Boris Daenen was barely out of his teens when Hospital Records signed him in late 2009. Most of us at that age were figuring out how to do laundry; he was in Belgium making liquid drum and bass clean enough to make London labels nervous about their own roster.
Short version, if you’re skimming: skip 3, start with the 2010 debut and 2, then jump to the post-2020 stuff. Now the long version.
The Hospital run
If you came up on Hospital in the late 2000s, you know exactly what that first run sounded like. “Tomorrow’s Another Day,” “Memory Lane,” the self-titled 2010 debut — all rolling basslines and vocal chops, the kind of liquid that sounds easy until you try to make it. Netsky made it sound effortless, almost too pretty — like the genre was the easy setting and everyone else was overcomplicating it. The follow-up, 2, doubled down: bigger, glossier, “Come Alive” and “Love Has Gone” pushing the sound toward festival-size without losing the warmth. For a stretch there he was the most exciting young producer in the genre, full stop. Hospital had a deep liquid-era bench — London Elektricity (who co-founded the label), High Contrast, Danny Byrd — but Netsky was the one your non-DnB friends had heard of.
And then he heard of crossover.
The pop pivot (3)
You can pinpoint the pivot pretty cleanly. 3 dropped in 2016 and it was barely a drum and bass record. It was a pop record wearing DnB’s old jacket. “Rio” with Digital Farm Animals, “Work It Out” with Digital Farm Animals again — tropical-house-adjacent radio plays, all plucky synths and gang vocals built for a summer playlist. There was even a Jauz collab (“Higher”) swinging for the big-room festival crowd. I’m not going to pretend I was rooting for it. It charted, it got him on bigger stages, it probably paid for a very nice house. It also sounded like a producer who’d been told by someone in a suit that 174 BPM doesn’t scale.
The pop detour wasn’t a crime, to be fair. Plenty of dance producers tried to crack the radio in the mid-2010s — it was the EDM-pop gold rush, everyone was chasing a “Lean On.” Netsky just happened to have a real catalogue to abandon to do it, which made the swerve feel more like a betrayal than it probably was on his end. A prodigy at nineteen doesn’t owe you the same record at thirty. But the thing about being that good at one specific sound is that watching you do a worse version of something everyone else is also doing stings more than it would for anyone else.
The comeback (Second Nature)
Then a funny thing happened. He came back. Not in a press-release “return to my roots” way that you roll your eyes at — actually came back.
Second Nature, the 2020 album, dropped exactly ten years after the debut and started edging the BPM back up. And the smart part is who he came back alongside: the record pulls in Sub Focus, Becky Hill and Rudimental — the exact UK liquid-crossover wave that was peaking right then. He didn’t return to a dead scene; he walked straight back into the moment that was already happening. The live show backs it up — the Netsky LIVE! band, a full-band setup he’s run since 2012, leaning hard into the dancefloor instead of the radio.
What to actually listen to
If you’re new to Netsky and you want the good stuff:
- The 2010 debut + 2 — the prime liquid era, the wunderkind firing on all cylinders. “Memory Lane” still goes off in a room more than a decade later.
- Post-2020 (Second Nature onward) — a more grown-up producer who’s done the dancefloor round-trip and come back with better taste.
- 3 — skip it. Useful for understanding the arc, skippable for the playlist. The pop years are a footnote, not a chapter.
The lesson of the Netsky story isn’t “selling out is bad” — half the producers you love took a swing at radio money and you just don’t hold it against the ones who failed quietly. The lesson is that talent that specific is hard to fully abandon. You can put a liquid DnB prodigy in a tropical-house costume for a couple of years, but eventually the bassline starts calling and he picks up. Boris went and looked at the pop money up close, decided the dancefloor was better, and came home. Most cautionary tales don’t get a third act this good.
Related: Netsky — Come Alive (Grafix Remix) · Sub Focus — Elevate (SOTA remix) · Wilkinson — Ultraviolet · /blogs/news/tagged/liquid-drum-and-bass