NIA ARCHIVES: MOVING THROUGH EMOTION

JULY 2026

Words by Vasili Papathanasopoulos

Photos by Iris Luz

Long before she became one of Britain’s most defining new voices, Nia Archives was already bending jungle into something more porous, more emotional, more immediate. Emerging with a run of self-produced releases that paired breakbeats with diaristic songwriting, she didn’t approach the genre as revival or nostalgia, but as something still in motion; alive and still capable of shifting shape. What made her early work stand out wasn’t just speed or style, but feeling. Jungle wasn’t treated as a reference point, but as a language that could hold intimacy, uncertainty and youth in real time. Across influences that stretch from reggae and soul to hip-hop and drum and bass, she carved out a sound that refused to stay in one emotional register for long. That refusal continues into her second album cycle, where expansion feels less like reinvention and more like pressure building outward. Not a break from what came before, but a widening of what was already there.

Her debut album, Silence Is Loud, arrived quickly - almost without resistance. There’s no mythology around its speed, just a kind of clarity that came from existing within those early stages of your career. “I think the debut album is interesting. I made that so quickly. I think the amount of days in the studio total must have been like two weeks worth of days, and it was such a quick process.” There’s something unrepeatable about that kind of immediacy. Ideas didn’t have time to harden, they moved straight from feeling into form, without the interruption of overthinking. “A lot of innocence as well, because I'd never made an album before. I didn't really know how it worked.” That lack of structure becomes part of the record’s identity in hindsight. Nothing was over-engineered. Nothing was overly explained to itself. Instead, the logic of DJ culture quietly shaped it - tempo, movement, flow. A sense of continuity rather than chapters. But even in that early ease, a shift was already forming. “Then it comes to the second album and it's like, 'oh my God, the pressure,’” she recalls. Reaffirming pressure arrives not as disruption, but as awareness that instinct alone now exists alongside expectation.

Where Silence Is Loud was instinctive, emotional junglist becomes deliberate in its expansion. Not more controlled, but more open. “I think what I wanted to do was take what I loved about Silence Is Loud and kind of double down on that on this album. Also I really opened up the possibilities of what I could make. I think I've always felt like I love jungle music, and I always will make jungle music, but I've always felt quite bound to the rules of like, 'this is what a jungle tune should be.' As a jungle artist, I've always felt like, 'okay, I've gotta do it like this and I've gotta have this.’” Those rules begin to loosen. “But this album, I've got a trip hop song on this album because I love trip hop and I would love to make trip hop, but I feel like I had to make this album and throw so many different kind of sounds and worlds at people so that I can go on to do whatever I want.” The record becomes a space for testing limits rather than reinforcing them. “I think after this album I can make anything, and this is the album that kind of destroys people's expectations of what I want to make. It's jungle adjacent music is kind of how I describe it [laughs]. It's got the breaks in there, it's dancey, but then there's a lot of indie stuff, a lot of alternative stuff - because that's the music that I like as well as jungle music. So it's been really fun to explore different sounds and to make different kind of sounds as well.”

What becomes clear is that the rules she once worked within weren’t abstract, they were self-imposed, tied directly to how she understood her own identity as a performer. “That was really, really great. Now I'm at the point where it's about to come out and it's a little bit scary. I think what I've learned from the first album to this album is just, I doubled down on what my sound is in some ways. Then there was things that I felt scared to try on the first album. Like the first album, the whole album was in 170 BPM because I was like, 'I need to DJ this' because I am a DJ.' I'm not a DJ [laughs], I just happened to DJ. This time around, I've just started my live band and I made the album different BPMs so that I couldn't DJ this album. Little things like that.” What she’s describing isn’t just a sonic decision - it’s a structural one. The tempo of the debut wasn’t just aesthetic; it was logistical, shaped by the physical reality of how she performed at the time. In removing that constraint for the new record, she isn’t just changing sound, she’s changing the conditions of how the music can exist at all. “It’s really changed my year. I've got a band, I'm doing a band show. I'm also DJing still, but I think I've set this album up so unfortunately I would have to push myself a bit harder and really be out of my comfort zone. I don't know why I did that, but it's just kind what I like to do [laughs].”Alongside that expansion comes a quieter question; what the album feels like to move through. Not just structurally, but emotionally. Love, identity, instability - they sit inside the same motion as the sound itself. I ask her which three songs she would play to someone to draw them into the world of the album and make them a fan. “I really like Train of Thought, which I don't think is gonna be like a big smash, but I think I would love that song. I really love Around The Bend and I love Vertical. It's like my favourite song on the album, just because it's a very me kind of song.” In my selection, I had included Super Loss, to which she responds: “It's interesting you said Super Loss because no one really.. None of my friends or my team sticks out that song.” It’s clear the album doesn’t behave the same way for everyone who hears it. Even for her.

