The Twerking Robots Were Right About Everything

Basement Jaxx arrived in the late nineties like proof that British dance music didn’t have to be solemn about itself to be completely serious about the dancefloor. Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe built their sound in Brixton and it showed—soulful and sweaty and formally unpredictable, the kind of thing that worked at two in the morning and also, somehow, in the car on a Tuesday. Red Alert. Where’s Your Head At. Good Luck. Tracks that didn’t ask your permission.

By the mid-2000s they’d faded from the conversation in the way that happens to dance acts too strange for easy categorization. Not forgotten, exactly, but no longer current. Then Junto arrived in 2014, and with it Never Say Never, and they sounded exactly like themselves—which is to say, like nobody else.

The video is something. It depicts a dystopia where humanity has forgotten how to move—crowds standing rigid and dead-eyed while music plays around them—until giant twerking superrobots descend and show everyone what they’ve been missing. It’s ridiculous. It’s also a coherent thesis about what dance music is actually for: not background, not ambiance, but instruction. A reminder that the body knows what to do if you stop overthinking it.

I don’t know if Never Say Never ended up on every dancefloor that summer the way it felt like it should. What I know is it had that specific quality of a track that rewires something slightly when you hear it at the right volume, in the right room, and you stop being wherever you were. That’s what they always did. The robots just made it explicit.