SJM Concerts & Wild Combination Present

4am Kru

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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 frenz

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