Can Danny L Harle reinvent hard dance for a new generation?

The easiest way to sell a new cultural product is through familiarity, whether it’s a gender-flipped version of Ghostbusters or an upsampled Star Wars: all the swashbuckling elements enhanced with new effects and younger, smoother-skinned leads. Remake, remix, reboot – we are living in an era where culture turns like a mirrorball in a hall of mirrors, reflecting infinitesimally.

Related: Danny L Harle: Harlecore review – big, dumb escapist fun

Dance music has been subject to this churn for decades, but it’s never been as mercilessly fast or as slickly, algorithmically refined as it is today. The newest example is Harlecore, the debut album from British producer Danny L Harle, who has worked with Nile Rodgers, Charli XCX, Rina Sawayama, Carly Rae Jepsen and more. His record is a love letter to an often maligned subset of genres, reintroducing them for a fresh young audience: bounce, trance, gabber and new age are rendered in blistering 4k resolution. Harle gives hard dance music a chemical peel, whether it needed it or not.

The son of Ivor Novello-winning composer John Harle, “DJ Danny”, as he occasionally presents himself on this new LP, isn’t new to this approach. His first major success was in 2013 with Broken Flowers, a charming attempt at garage-pop that scored him a record deal with Sony. The track was initially released on PC Music – the influential label and art collective run by Harle’s collaborator and schoolmate AG Cook – and like much of their catalogue, it wasn’t immediately obvious whether it was cartoon or lampoon.

Sophie, the producer who tragically died in January and, alongside Harle and PC Music, reclaimed the sounds of trance and pop, succeeded by bending the cultural hall of mirrors in on itself, contorting familiar shapes into unfamiliar patterns to wave sensually towards themes of gender, queerness and exuberant rebellion. Harle’s process is straighter, in more ways than one; Harlecore is more reverent, more respectful and ultimately more questionable.

I first came across hard dance music in Birmingham’s gay clubs in the 1990s, where hard house reigned supreme. This fast, grotty, distinctly British subgenre took Black American house and techno and supped out the funk, soul and futurism, replacing it with rave’s wacky energy and, most visibly, hoover bass sounds and air horns. It was the ideal utilitarian soundtrack to long, chaotic weekends of pills, powders and endless grinding in dark rooms.

The genre was granted a flush of popularity thanks to its association with Trade, the legendary gay late-night party at London’s Turnmills. Opening at 3am and running until 1pm, Trade offered something other clubs, gay or straight, couldn’t: a place to go when everywhere else had closed. It was the precursor to Berghain, Berlin’s exclusive temple to hedonism. Trade’s not-so-secret weapon was Brummie DJ Tony De Vit, who not only popularised hard house across the UK, but took it from the gay scene into the straight mainstream. From the mid 90s until his untimely death in 1998, he was one of the country’s most popular DJs.

Around this time, I was working as a car audio specialist at Halfords, hacking bass boxes into bashed-up hatchbacks for the Black Country’s lads and dads. It was impossible to spend more than an hour at the ICE (“in-car audio”) demo station without hearing some variant of happy hardcore, the breakneck, breakbeat-fuelled sound that inspired a thousand tape packs. Fast, bass-heavy remixes of kids TV themes were popular, so an average day at work would be riddled with cheeky edits of Thomas the Tank Engine, Batman or The Magic Roundabout. If you were into tunes, you were used to wasting away evenings sitting in a car park with your mates thumbing spliffs and skimming through the local pirate radio stations; the funnier the tracks were, the more they made sense to our THC-faded brains on a system that was 75% bass, 25% the rest. The differences between hard house and happy hardcore were fairly thin, and as happy hardcore morphed into UK hardcore, with bigger, bouncier kick drums, those differences faded even further.

In the north of England, hard house and UK hardcore melted together like butter and margarine into an enduringly popular cultural movement that has long defied the disapproving scowl of serious dance music journalists. The bouncy, narcotic sound took on different flavours, but comprised similar ingredients. Donk in Manchester, Scouse house in Liverpool, makina in Newcastle: northerners who wanted to party and had been weaned on Tidy Boys mixes and Bonkers packs had developed a taste for hard, fast, cheeky music and while there were differences between the variants, the linking thread was still frothy nights of jaw-chomping and water-guzzling.

All these musical elements appear on Harlecore, but once they’ve been cleaned up, dabbed with Old Spice and gelled in place, feel disappointingly sober. Opener Where Are You Now sets the pace, blessing pneumatic 4/4 kicks with pop-trance euphoria, heartbreaking harmonies and an overfamiliar hook, but it fails to capture hard trance’s primary function: mirroring the pulse-accelerating full body tingle of an MDMA rush. It’s deviously well-crafted singalong radio fodder, but skews closer to a sexy hard dance Halloween costume than an accurate embodiment of the genre’s sozzled philosophy.

The unashamedly throwback Do You Remember twins soaring vocals with a hard house bass knock, but its brash, anthemic lead and saccharine vocal reminds me less of sybaritic raves and more of the New Labour era’s misplaced optimism and hollow promises. And when Harle pays respects to the boy racers with Car Song, rapping: “We are driving in a car, car, car, car, car / playing music in a car, car, car, car, car,” it comes across like a skit from a 90s TV sketch show. I don’t doubt that he has genuine affection for the source material, but I still can’t be completely sure I’m not being laughed at.

He inches closer to actualisation on All Night and Interlocked, which touch on hardcore’s gross, overdriven ferocity, but by never crossing the line into sloppy excess Harle sidesteps the genre’s central allure. Hard house, gabber and hardstyle endure because their extremity is fallible and untempered, serving as a reactionary counter to the mainstream’s faultlessness and the critical canon’s often buttoned-up, watered-down middle ground. The overblown breakdowns, hastily chopped samples and overused canned presets are part of the appeal, not aspects to be retouched like a fig leaf over an offending organ.

On one hand, I appreciate Harle’s finely stitched tapestry of strip-mined references. By assembling a vivid virtual club space to accompany the album online, he has realised the ideal musical package to represent the Covid-19 era – one bereft of physical functionality and crammed with anaesthetising nostalgia. This virtual reality spectre speaks to the way culture has become trapped in an optimisation loop, where each artistic development is refashioned to fit the trending delivery method of the month.

But hard dance was already thriving in the streaming era, and it’s just as reactionary, revolutionary, messy, substance-fuelled – and often gay – as it ever was. Harle’s simulacrum is surplus to requirements: in Berlin, LSDXOXO’s Floorgasm party has reignited the fiery gay energy of the Trade era with pneumatic hi-NRG beats and pert pop edits; in Nairobi, meanwhile, energetic duo Duma break musical rules, crossing pummelling hardcore drums with death metal and industrial rap; in São Paulo, local DJ and producer Pininga launched Tormenta, a space where the energy of hardcore can thrive in a queer, chaotic, genre-fluid environment; in Thailand, Yennu Ariendra and J Mo’ong Santosa Pribadi’s Raja Kirik project attacks anti-colonial themes using Dutch hardstyle and trance alongside traditional gamelan; in Brooklyn, quest?onmarc simmers gabber and hard techno with ballroom and jungle to land on a dancefloor-centric sound that’s completely their own.

Compared to the fertility of this global experimentation, Harle’s sonic landscape is an arid desert. “Everyone here is safe and nice,” MC Boing raps on the track Boing Beat. That’s precisely the problem.