At its core, emotional junglist isn’t interested in presenting emotion as something resolved or neatly understood. It stays closer to the moment where things are still happening, where clarity hasn’t arrived yet - and probably won’t for a while. That sense of being inside experience rather than looking back on it runs through the way Archives talks about the record’s emotional centre: love, loss, and the instability of early adulthood. “I definitely explore love and you know, I'm mid-to-late twenties now, so it's kind of exploring that as well and the kind of turmoil that people go through.” There’s no attempt here to elevate that period of life into something symbolic. It’s described more plainly, as a set of overlapping states that refuse to settle into anything stable, because in practice, those experiences don’t arrive one at a time. They overlap, interrupt, contradict each other. That’s where the album finds its shape: not in emotional resolution, but in emotional congestion. “I feel like being in your twenties is like the worst. It's actually just so intense, constantly.” It’s said half-laughing, but the point lands because it resists romanticising a phase of life that is often packaged that way. There’s no distant reflection in her voice, just recognition of being inside it. 

That instability becomes the lens through which the album keeps asking the same question in different forms: what happens to identity when your emotional life is constantly shifting underneath it? “So it is just kind of exploring that, you know, finding love, falling out love. Who do I become in that process as well? Who was I before, during, and after was kind of a key, self-discovery in this album, and just like all the emotions that come with that.” What matters in that question isn’t the idea of transformation itself, but its repetition. Before, during, after - as if identity is something that only becomes visible in motion, never in stillness. Rather than treating those versions of the self as separate chapters, the album allows them to blur together. The result is less a narrative about growth than a refusal to separate experience cleanly in the first place. That refusal extends into how emotion itself is handled across the record. There’s no hierarchy between feelings, no attempt to sort them into meaning. “I feel like there's just such a range of emotions that you feel like you know adoration, whimsy, betrayal. So yeah, just really exploring that [laughs] on like fifteen different tracks.” What’s notable isn’t just the range, but the refusal to rank one emotional register over another. Joy and rapture sit side by side without cancelling each other out. Nothing is treated as more “definitive” than anything else.

Even the idea of identity - particularly femininity - is approached with the same lack of fixed positioning. It’s not something she defines so much as something she notices shifting around her. “I think it's something that just kind of came out. I think it was just the era that I was in last year. I was in a very feminine place in my life.” That framing matters: it’s not presented as a statement of identity, but a description of a moment in time. Something experienced, not declared. And even that moment doesn’t stay still. “I feel like I still am, but I think I kind of stray the line between feeling very feminine, really masculine.” What the album builds, then, isn’t a definition of self but a record of fluctuation; of someone noticing how quickly emotional and personal identity can shift depending on context, time, and feeling. “At the moment, I'm just in that era. I don't know if it's just like the mid to late twenties, but it's just got me feeling things that I don't haven't felt. I guess that comes out a lot in the project. Very emotional, up and down and kind of all over the place.” It’s the closest the section comes to a summary, but even here the emphasis isn’t on clarity, it’s on motion. Up and down. All over the place. No fixed emotional centre. And that, ultimately, is where emotional junglist finds its identity: not in resolving those contradictions, but in staying close enough to them that they don’t need to be resolved at all.

For a long time, Archives’ way of working was defined by control through closeness. Her debut album was largely built in tight creative environments, shaped by a small circle and a very specific kind of instinct-led focus. That intimacy gave Silence Is Loud its coherence, but it also established a working rhythm that felt, at the time, difficult to break from. That shift didn’t happen all at once. It came through testing what it meant to let other people into a process that had previously been so self-contained. “It’s been really good to collaborate because I'm actually quite a bit of a weirdo. When it comes to collaborations, I've never really liked working with loads of people. The last album, me and Ethan [P Flynn] made it all literally in his bedroom studio at his house.” There’s a quiet honesty in the way she describes that earlier approach, not as limitation, but as comfort. A way of working that made sense for a first body of work, where instinct and immediacy mattered more than expansion. This time, though, something shifted in the friction of doing things differently. “This album, I tried to work with other people and I actually ended up loving it. I loved working with James Ford. He's such an incredible producer and such a lovely person. So it's been really fun to experiment and work with other people, because I've learned so much from watching how other people work.

