Live at Epic Studios in Norwich: 4AM Kru - From The Ground Up Tour '27

It would be easy to imagine 4am Kru were born in an instant flash of blinding light. After all, the truest way to experience their music is in the timeless white heat of a manic rave dancefloor as they deliver their literally sweat-drenched live show. Those live shows seemed to arrive fully-formed and, along with a barrage of online and vinyl releases, have seen them snowballing as they roll through clubs and festivals, building a passionate following and doing bigger and bigger shows up to and including warming up arenas for Chase & Status. And the way they condense the purest essence and energy of early 90s rave and jungle seems so natural, it feels like it must be done on pure instinct. In fact, though, the genesis was anything but instant – or at least, Howie and Stu, the core of the Kru, had to put in years of painstaking experimentation to set the scene for its explosion.

Both of the two are, as Stu puts it with some understatement, “music dudes” through and through, and have been since their early childhood. Howie grew up in High Wycombe, a commuter town out to the northwest of London, as part of a musical family – his brother is a drummer. He picked up guitar from a young age, influenced by a huge range of music from classics like Hendrix and Bowie to Paul Giovann’s Wicker Man score and other far-out soundtracks. He quickly also became a keen pianist - he puts his later development as a songwriter down to a love of exploring the possibilities of pianos and synths.

Stu, meanwhile, grew up in Edmonton, Alberta in Canada, and loved beats from the off. At just eight years old he was making pause button beat tapes, rapping and beatboxing, and when a friend came back from Ireland with rave mixtapes he was smitten. By the start of his teens he’d hooked up with some reprobate English expatriates who were throwing after hours parties, bringing big DJs over and so not only was Stu cutting his teeth as a DJ himself but he got to witness and meet OGs of the scene like Slipmatt and Nicky Blackmarket.

Each of the two, though, was musically voracious and their tastes naturally spread out through their adolescence. By the time they both moved to London to pursue music more seriously, they were listening and playing right across genres, and finding themselves crossing paths as they supported one another’s bands, they gradually discovered how many of the same things they liked and ended up collaborating. They worked on a number of projects, notably a “kind of soothing downer beats and indie hybrid” which helped them through a dark time after some friends passed away, and eventually ended up with a studio together in Tottenham, North London.

Although they both knew they shared a love of rave music, it wasn’t until this period that they discovered just how deep that went. They shared their studio with the great producer Gold Panda, who had turntables set up there, which Howie and Stu started spending more and more time spinning their vinyl collections on. Eventually, almost no music got made there as they started pulling out their favourite acid house, rave, hardcore and jungle tracks in sessions that quickly sprawled into being weekend-long parties.

Even then it took a while still tinkering with their indie-electronic fusions before they had that bolt from the blue moment of Howie saying “Bro, look, why don't we just make a jungle track?” The minute they tried it they knew this was it. Years of immersion in both rave history and studio technique meant the music came easily, but better still they knew how to deconstruct their tracks and rearrange them on the fly: they could play them live. The tracks came thick and fast, and they started to think about taking the new outlet seriously, but they only had time to do one paltry DJ gig playing these new tunes to barely a dozen people in a Camden’s Dublin Castle indie gig venue, before Covid hit and everything shut down.

It was infuriating, as they were chomping at the bit to get onto dancefloors with their new live show, but it also worked in their favour. There was all the time in the world to make beats, and so they put out a track a month through almost the entirety of lockdown, and when clubs finally re-opened they already had gig offers on the table. And of course a nation of ravers was building up a fierce head of steam and a love of jungle as names like Nia Archives and Sherelle rose in popularity. This audience included, of course, a young cohort of teenagers who’d never properly been out before – and were ready to go absolutely buck wild when they got the chance.

So when they did get to play their live shows at long last, it was in fact like a blinding flash, like a detonator meeting TNT. With everything done DIY, offers just coming in by Instagram DM, the guys would drive themselves across country in the middle of the night to find themselves setting up in the middle of a frenzied dancefloor, Howie and Stu literally holding off club goers while they piled in to them mid rave, promoters looking baffled at what was actually happening. Drum sticks and limbs were flying everywhere.

In the chaos, there were injuries, to both Howie and Stu and to the ravers. An early 4am live show could more often than not feel like a full-contact sport. Howie’s drumming is intense, playing all the individual basslines live, note by note, which on its own has frequently left him with injuries from fractured fingers to chipped bones. In those early days with the duo set up in the thick of the dancefloor, people would get too close, or - worse - in the heat of the moment think they could reach in and hit his drums themselves, which was inevitably a big mistake given the force he was already applying to the task in hand.

But all of this fed back into the pure rave energy of the music and then some. Far from just being a one-off diversion, it became abundantly clear that this was a creative wellspring that wasn’t going to run dry. Howie and Stu put every bit of experience they had of songwriting, production and performance to bear on the records as much as on the live shows. Various friends were recorded, sampled, thrown into the mix, and in particular Layla Sibelle – who had been one of that tiny crowd who saw their debut DJ gig and vibed instantly with what they were doing – helped them evolve real-deal song structures, and start to get a big picture of just how much this thing could expand.

So there have been blinding flashes in 4am Kru’s existence: that simple decision to “make a jungle track”, and the instant mayhem that happened once ravers could experience the music in the raw. From the minute it became apparent they were on to something they have worked and worked, slowly testing out how far they can go with the sounds, building a bona fide “Kru” around them, and setting in for the long haul. They’re already one 20-track album and who knows how many single releases down, but now they’re looking forward to bigger shows, more shows, an artist-led EP with Layla Sibelle and likely more collaborations on the horizon.

And the rawness, the simplicity - the energy of two mates sharing records or jamming in the thick of a sweat drenched rave - powers everything. They may be up on real stages now, often big ones, and they may have industry buzz, but everything remains as DIY as ever before. “This is our label, our timeline” says Stu. In a world where right-thinking music fans are instigating a backlash against the fake, the virtual, the algorithm led, this level of realness can’t be faked, and it really seems like its time has come.

Doors 7pm