Between SoundCloud, YouTube, Mixcloud and everything else, it can feel like we’re being overwhelmed by an impenetrable, almost infinite stream of music, often of varying quality. You need a soundtrack to start your weekend right, but you don’t have the requisite lifetime to trawl through the week’s new DJ mixes. To help you out, we’ve done the busy work for you. We’ll be running this series every single Friday of every single week to bring you the very finest house music, grime, techno, bashment, R&B, trap, D&B, Amapiano, and no doubt a bunch of stuff that doesn’t have a name yet.

Dive into TRENCH Radio’s best mixes of the week below.

For the past 10 years or so, DJay-R JR, aka Junior, has been bucking the trend of an ever-shrinking pool of after-school resources by offering kids lessons in sports and DJing with his Wrights Academy. Between that and his weekly Croydon FM show, he’s a bit of an institution in South London. Although officially running under the name Garage Tuesdays, this one packed a tonne of house music, Afro-house, and Amapiano burners to cut through the winter chill.

2023 has been a watershed year for hit-maker M1OnTheBeat. His creations have defined drill and dictated the sound’s evolution, but until recently he was a behind-the-scenes figure. This year, however, he stepped into the spotlight with “Trap Global” and “Like Dat”, two singles that gave his name top billing and the MCs as featured artist. He’s also been pushing himself as a selector, hopping on the decks during Skrillex & co’s ‘Badders Radio’ set at Kindred and now he has a Crack mix. Built almost exclusively from drill’s greatest hits—much of which he produced, of course—plus a few up-and-comers and future classics he wanted to give his stamp of approval.

Ever since she started out as a DJ, Germany’s Trigger T has been on a mission to forge a global clubbing experience with her sets and give ravers, particularly those from marginalised communities, a safe haven on the dancefloor. She’s also keen to create a sense of community in her sets, finding common ground between geographically disparate sounds from across the African diaspora. Here, she pulls together the undulating rhythms of Baile funk, hip-hop, Amapiano, house, and more to give us a much-needed rush of heat.

Voices Radio resident warmluke and In Situ leader DJoe hopped in the Pound And Yam studio this week. They’ve been working together for some time now, regularly going back-to-back, and they’ve hit an easy, natural stride as a pair. This latest set centres largely on grime and garage, the pair also throw in some inspired edits and blends, including setting Princess Superstar against a grizzled bassline, Sisqo’s “Thong Song” mixed with some snappy 2-step, and some thumping kick drums for “Shutdown”.

For the past few years now, journalist, author, DJ and filmmaker Jesse Bernard has been making trips back and forth to Brazil to tell the story of, and help cultivate, Brazil’s wholly unique take on grime. Last summer, a documentary was released titled COMO VOCÊ (which translates to “like you”), but the story didn’t stop there. The scene continues to grow and more recently, Jesse was over in SP for the COMO VOCÊ: Joga Bonito Boiler Room set. It was a huge, cross-continent link-up with DJs Super, Akila, Peroli, Korsain and Diniboy all on deck as well as a tonne of MCs, plus Jesse himself with this incendiary set to kick things off.

DJ, photographer and graphic designer Simms has been capturing the culture on wax and on film for some years now and his profile continues to rise. On the visual side, he seems to be busier and busier these days, but it’s his appearances on Balamii show that we’ve been tapping into. For the most part, he keeps his focus on all things breakbeat, but there’s often a bit of garage and so on in there too. This time round, he went in particularly hard with an hour of big, noisy slammers from Zebedee, Tim Reaper, 4am Kru, DJ SS and more.