Nia Archives

Dehaney Nia Lishahn Hunt (born September 1999), known professionally as Nia Archives, is an English producer, DJ, singer and songwriter from the United Kingdom. Within drum and bass and jungle she is most often associated with liquid, jungle‑revival and bass‑led strands of the sound while also working across adjacent styles such as dub, ragga and breakbeat.

Born in Bradford and raised in Leeds from the age of seven, Nia Archives spent formative years in Greater Manchester before later relocating to London to study and develop her career. She was introduced to production software as a child and began self‑releasing music early in her career. Those self‑released projects include the EPs Headz Gone West and Forbidden Feelingz. Across releases and performances she became a prominent figure in the post‑2020 jungle and drum and bass revival.

Her musical style mixes contemporary jungle and drum‑and‑bass frameworks with melodic vocals and dub‑informed space. As a producer she foregrounds chopped vocal lines and reverberant pads alongside tight, syncopated break edits; as a singer and songwriter she layers vocal melodies and hooks over that rhythmic scaffold. Tracks commonly emphasise fast break patterns and skittering hi‑hat work, while the low end is constructed for physical impact via focused sub‑bass and pairings of sine‑style basses with distorted mid‑range bass hits. Atmospherics — delay, long plate and spring‑style reverbs, and airy pad textures — frequently sit above the drums to create contrast between percussion and ambient elements.

Technically, her productions balance precise break editing with contemporary mix practices: clear transient shaping on snares and kicks, and vocal processing that uses pitch shifting and chopping for rhythmic effect. Her DJing complements those production choices; sets and mixes move between rolling jungle sections and sparser, dub‑wise passages, using tempo and break selection to change energy rather than relying solely on volume or Mid/Side EQ tricks. The result is a sound that often reads as both club‑oriented and song‑led — jungle energy around structured vocal work rather than purely instrumental rollers.

Career highlights and concrete releases underline that approach. She self‑released Headz Gone West and Forbidden Feelingz early on, and later released the EP Sunrise Bang Ur Head Against Tha Wall, which topped the UK Dance Albums Chart. Her debut album, Silence Is Loud, arrived in April 2024; it peaked at No.16 on the UK Albums Chart and received a Mercury Prize nomination. Those releases document her dual role as producer and vocalist and mark her visible position within the recent jungle/DNB resurgence.

Publicly available material names her as a key figure in the post‑2020 revival, but specific named influences she has cited are not extensively documented in widely available sources. Listeners and reviewers point to clear connections in her work to ragga and dub textures, vocal‑led liquid approaches, and contemporary break editing practices; those elements can be heard across her EPs and on Silence Is Loud.

Nia Archives’s recorded output — the self‑released Headz Gone West and Forbidden Feelingz EPs, the chart‑topping Sunrise Bang Ur Head Against Tha Wall EP, and the April 2024 debut album Silence Is Loud (UK Albums Chart No.16; Mercury Prize‑nominated) — maps a trajectory from bedroom production into festival and chart visibility while keeping production detail and vocal writing central to her role as both producer and DJ.