73: Dance music has entered its proteinmaxxed era

We need to talk about this event flyer, and not just because of how Big Beat Cinema-coded it is.

Prospa, Josh Baker and Kettama have worked their way into the uppermost stratum of dance music – a rarefied zone which might seem a million miles away to No Tags listeners, but which has officially become too big to ignore.

The massive Finsbury Park show that this photo shoot is advertising received 220,000 presale sign-ups and sold out in a day. At the time of writing, the boys have just added a third date. Clearly their Guy Ritchie-style promo video did the business.

So what’s the secret recipe? It’s tech-house-but-not-quite, it’s gymbro-adjacent, it’s hetero to the point of retrograde... in fact, there’s a whiff of post-woke to the whole thing. After a decade of dance music attempting to diversify line-ups and recognise its Black and queer origins – at least, that was the claim – how did we end up back here, with four white lads as the DJ event of the year?

To find out, Tom and Chal rack up two fat lines of creatine and attempt to chart the rise of 2020s protein-house: from Circoloco to Finsbury Park, via @joshbakertourmanager and the underworld of UGC clip farming.

Plus: we tackle your feedback on our recent festivals episode – there was plenty of good stuff here, so we’ll come back to it next time. And of course, send in your thoughts and feelings on the whole Ket Street Boys situation.

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