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Music

'The Brit Invasion' Investigates Why America's Younger Generation Has Fallen In Love with UK House Music

From New York to New Orleans, young Americans have fallen for UK dance music. THUMP UK (and Jess Glynne) tried to find out why.

While America might be the home of club culture as we know it — it's the nation that gave the world disco, house, and techno — it wasn't until recently that acts like Porter Robinson or Zedd could headline festivals and sell out stadiums. Dance music, now, is the norm. It's snuck out of basements and slammed it self into enormodomes from New York to New Orleans.

What's really interesting to note, though, is that it's not necessarily the homegrown acts that young Americans are getting themselves facepainted for. While European superstars like Swedish House Mafia to Avicii, helped usher in the first wave of the EDM explosion, it's younger, house-centric acts like Disclosure, Duke Dumont, and Gorgon City who have helped convert American kids from the fist-pumping overload of EDM, to the underground stylings of UK house and garage music, helping to recreate what the mainstream is in the states, and effectively push out a lot to the sidelines.

To help discover more about this interesting cultural parallel, THUMP UK hooked up with London vocalist darling Jess Glynne and sent her across The Atlantic to Los Angeles to discover exactly what it is about UK dance music that's sending the US wild. Meeting up with one of her most important collaborators, Kye and Matt from Gorgon City, as well as a younger American house artist who's cut his teeth to underground UK sounds, Hotel Garuda, Glynne helps connect the dots between the UK/US house music cultural exchange, and discover if the USA's love for deep English beats is a flash in the pan or here to stay.

You can watch the documentary, made by possible by Bench — Brit Invasion — below.