DJ Mag Best of British awards 2024: the winners

“It’s for the dancefloor; it’s fun, with groovy basslines, nice chords, fairly simple, not super intricate, but it’s changed so much it’s quite hard to describe!” Over Zoom, a beaming Josh Baker is attempting to define the distinctive production sound that won him our Breakthrough Producer award.

He specialises in clean, direct, fully dancefloor-targeted house, epitomised by his devastatingly effective ‘Jam Is Pumping’ and ‘Handle This’ from this year. They both dropped on Baker’s You&Me imprint, and in 2024, he also released on Chaos, MOG, TSZR, fabric and Constant Black.

“Through my catalogue this year, you can almost see the steps I took to get where I am,” Baker tells us, “how I got the basslines a bit catchier, or filled the gaps in the 16-bar loop where maybe I wouldn’t have before. Through working more with vocalists and thinking about the hook, I think this year I managed to bring a complete package.”

2024’s successful singles ‘Something To Me’ and ‘Misleading’ showcase his fully realised sound, achieving that dance music holy grail of being both underground and accessible. “This year my music’s got catchier, but I stayed true to myself,” Baker says. “It still kills at underground clubs and gets played at DC-10, but Radio 1 are playing it too.”

And we have to ask, does he have a production tip for budding artists? “Those first gigs, that first release, that first time the DJ plays your track: that buzz is hard to match down the line, so just have fun — enjoy the journey, not the destination.” HAROLD HEATH