On her exhilarating second album, Nia Archives tears down the walls between jungle, indie-pop and confessional songwriting, proving that emotional vulnerability and ferocious breakbeats belong in the same room.

Artist: Nia Archives
Album: Emotional Junglist
Label: Hijinxx/Island Records
Rating: ★★★★½

The music industry is fond of celebrating women who break through barriers, provided they remain grateful, marketable and reasonably easy to categorise once they arrive. Nia Archives has other ideas.

On Emotional Junglist, the Bradford-born producer, singer and songwriter refuses to behave like a visiting pop star borrowing jungle for colour. Nor is she interested in becoming the respectable public face of a scene whose rougher edges must be filed down for daytime radio. Instead, she takes the foundations of jungle and builds something unruly, intimate and distinctly her own.

This is not simply a dance record with a few vulnerable lyrics floating over it. It is an album in which the emotional turbulence dictates the production. Desire accelerates the breakbeats. Anxiety unsettles the guitars. Heartbreak drains the colour from the room before the drums come charging back through the door.

The album broadly follows the rise and collapse of a relationship. Its first half captures the intoxication of falling in love at frightening speed. The second deals with betrayal, separation and the strange administrative misery of continuing to live after somebody has dismantled the future you imagined with them.

It is a familiar story, but Nia Archives tells it through an unusual collision of sounds. Jungle sits beside indie-pop, R&B, punkish guitars and early-2000s alternative music. At points, the record recalls the nervous momentum of Bloc Party and the wiry romanticism of early Arctic Monkeys. Elsewhere, it moves towards the wounded melodic directness of Dido or Natalie Imbruglia. None of those references overwhelm her identity. Nia is not trying on old records like vintage jackets. She is pulling apart the music that formed her and stitching it into something contemporary.

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‘Around tha Bend’ demonstrates how effectively those worlds can coexist. Its restless guitar work and circling rhythms create the sensation of thoughts moving too quickly to be controlled. ‘Dance With Me 2Nite’ is lighter on its feet, carrying some of the scrappy charm of early British indie while remaining anchored by Nia’s instinctive understanding of movement.

‘Danger’ is among the record’s most immediate moments. Originally developed during a writing camp for Rihanna, the song possesses the kind of swagger another artist might have turned into polished international pop. Nia wisely kept it. Beneath its provocation and humour is muscular production that sounds far more alive in her hands than it would have after the usual major-label sanding and varnishing.

The album’s collaborators are used with similar intelligence. Jorja Smith appears on ‘Get Me Down’, where the pair’s voices move through a softer, more sensual R&B space without allowing the track to become weightless. Smith is not parachuted in to generate a headline or rescue a chorus. She belongs within the emotional world of the song.

Sampha arrives later on ‘Tender’, just as romantic certainty begins to fracture. His voice is particularly suited to this territory, carrying sadness without turning it into spectacle. The piano-led arrangement creates breathing room within an album frequently propelled by nervous energy. It feels less like a conventional duet than two people standing inside the wreckage, quietly taking stock.

The use of a live band gives Emotional Junglist additional force. Cymbals crash, guitars bite and the bass feels physical. The instruments do not tame the electronic production. They make its impact more volatile. It is the first time Nia has written an album with live-band performance in mind, and the decision expands the scale of her music without sacrificing its urgency.

The record becomes more compelling as its romantic optimism begins to curdle. ‘Lovers Grief’ catches the exhausted clarity that follows a breakup, when love has not entirely disappeared but the person attached to it has become almost unrecognisable. The drums continue to flicker and race beneath the song, as if the body is attempting to escape what the mind has finally understood.

‘There Goes Ma Head’ is sharper and more confrontational, turning emotional disarray into something almost exhilarating. ‘Boys in Blue’, meanwhile, brings the album’s underlying conflict into brutal focus as Nia recounts a former partner calling the police during the breakdown of their relationship. The song refuses to present personal pain as something delicate or privately tasteful. It is furious, messy and public.

Not every experiment lands with the same authority. Some of the album’s more conventional indie-pop passages slightly soften the distinctive friction that makes Nia’s best work so thrilling. When the breakbeats retreat too far, the songs occasionally lose the strange tension between sweetness and impact that separates her from the pack.

But even those moments reveal an artist testing the perimeter of her own sound rather than repeating a successful formula. There is courage in that. Plenty of artists speak about refusing genre restrictions while making records that remain carefully aligned with playlists and marketing categories. Nia Archives actually takes the risk.

Much has been written about her effort to bring a more openly feminine and emotional perspective into jungle, a scene historically shaped and dominated by men. That context is important. Women in electronic music are still too frequently treated as vocalists, muses or attractive additions to work whose technical authority is presumed to belong elsewhere.

Nia Archives is the producer, architect and central intelligence behind this music. She does not merely place female feeling inside jungle. She challenges the childish assumption that technical aggression and emotional openness are opposites in the first place.

Calling Emotional Junglist “jungle for girls” would therefore miss the point rather spectacularly. Women have never required a diluted version of dance music with the difficult bits removed. What Nia offers is something far more interesting: jungle allowed to contain tenderness, lust, humiliation, rage, humour and grief without surrendering its physical power.

Her 2024 debut, Silence Is Loud, announced an artist with a formidable command of jungle’s history and a clear desire to push beyond it. Emotional Junglist is the moment that ambition becomes a fully inhabited artistic identity. The songwriting is stronger, the melodic world is broader and the production now carries emotional consequences rather than merely impressive technique.

Nia Archives has not abandoned jungle in pursuit of pop acceptance. She has dragged pop, indie and R&B into her own territory and demanded that they keep up.

The result is an album that sweats, aches and occasionally bares its teeth. Emotional Junglist does not ask listeners to choose between the dance floor and the bedroom floor at three in the morning. It understands that, after the right person and the wrong ending, they can become exactly the same place.

Verdict: A fearless and emotionally exposed second album from an artist expanding not only her own sound, but the possibilities of British jungle itself.