There is something quietly poetic about producers with three decades in the game circling back to where it all began, not out of nostalgia, but because the original spark still burns.

For Craggz and Haste, that origin point is not a convenient storyline or a retro marketing angle. It is The Rezerection in 1991, Donington Park for Fantazia, pirate radio bleeding through cheap FM tuners in London bedrooms. It is the moment breakbeats stopped being background noise and became a calling.

Nation, their new label and collaborative project, feels less like a launch and more like the natural result of two lifetimes spent orbiting the same culture, occasionally drifting apart, then finding themselves back in the same room with the same records on the table.

From Newcastle metal to Metalheadz

Craggz’s trajectory only really makes sense if you understand how seismic early 90s rave culture was. A Newcastle teenager playing in a death metal band, on the verge of signing to Mutant, hears Grooverider, Carl Cox, and Stu Allen at The Rezerection and promptly rewrites his future. Hair gone. Guitars sidelined. Dance music, full focus.

He followed hardcore as it mutated into jungle and then hardened into drum and bass, eventually landing a defining break with Dillinja’s Valve Recordings as one half of Craggz and Parallel Forces. Albums, world tours, and the launch of their own Product imprint kept the momentum relentless. It was a period of serious output and serious pressure, the kind that forges technical precision.

In 2015 the switch to Battery marked another recalibration, leaning into a deeper, more engineered sound and releasing on pillars such as Metalheadz, RAM Records, Dispatch Recordings, and Renegade Hardware. The aesthetic tightened, the low end grew more forensic, and the studio became as important as the stage.

By 2026, with Majesty launched alongside Philth as a label, radio platform, and club night, it was clear that Craggz is not content to simply release music. He builds frameworks around it. Ecosystems. Maybe he cannot help it.

Haste and the long memory of jungle

Haste’s relationship with the culture runs through different channels but carries the same intensity. Growing up in London in the early 90s, he absorbed hardcore through pirate stations such as Rude FM, catching half-heard transmissions and late-night broadcasts that felt illicit and urgent. When jungle properly took hold in 1994, he was already deep in, buying vinyl obsessively and eventually stepping behind the decks on pirates including Rude FM and Ruud Awakening.

As the late 90s sound drifted into directions that did not quite resonate, he leaned into archiving and preservation rather than disengagement. RollDaBeats, co-founded with Thijs, better known as Tarzan, became a vital catalogue of releases, labels, and discographies at a time when much of that information was scattered or simply lost. It was not glamorous work, but it mattered. It still does.

After a period away from the centre of the scene, production drew him back in. Living with Craggz, watching sessions unfold in real time, he caught the bug again and began releasing retro-inflected jungle on his Twilight label in 2023. There is a clarity to those productions, a sense that they are informed by history rather than trapped by it.

Where their skills intersect

Nation emerges from that shared history, but it is not just a sentimental reunion. It is a practical collaboration built on complementary strengths. Craggz arrives from the hyper-detailed world of modern drum and bass, with decades of experience in sound design, mixdowns, and the kind of low-end control that only comes from testing tracks in serious systems. Haste brings deep musicality, instinctive arrangement, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of samples and source material, alongside shaping the project’s visual identity.

Their shared love of rock and metal, genres they bonded over long before Nation was conceived, threads subtly through the project’s darker aesthetic. You can feel it in the textures and the tension, even when the breaks are flying. It is not obvious, not theatrical, just present.

They describe Nation as a celebration of the sounds that changed their lives in the early to mid 90s and continue to excite them now. That word, excite, feels important. This is not a museum piece. It is two producers revisiting formative influences with the benefit of 30 years’ perspective and considerably sharper tools.

Inner World sets the tone

The debut release, NATION 001, arrives on 6 March 2026 and immediately establishes the blueprint. A-side Inner World balances early 90s uplift with modern weight, its breaks crisp and assertive without losing that rush of optimism that defined so much early rave. On the flip, Take Me and Together push further into break-heavy jungle territory, tougher around the edges but still melodic at heart.

There is a confidence in the arrangements that suggests these tracks were not rushed out to mark a launch date. They feel road-tested, even if only in private sessions. And with enough material already completed for an album, the duo are in no hurry. Limited vinyl runs will sit alongside digital releases, a deliberate nod to the format that shaped them both.

Pressing wax in 2026 is not the easiest route, financially or logistically, but it carries symbolic weight. For producers whose formative years were spent studying catalogue numbers and label sleeves, that physical artefact still means something. Maybe more than ever.

Nation does not present itself as a reinvention. It feels more like alignment, a moment where two long arcs converge. In a scene that often oscillates between breathless futurism and endless revivalism, that steadiness is refreshing. Not loud about it. Not self-congratulatory. Just honest.

Hardcore and jungle once offered escape, community, and a sense of possibility. Nation taps back into that current without pretending it is still 1993. The energy is familiar, but the perspective is older, perhaps wiser. And there is something quietly powerful in that.