Crying on the dancefloor: How dance music got emotional in 2020

Sign up to Roisin O’Connor’s free weekly newsletter Now Hear This for the inside track on all things music Get our Now Hear This email for free Get our Now Hear This email for free SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. “For a while I just couldn’t listen to certain types of records,” admits The Blessed Madonna, one of dance music’s biggest draws and the DJ behind Dua Lipa’s recent Club Future Nostalgia remix album. “I love techno but a lot of pure club records that are made for a very specific context, listening to them just made me a little bit sad.” As furious techno records started to make little sense without the chance to hear them on a bowel-shaking soundsystem, however, a different style of dance music has stepped in to save the day – the emotional club anthem. Emotional club music has previous, and is closely related to the “sad banger” wave last year, which saw pop’s top tier like Mark Ronson and Ariana Grande make records that evoked what Ronson described as “those moments when the night’s promise gives way to a sense of 3am regret”. But whereas a sad banger like “Dancing On My Own” or Ronson’s album Late Night Feelings often elicit the memory of feeling down and alone in a club while surrounded by people, the emotional club tracks that took hold in 2020 evoked a deep yearning for human connection and letting off steam in a year when we were chronically deprived of it.