What’s important here isn’t just who she worked with, but what that collaboration does to the pace of decision-making. The solitary loop of refining and second-guessing is replaced, at least partially, with dialogue. Ideas are no longer held in isolation until they feel finished, they’re tested in real time. That shift also changes how writing itself feels “Obviously Ethan, he's a genius, and even writing with Jorja Smith on Get Me Down, it was so, so fun to write with her because I didn't feel like, I was like, 'oh my God, I'm going to clock in at my job and write a song.' It was like, I felt kids playing, you know? It felt very fun.” There’s a release in that description. Not just of pressure, but of expectation. Collaboration here isn’t framed as a structural decision, but as a return to something looser. Less self-monitoring, more responsiveness. Less control over outcome, more attention to what emerges between people in the room. What changes across these experiences is not just output, but attitude. The process stops being something to protect and starts becoming something to move through. “It’s like, it's not just you obsessing over one detail. It's okay to bounce off people. I think it's a balance. I think it's definitely a balance.” That idea of balance feels key. Not replacement, not reversal, but recalibration. The same instinct that drives her music towards emotional intensity is now being redistributed across multiple voices, without losing its centre. Collaboration, in this sense, becomes less about adding outside influence and more about loosening the edges of control just enough to let the record breathe differently. In the context of emotional junglist, that feels consistent. A record already defined by emotional fluctuation and shifting identity naturally extends that logic into its method of creation. Nothing stays fully contained. Not emotion, not sound, not process.

Archives tells me the visual world around emotional junglist didn’t arrive fully formed. It emerged in conversation with the music itself; slowly, and without a fixed blueprint for what the record was supposed to look like. “It’s been a lot of work to kind of build the world because I think when I made it, I wasn't really sure what it was this time - what it looked like in my head.” That uncertainty becomes part of the process rather than a problem to solve. Instead of starting with a defined aesthetic, the imagery develops as a way of giving shape to something already emotionally active. The central idea that eventually surfaces is the shell for something protective, but not closed off. Something that holds tension between exterior and interior. “I kind of came up with this idea of the shell reference, tough exterior. Shells produced pearls, and there's this beauty inside it. That's what I felt about with the album.” The metaphor works precisely because it doesn’t simplify what it describes. A shell is not just armour; it is also a space where something fragile forms. It protects, but it also contains transformation.

That duality mirrors the record itself - a body of work built around emotional volatility, shifting identity, and moments of vulnerability that are never fully resolved or contained. Visually, that idea becomes more playful than purely symbolic. “So we kinda made these cool shell headphones and they look kind of weird and surreal [laughs].” There’s a sense here that the visual language isn’t trying to over-explain the music, but to extend its texture into physical form. Something slightly strange, slightly unreal and closer to feeling than to representation. The aesthetic direction also marks a shift in tone from earlier work. Where the debut leaned more toward everyday, grounded imagery, this era feels more constructed, more intentionally stylised but not in a way that distances it from emotion. “I definitely think it's got a lot of like female gaze kind of perspective, which I think is quite fun. I think my last album was a bit more maybe masculine presenting, in terms of the creative. It was a lot more like me in the pub, me in a Fred Perry, me in a CP jacket, you know? Whereas this one is definitely a lot more feminine.” What’s important here isn’t the contrast itself, but the way she frames it; not as correction or rejection, but as shift. The visual identity moves with the music rather than sitting above it. “I think that's because the music's definitely more feminine.” It’s a simple line, but it quietly ties the entire visual world back to the emotional core of the record. Nothing here exists in isolation. The imagery, like the sound and the writing, is shaped by the same internal conditions - instability, openness, and change.

