“Time moves in spirals.”

So goes Hyperdub’s description of Tim Reaper and Kloke’s new collab album, In Full Effect. Ordinarily, I’d ignore this kind of philosophical chestnut, lest I fall prey to marketing copy. But in this case, these words almost exactly match something Kode9 said to me 10 years ago, and the concept of history not quite repeating but instead rhyming feels particularly apt. After all, for 20 years, Hyperdub has never stood still, boldly tackling genres like dubstep and funky only to move on to the next big idea, while nevertheless circling back to threads linking their releases throughout their catalogue: bass, the future, the seductive side of darkness, and an imperative to look beyond dance music’s surface-level formulas for deeper meaning.

In some respects, In Full Effect can be seen as a break with the past, the first jungle album ever released on a label started by a DJ, raver and theorist seeking to escape drum & bass’ early aughts clownstep doldrums. Now, 20 years later, in an era of cascading, overlapping revivals in UK dance music—with jungle, garage, grime and dubstep all insisting it’s their turn—what are we to make of an album that would have sounded right at home in 1994? More importantly, what does it say that its brittle, rapid-fire breaks and bitcrushed pads sound just as shocking and futuristic today as they would have in jungle’s heyday, even after decades of turbocharged D&B tunes, each heavier and more perfectly engineered than the last?

A lot of that is down to jungle’s intangibles. When the sound first shocked the world in the mid-1990s—spreading like a viral contagion from DJ to DJ, raver to raver and eventually, country to country—most latched onto jungle’s speed and bassweight. Just as important, however, was the genre’s timbre and production quality, key elements that became increasingly hard to replicate as technology advanced, given that those elements were imparted by once cutting-edge tools like Amigas and trackers that were mostly abandoned as home computers improved. If junglists were celebrated for making classics out of little more than samples and cracked software, they were quick to move with the times, even unintentionally at the cost of the music’s soul. Of course, plenty of die-hards stuck to their guns, collecting vintage equipment in search of a way to replicate the past, but sacrificing looseness for fidelity often proved to be an equally fraught strategy, one leaving listeners to think: “OK, this sounds right, but I’ve heard it before.”

On In Full Effect, Londoner Tim Reaper and Australia’s Kloke hit a perfect balance: every tune has the intangible grit and debris of classic jungle, without sounding like overly studious recreations of past glories. Specifically, the project positions itself at the moment where the genre’s explosive ragga jungle populism, as spread by pirate radio, collided with jazz-fusion-inspired deep cuts played by DJs like LTJ Bukem. Like the moment a star goes supernova, this golden moment was over in a matter of months, transformed into a new state: the jazzy tunes becoming more mannered and the ragga tunes accelerating into tech-step and breakcore overkill. And much like a nova can’t escape becoming a black hole, the gravity of ever heavier tunes led the original jungle sound to collapse on itself. (To push this tenuous metaphor even further, some physicists theorise you can time travel via black hole, but frankly, you’d have an easier time returning the ‘90s with In Full Effect.)

With this in mind, Hyperdub’s early identity as a label building on jungle’s energy but avoiding its form and pitfalls feels more like a musical survival strategy than any sort of snub, one that the label would later mirror with dubstep—the scene that birthed it. Listen to the label’s early output like Kode9 & Spaceape’s “Sine” or Burial’s “South London Boroughs” and you can hear artists taking a step back to then take 2 forward: stripping drum & bass of its machismo and garage of its champagne-soaked excess to recenter bass music around its core elements. That’s not unlike what Reaper and Kloke are doing today, forgoing tunes mixed within an inch of their lives and cheap pop edits to revisit the sound of amateurs messing around with their record collection and family PC to see what kind of madness they could come up with.

Still, time’s a spiral, not a circle, and dance music today faces even greater challenges than it did amidst the already fraught early-2000s recession. Clubs have been closing for years now, ravers have less money to go out than ever even as event prices are skyrocketing, and a plethora of home entertainment options are keeping people indoors, to say nothing of crackpot ideas being floated around like outdoor smoking bans. Meanwhile, on the production side, the torrent of cheap new music tech that helped young producers create jungle, garage and grime in quick succession has slowed down: you’re more likely to get new quality of life upgrades with your latest version of FL Studio update than anything remotely as life-changing as time stretching was in the ‘90s.

This malaise has led some to fret about a lack of new ideas in music becoming an explanation for why we’re living in an eternal revival of past genres. But while I agree that there’s been some much-needed consolidation in bass music—scenes so closely linked should overlap and collaborate rather than compete in a zero-sum game for attention—records like In Full Effect offer the opportunity to take stock of what rave music has lost along the way, and how to recapture it—a new starting point rather than just a look backwards.

I’m left wondering what the album’s fidelity might sound like married to the footwork music Hyperdub has put out over the past decade (an experiment DJ Rashad was exploring before his untimely passing). Likewise, we’re due for the early FWD>> movement’s reappraisal—might Hyperdub celebrate their 30th anniversary with an album evoking early Mala? Future evolutions aside, In Full Effect is a futuristic shockwave that has the potential to inspire the next generation, just as its inspirations did in the 1990s. Just don’t call it retro.

In Full Effect is out on Sept 20 via Hyperdub (pre-order here).