AC13 drum & bass has always been about raw rave energy glued to clever melody, and the Bristol-based producer admits that spark hit hard at 16 when a Spor B2B Icicle set at NASS Festival cracked his brain wide open.
One year later he was “knees deep” in FL Studio, never imagining the hobby would snowball into sets around the globe and releases on Hospital Records, Critical Music, and now his own imprint, Alpha Circuit. Luck played a part, he says, but the grind mattered more: ditching the pressure to churn out tunes just to keep up and instead chasing authenticity until the right hybrid, jump-up grit welded tog-along dance-floor hooks, finally clicked in 2024.
That newly crystallized identity drives everything. In the studio he protects the vibe by refusing to compare output to the scene’s never-ending feed; forcing bangers on a bad headspace only spits out filler. Instead, he lets ideas simmer, often sketchingffs pre-flight or on a sunny beach between gigs, then tests the near-finished versions in very specific slots of his live sets. Those roadions fine-tune arrangement, bass weight, and vocal placement so each cut lands exactly where he imagined when the drop hits.
Tour life, unsurprisingly, steers the writing calendar. AC13 now builds tracks tolve set-flow problems, “I needed a tune that bridges the melty vocal moment into the outright filth, so I wrote one.” That loop of immediate feedback keeps him stacking more of his own dubs into the USB,, a win-win for crowd and career. On flights he’ll alsoprint metal-tinged or K-pop melodies, proof he hydrates creativity with genres far outside 174 BPM. He name-checks Bring Me The Horizon, Babymetal, and Bilmuri as dream collaborators exactly because their textures could yank drum & bass somewhere fresh.
Community keeps the genre buzzing among Gen Z ravers, he argues. Compared with colossal EDM monoliths, DnB still feels like a secret handshake, tight-knit, underground‑ish and welcoming. That intimacy pulls newbies in and powers the current surge across UK and EU festivals. Expect the sound to keep morphing as younger fans fold in outside influences, just like AC13 does.
Legacy labels gave him early oxygen, Hospital’s “Lakeside 94” era and Critical’s tech-heavy cuts, but 2025 is all about independence. January saw the birth of Alpha Circuit, a vehicle for artists he rates and a home for his next run of releases. Twelve AC13 originals are locked for the calendar year,lus the brand-new project Alpha:Omega alongside Austin, TX, powerhouse Reaper, promising even more high-octane mayhem. With roughly 100 dates on the books and each show stacking new dubplates against the previous night’s carnage, the momentum looks unstoppable.
So what’s the takeaway for aspiring producers? According to AC13, find your lane, ignore the FOMO scroll, and remember why you started, a kid at a festival floored by basslines big enough to change a life. The rest is determination…and maybe writing bangers on a beach.
