Max HeyraudIn a country where four-to-the-floor still dominates the dancefloor, Galway has quietly emerged as Ireland’s unlikely epicentre for raw, underground electro.
Time In Body just announced that one of the UK’s pioneering electro contemporaries, Radioactive Man, is touching down in the west of Ireland next month for a set at Electric, another landmark booking that solidifies Galway’s status as Ireland’s unexpected capital of electro.
Electro, as a genre, has never quite had its moment in the sun. Sure, it’s had its peaks and troughs like any scene, and in 2017, it felt like a genuine comeback was brewing. Mixmag even ran a piece titled “The Rise & Rise of Electro”, capturing a moment when artists like Blawan, Anastasia Kristensen, and Objekt were dragging electro-adjacent music into broader club culture. Meanwhile, the heads, Helena Hauff, DJ Stingray, Carl Finlow, Radioactive Man, and Ireland’s own DeFeKT, had never let the fire go out.
But as fast as it surged, electro began to fade again, slipping back into the shadows. Festival lineups grew sparse, and broken beats gave way once more to safe four-to-the-floor formulas. In Ireland, things stayed mostly quiet, with the exception of stalwart crews like Subject and the nights at Yamamori Tengu in Dublin, keeping the spirit alive. But for the true electro diehards, a new city quietly took up the torch: Galway.
Through a tightly connected network of crews, Deep Sea Dweller, Gash Collective, Ar Ais Arís, Electric Galway, Basement Project and Time In Body, electro didn’t just survive here. It thrived. And not in a watered-down, nu-skool, TikTok-friendly kind of way. We’re talking real, raw, Drexciyan energy, in a city more associated with trad pubs and students than 808 warfare.
Maybe it’s the proximity to the sea, but that’s too cliche of an answer. The truth is, Galway’s electro renaissance belongs to the people behind it. Heads like Prun Roche (Deep Sea Dweller), Lolz, Eliza, and Maeve O’Neill (Gash Collective & Electric), Ian of Basement Project, Rob of Ar Ais Arís, alongside residents Alannah, Hannah, and Robin. These are the protagonists in a space that embraces broken rhythms, and they’ve created something special.
You also can’t talk about Galway without mentioning Shampain, one of Ireland’s most prolific and boundary-pushing DJs, whose championing of fractured beats and genre-agnostic selections has long made Galway feel like a haven for the rhythmically curious.
In recent years, and especially the last few months, the electro bookings in Galway have exploded. The city has hosted royalty: The Hacker, Anthony Rother, Plant43, Dopplereffekt (as a collab event between DSG and Galway Arts Centre), L.F.T., Client_03, and Irish titans like Cignol and Kerrie. Rising UK force Imogen recently brought her futuristic flair to town, and a collaboration with Sunil Sharpe’s Earwiggle label celebrated The Dream of Electric Beep, a curated time capsule of vintage Irish electro.
While other cities chase their tails, battling for relevance with trendy bookings and half-full rooms, Galway just put its head down and did the work. The results speak for themselves: artists are taking notice, punters are travelling, and a once-niche sound is finding its spiritual home in a place nobody saw coming.
