Most breakup albums start at the beginning of a romantic relationship, but Nia Archives’s Emotional Junglist starts with the wreckage. The album opens with “Feelingz Go Numb,” a club stomper built around one flat admission—that her numbness has swallowed her whole—and rewinds from there. “Danger” is horny and reckless, “Vertical” is consumed by obsession, and “This Could Be…” catches the giddy rush of a new crush. The sequencing helps turn a fairly conventional set of love songs into a story with actual suspense.
On her 2024 debut, Silence Is Loud, jungle music provided Archives with a language built for velocity: chopped breakbeats, subterranean bass, the sound of a body outrunning itself. She pushes further on Emotional Junglist, with the help of producers James Ford and Ethan P. Flynn and songwriter Julia Michael, infusing the album with more exploratory sounds. “Around Tha Bend” rides a guitar riff through a spiral of self-estrangement—she calls herself “a stranger to myself” while the drums churn beneath—and the speed reads as panic instead of release.
The album’s best sustained joke, “Danger” is all lust and swagger, an X-rated come-on where Archives chants the title letter by letter, cheerleader-style, and the percussion hits hard enough to make the bravado feel earned. Then, “Vertical” slows the BPM into a woozy ’90s-electronica haze so Archives can confess an obsession plainly: She calls him a wave and prays he crashes on her, which is a nice way of admitting that she saw the damage coming.
What follows helps make the rewind pay off. “This Could Be…” is a bright, drum-forward rush of early-romance optimism, while “Dance with Me 2nite” boasts with a honey-sweet groove and orchestral sweeps. Compared to the album’s numb opener, these songs play as dramatic irony. We already know how this will end, and the album’s best trick is making even joy hurt.
Like the doomed relationship at its center, Emotional Junglist’s middle section begins to drag. “Train of Thought” and “Superlust” in particular settle into pleasant indie-pop, and the breakbeats become mere decoration. Still, the album proves Archives is adept at thinking structurally and keeping her rhythms meaningful: “Almost Always” opens with a hushed rock figure before dropping into a trap beat, which captures the rhythm of bargaining, with love that was “almost always mine,” a woman circling what could have been.
Emotional Junglist concludes with “Boys in Blue,” a guitar-slashed kiss-off about Archives’s ex calling the police on her. Jungle grew out of Black British sound-system culture, pirate radio, and warehouse raves that the police spent the ’90s trying to shut down. The genre’s entire history involves keeping the party going while the authorities arrive. So when a Black junglist finds an ex weaponizing the cops against her, the personal betrayal and the inherited one land as a single blow.
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