That shift in how the world looks isn’t confined to imagery or design. Once the record starts taking shape visually, it also begins demanding something more physical from her. Something that exists outside screens, artwork, or concept. The shift from DJ booth to stage changes everything. “I’ve started this kind of live band situation, which is something I said to myself I would never do. But I made this album so it was not able to be DJ'ed. So I had to do it.” The decision isn’t framed as ambition so much as consequence. The album dictated its own conditions of survival in a live environment, and those conditions didn’t align with the way she had traditionally performed. That difference immediately exposes a new kind of learning curve. “Honestly, it's such a challenging process because I'm the kind of person where I've got over my hundred hours in DJing. I know how to count to four and DJ, it's very easy. But when it comes to the band thing, I'm really starting a new skill from scratch, but at a level where people are expecting a lot in terms of a show and where I'm at.”

There’s a shift here from mastery to beginner status, but in a public space. The familiarity of DJing, where control and instinct are deeply embedded, is replaced with something that requires coordination, rehearsal, and physical presence in a different way. “So it is tough. I've been rehearsing, I've been doing like dance classes. I've been doing a lot of things that I need to do to feel confident and figure out what kind of performer I want to be.” What’s happening isn’t just technical preparation. It’s the construction of a new stage identity, and one that can’t rely on hiding behind equipment or working within established patterns of control. “I think as a DJ I've often been hiding behind the decks and not really performing. Now I'm really having to step into being a front woman and being front and centre and commanding a stage and engaging with people, which you don't have to do as a DJ.” That shift in visibility changes the entire relationship between artist and audience. The distance collapses. The performance becomes less about shaping atmosphere and more about inhabiting it. But the process isn’t framed as loss. It’s framed as adjustment; uncomfortable, but necessary. “But it's really great. I've done five shows now and my last show I've really enjoyed it. I'm excited. I've got two more festivals this month with the band that I'm really excited to do. It just keeps getting better and better. Momentum begins to build. Each performance becomes a form of refinement rather than repetition - a way of slowly understanding what this version of herself looks like in motion. “I can't wait till I get to the end of the year. Hopefully by the time I come to Australia, I would've got so much more experience and I would just be so confident. But it's definitely a process.” Even confidence is treated as something conditional, something that accumulates rather than arrives.

Alongside that growth sits a quieter awareness of timing, of touring cycles, distance, and the strange rhythm of being present and absent in different places. “I usually come every January. I didn't come this year. It was sad. I was watching everybody's stories in Australia having the time of their lives in January. I was like, 'oh my God, I'm not there.’” The moment is small, but it adds a human texture to the larger narrative of transition. Career movement isn’t abstract - it has geography, absence, and missed experiences attached to it. “I'll be there. I need to figure out, but I definitely wanna come back to Australia.” And then, crucially, the rationale behind all of it: why stepping into live performance matters at all in the context of this record. “I think it's definitely important to do the live thing. It's a risk though, because in dance music not everybody does that. I think this music should be heard in this setting, and I think some of the songs sound better live than they do on the record because it's just more that goes into it.” What she’s describing is a change in how the music exists, not just how it is presented. The live environment becomes another layer of the record rather than a reproduction of it. “I can't wait till the album's out. I'm playing songs [laughs] and people don't know the music, I'm like, 'ah [laughs].' I think when the record's out and people know the tunes, I think it'll be a really fun experience.”

There’s anticipation there, not just for recognition, but for shared understanding. For songs moving from private familiarity into collective memory. “I think I decided to take this risk now because if I didn't do it now, I don't think I would ever do it. I'm glad and it definitely means that I can go do different things to what I would do in the DJ kind of space, you know? So it's definitely exciting. It is just so new.” Newness becomes the defining condition of this entire phase - not just musically, but structurally. A new way of performing, a new way of inhabiting space, a new way of being seen. And like everything surrounding emotional junglist, it remains in motion.

