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A New Wave in Jungle and Drum and Bass: Women and Queer DJs Take Control
A New Wave in Jungle and Drum and Bass: Women and Queer DJs Take Control
Jungle was created in the margins of British nightlife. Think dub, reggae, and drum and bass played on pirate radio stations or at warehouse raves. It emerged as a sound that rejected the mainstream with its fast, unruly style. But for a genre formed by marginalised groups, this British dance-music scene has become largely male – and often white. In London, female and queer jungle DJs are challenging this overrepresentation.
In a dingy warehouse club in an industrial estate in Deptford, southeast London, a collective formed mostly of female and non-binary DJs blast jungle, drum and bass, bassline, and techno to a crowd of sweaty revellers.
It's here that a correction is taking place – a new wave of female and queer DJs and promoters are making their own space in the genre by creating collectives and throwing their own inclusive raves.
Among these new organisers are a collective called Jungyals and Gays, who have been throwing raves in similar venues in London since early 2023. Their events showcase queer and female-only line-ups, fancy-dress codes and a welcoming and warm vibe.
The crowds in these events are young, enthusiastic, and often queer, dressed in bright colours and not afraid to openly express themselves on the dancefloor.
Jungyals and Gays’ founders, Chloe Parkinson and Daya Istiawan, explain their collective isn’t exclusive to the queer community alone:
‘It’s a space for everybody to come and experience an environment that is welcoming. We aim to be a worry-free space where you can express yourself freely and where you can rave safely.’
‘We were going to a lot of strictly queer, strictly female parties… it completely opened our eyes when we went raving, and we wanted to bring our friends.’
Jungyals and Gays’ founders, Chloe Parkinson and Daya Istiawan, explain their collective isn’t exclusive to the queer community alone:
‘It’s a space for everybody to come and experience an environment that is welcoming. We aim to be a worry-free space where you can express yourself freely and where you can rave safely.’
‘We were going to a lot of strictly queer, strictly female parties… it completely opened our eyes when we went raving, and we wanted to bring our friends.’
While conversations about gender/sex and race inequality have become more prominent in terms of dance music as a whole, jungle and drum and bass are still male-dominated, with a 2020 report titled Counting the Music Industry, finding that drum and bass labels had the lowest numbers of women signed to them, at just over 5%.
Representations in crowds also show disparity: In 2022, the Jaguar Foundation, in collaboration with Sony’s Social Justice Fund UK, published a report into gender representation in UK dance music. The report found that 37% of Skiddles’ events had over 60% male attendees, and drum and bass and jungle were the genres most skewed to male audiences.
Which DJs are selected for visibility in the industry can be seen in festival line-ups. The newly released Boomtown 2026 line-up heavily features jungle and drum and bass DJs, but once again, most are male.
Familiar male DJs like Shy-Fx, Camo and Krooked, and L’ Enterloop feature. While there are female artists on the line-up, and there are more musicians to be announced, it's clear Boomtown could have more female jungle and drum and bass talent.
Sophie Scott, who performs under the name Silva Snipa, is a young jungle and drum and bass vinyl DJ from Croydon. She has been taking the drum and bass scene in London by storm in the last few years, with a residency at Kool FM and sets at Outlook festival and Fabric, as well as many others. Her style of spinning old school drum and bass and jungle records seems to have resonated with a younger crowd.
However, she explains the difficulties there are for women in this scene: ‘I think there’s a massive difference with representation when talking about the underground scene and bigger promoters and parties, with the underground and smaller collectives pushing for diversity more.’
Chloe and Daya noticed similar themes, saying, ‘you’re seeing a lot of new, small collectives popping up and working towards inclusivity. But that is only half the scene, and it's not enough.’
Speaking on their own experiences as female DJs and promoters, the organisers of Jungyals and Gays and Silva Snipa mentioned being told they were someone’s favourite ‘female DJ’ or they were ‘not bad for a girl’ and being expected to be less knowledgeable than their male counterparts when it came to production and sound engineering.
‘We’ve had sound engineers laughing in our face when we’re trying to tell them there's a problem,’ Said Chloe, ‘It’s the underestimating by other people that is most noticeable, people feel the need to mansplain everything to us, or they just don’t believe we know what we’re doing,’ added Daya.
‘I don’t want to be classed as a female DJ,’ said Sophie, ‘I just want to be a DJ.’
The gender imbalance in terms of jungle DJs may be improving, but the imbalance in people working as promoters is another issue. The Jaguar Foundation report found that 63% of senior roles in live music were men.
‘I can’t remember the last time I dealt with a promoter who was a woman,’ said Sophie.
In the face of an industry in which young women and queer people are overlooked, spaces in which they can be given opportunities that their male counterparts might get more easily are important. But for these DJs, their gender or identity shouldn't be the sole reason for them being booked:
‘We don’t want people booking us because they’ve been told they need to have a female or a queer person on their line-up… they see our name has gay in it, and they think that’ll tick a box’. Chloe goes on to say, ‘book the DJs because they're incredibly talented, it shouldn't be that you have to, it should be that you really want to’.
Sophie also spoke on this: ‘it’s important that we have these spaces and these line-ups to make sure people aren’t sidelined… It's a great thing that it’s happening but it's sad that it has to happen. It shows there is still a structure in place that is stopping people from marginalised backgrounds from reaching certain places in their music career’.
‘It reflects society as a whole, there is an imbalance between men and women and people should recognise that in our industry, and take that into account in their bookings,’ said Daya. ‘It should be a positive thing, it’s not just ticking a box, if you are making that active effort then you are part of the movement’.
For collectives like Jungyals and Gays and DJs like Silva Snipa, the response to this inequality is to carve out their own paths in the industry, to focus on talent and equity rather than tradition. It’s clear that these musicians aren’t waiting around for a change, they are creating it themselves.
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