.
The creators of dubstep, Skream and Benga, who had parted ways just about a decade ago, made a comeback, this time with some music. A slice of old-school dubstep wrapped in the contemporary realms of the genre. It’s their sets, however, that have captured attention ever since coming back. Without breaking a sweat, they have reintroduced patience, weight, and system culture back into the conversation. In doing so, they have reminded a generation accustomed to constant sensory overload that the most powerful movements often begin in the shadows of the low-end.
Bass Music Headliners at Major Festivals
The popularity of bass music has soared to such heights that we’re now seeing artists across the scene headlining the mainstages of the biggest dance music festivals. Subtronics was the undisputed bass music headliner of the year, followed by Chase & Status, Illenium, and Zeds Dead, to name a few, whereas we saw landmark collaborations like Skrillex going back to back with ISOXO, Deadmau5 going back to back with drum & bass pioneers Pendulum, and the LSZEE, a collaboration between CloZee x LSDREAM that defined the sound of 2025 with their psychedelic, high-concept stage production.
Red Bull Symphonic Feat. Camo & Krooked
This isn’t the first time the Austrian drum & bass visionaries have attempted a feat of this magnitude. Their original 2020 Red Bull Symphonic performance was a staggering, groundbreaking collision of two distinct worlds of music, but for some reason, the 2025 Johann Strauss Edition felt different.
The performance felt blissful, more intimate, and far more emotionally charged. The 2025 residency at the Vienna Konzerthaus, alongside the Wiener Symphoniker, bridged 19th-century waltz culture with 21st-century bass weight and reaffirmed that, beyond its warehouse capabilities, drum & bass is a sophisticated, versatile language that can travel anywhere stylistically.
The Blurring of Lines in Bass Music
VIER, a collaboration between Thys from the now-disbanded trio NOISIA, Holly, Machinedrum, and Salvador Breed on VISION Recordings, felt like a manifesto for where bass music is headed in 2026 rather than a conventional meeting of four bass music acts.
Same is with Ring Noord, the collaborative vision led by Nik Roos alongside VISION Recordings regular Former reflects Noisia’s legacy, which is rooted in technical perfection and maximal intensity. VIER and Ring Noord’s penchant to treat sound design as an immersive, high-art experience rather than just club fodder has ensured that bass music offers varied entry points by demanding attention to the fact that the technical and experimental fringes of bass music underwent a quiet revolution.
Finally, as we draw 2025 to a close, what remains most striking about bass music is the clarity with which the scene understands itself. This was a year where legacy acts returned with renewed purpose, fresh collaborations pushed beyond inherited frameworks, and global scenes stepped confidently into the spotlight; and if there’s one thing this year proved, it’s that bass music’s future doesn’t lie in one sound, one place, or one moment. It’s like its roots; it lives in movement and a community that continues to evolve without losing sight of where it came from.
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