By the time emotional junglist reaches its final stages, the work of building it is no longer the only thing happening. There’s a quieter shift taking place: from making the record to preparing to no longer hold it. “I love this album so much and I'm really proud of it. When it was kind of like, on my untitled whatever, I was just like listening to it, enjoying it.” In that earlier stage, before release pressure sets in, there’s still a kind of privacy to it. The album exists in a space where it can simply be enjoyed without consequence - still flexible, still internal. But that relationship changes as the outside world starts to close in. “Now that it's about to come out, I'm definitely getting the pre-album fear of like, 'why did I [laughs], did I make this? Everyone's gonna hate this. What was I thinking? Why did I go so crazy?' It's experimental.” What she’s describing isn’t doubt about the process itself, but the shift in perspective that happens when something private becomes public. The same decisions that felt instinctive in the studio begin to look different under imagined scrutiny. Still, there’s a counterbalance forming at the same time, a way of grounding the uncertainty in something irreversible and physical. “But then I just keep saying to myself like, 'oh, I've made it. Now it's gone off to print the vinyl. There's no taking it back. There's literally a physical, so it's cement.” That physicality changes the emotional weight of it. Once it exists in the world as an object, it stops being negotiable. It becomes fixed, even if her relationship to it continues to shift. That shift - from internal to external - is something she expects to evolve again once the record is actually out in the world. “I think it's gonna keep changing. I think once it comes out, hopefully I'll feel a bit of a buzz from people actually being like, 'okay, so I get it,' in the context of everything. Understanding, in her view, isn’t immediate. It arrives through time, context, and repetition, not through first impressions. For now, though, she’s still in the space just before that happens. “I think it's just like the month out kind of fear is creeping in.” That final stretch before release becomes its own emotional state - not quite creation anymore, not yet reception. A suspended moment where everything built so far is about to leave its original context and exist on its own terms. And after everything the record has gone through - expansion, collaboration, reinvention, performance - this might be the first moment where she can no longer shape how it’s received.

By the time emotional junglist reaches the outside world, its meaning is no longer something that can be fully controlled by its creator. What it becomes is shaped as much by the people who hear it as by the person who made it. For Archives, that openness is almost the point. “I feel like my motto of what an 'emotional junglist' is, it's like emotional junglism is just being an emotional person up, down, sideways. And obviously you are a fan of jungle music, but I see it as this thing where it's like the punks have the punk movement, but not every punk actually listens to punk music. Sometimes it's just like a spirit. It's an energy.” What she’s describing isn’t a genre identity, but a behavioural one, something that exists outside of sound entirely. A way of moving through emotion rather than a way of producing music. The comparison to punk matters because it removes the idea that you need technical or stylistic alignment to belong to something culturally. It’s less about adherence and more about attitude, it is something lived rather than learned. That’s where her hope for the record sits. Not in how it is classified, but in how it is carried. “I hope that people listen to this, the emotional junglist project and they take that energy and that spirit of being an 'emotional junglist’ with them. I hope they can relate, obviously, but that's mainly the thing, become that energy of just. EJ [emotional junglist] vibes [laughs] and that they can take with them after that album.” There’s a looseness in how she says it - almost playful - but the idea itself is consistent with everything the album has been building toward. Emotion as motion. Identity as something in flux. Genre as something secondary to feeling. What she’s really describing is a kind of permission. Not to feel a certain way, but to stop needing those feelings to resolve into something neat in order to be valid. In that sense, emotional junglist stops being something that ends when the record finishes. It becomes something that continues in other people, in different contexts, in ways she can’t predict or control. And that, more than anything else, is where the project seems to land. Not as a statement, but as something passed on.

What emotional junglist builds isn’t a fixed version of who Nia Archives is, but a sense of constant adjustment. Not arrival, but movement that keeps unfolding. Across the record and its surroundings, each part of her process seems to move in the same direction: outward. The music expands beyond genre. The writing holds multiple emotional states at once. Collaboration opens the process up. The visuals give it form. The live show pulls it into physical space. None of it resolves into a single defining statement, and maybe that’s the point. There’s a version of this story that would try to land on certainty, on where this positions her, what this means for jungle and what it signals about her evolution as an artist. But the more accurate reading is simpler, and less final than that. It’s that she is still moving through it. Still testing what the music can hold. Still adjusting how she performs it. Still discovering how it exists outside of her. And in that sense, emotional junglist doesn’t arrive as a conclusion to anything. It behaves more like a threshold; a moment where different versions of an artist exist at once, without one fully replacing the other. If Silence Is Loud captured instinct before it had been examined, then this record exists in the space after instinct has been tested, stretched, and shared. Not more certain, just more aware of its own movement. What comes next isn’t defined here. It can’t be. But everything in this moment suggests it will continue outward. Not toward resolution, but toward whatever comes after certainty.

emotional junglist is out July 17.