Chase & Status: 'We want to make music that sounds like 2040'
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You really know you’ve made it when you barely blink at booking a helicopter to steal Stormzy from a wedding. “It wasn’t his wedding, he was best man,” says Will “Status” Kennard, recalling the night in 2024 when Chase & Status ’coptered in grime’s finest to guest at their enormous Milton Keynes takeover show. “It ruined someone else’s wedding, basically. A chopper landed on the lawn, he jumped in it in his tuxedo, flew to Milton Keynes, landed next to the stage, runs on the stage, and he was just standing there at the front of this catwalk to 100,000 people. It was one of the greatest reactions I’ve ever seen from any live show we’ve ever done.” He shakes his head. “Which is saying something.”
In the helicopter en route, Stormzy learned that Backbone, the dark, warp-heavy track he’d rapped on — and then pretty much forgotten about — for London’s biggest drum ’n’ bass duo, had just that day become C&S’s first ever No 1. He didn’t stay for backslaps though, having toasts to raise elsewhere. “He went back,” laughs Saul “Chase” Milton. “Had the meal, the sing-song, maybe speeches. But we really wanted that to happen. Before he even agreed to it, we were like ‘the chopper’s sorted’.”
The success of Backbone capped a phenomenal chart resurgence for these grandmasters of grand-scale rave. 2022’s sixth album What Came Before hit the Top Five and launched a flurry of hits: Disconnect with Becky Hill, Baddadan, Liquor & Cigarettes and the Stefflon Don collab Selecta. Since they first broke big with 2009’s End Credits and went multi-platinum with their second album No More Idols in 2011, the duo have never been more popular, and it all culminated in a pair of celebratory blow-outs as headliners of Reading & Leeds 2026, fire filling the sky and the Reading stage rammed with star guests from many disparate threads of dance, rap and pop.
‘It’s this mish-mash of scenes and genres and artists who would never normally work together’
“There’s something so special about the family feeling of the show, which we built up over years and years,” Kennard says. “There’s such a big group of people that come around and tour with us now, and they get on really well. It was so lovely seeing Tom Grennan hanging out with Irah and Trigga and Flowdan. It’s this mish-mash of scenes and genres and artists who would never normally work together, all on the same stage.”
It was, in a way, a bar-spitting personification of C&S’s long-standing mentality. Born — as students in Manchester in the mid-2000s — from a mutual love of all strands of drum ’n’ bass and jungle music, Chase & Status have always been a unifying force. “From day one, we didn’t just want to make one style of drum ’n’ bass,” says Milton. “Some people make the liquid style, you make the techy style, you make the dancehall style — we like it all, and so we tried to dip our foot in all of it.”
Throughout their 23 years together they’ve refused to stand still, shifting album-by-album through darker territories, jungle revivals and pan-genre collaborations, until no one blinked at 2017’s Tribe record featuring Craig David, Emeli Sandé and Tom Grennan alongside rappers Kano and Bugzy Malone, and indie rockers Blossoms and Soft Play. “We also love garage,” Milton asserts. “We love dubstep. We love grime. We love rock. We love indie. We love rap. We’re musicphiles. What I hope that we do is give these other genres the respect they deserve.”
A respect that hasn’t always been mutual. When C&S were booked to play Download festival in 2012, plans were laid to give them the welcome traditionally afforded to dance acts at rock festivals: the age-old Rain of Gold. “There was a campaign to douse us in bottles and bottles of urine,” Milton remembers. “I was like, ‘I can’t get covered in urine, this a new outfit’. My fiancée was there at the time, it’s going to be pretty embarrassing.” Come the event, they won the metalheads over. “I don’t think they threw one vial of urine at us that day,” Milton says. “That was a win in itself.”
Kennard defines the C&S ideology as “not resisting change — we’re obsessed with forward-looking attitudes to music and creativity”. A mindset encapsulated by their new album, Generic Everything, in which a vast musical array of rock, rap, dance, future-pop, ragga, folk and (at one Skrillex-aided point) robo-Latino squelch rave is mashed into a startling half hour, with the likes of J Hus, Little Simz and Giggs adding their inimitable flavours to the stew. The title hints at the concept: to defy the onrush of AI — and, let’s be honest, human — slop by concocting original sonic ideas beyond the capabilities of the Claude crew.
Milton points to Disgruntled, the mesmerising mash-up of rock, rap and rave that opens the album, as a prime example. “On paper, does this weird Britpop indie rock-sounding beat with J Hus on a verse make sense? No, it sounds ridiculous on paper. It’s like, ‘guys, you lost your minds’. But actually it sounds really great. That tune itself is the ultimate example of nonconformism.”
‘If someone feels threatened that they will lose their spot in whatever field they’re doing because of AI...they need to make better music’
Kennard admits to feeling “bamboozled” by the rate of AI advancement in music. “It’s not like going from samplers to mixing desks to laptops, it’s like a million steps, and that is a bit of headf***,” he says. “It’s a messy moment in a transformative, transitional time, and in some ways it’s exciting but in some ways it’s overwhelming.” Do they worry about the threat of AI music (over half of new uploads are now AI-generated, and rising) creeping into the charts? “If someone feels threatened that they will lose their spot in whatever field they’re doing because of AI then, as harsh as it sounds, they need to make better music,” Milton argues. “You need to be having better ideas. If the AI slop sounds like your stuff, then it’s time to maybe reassess.”
They’re fans of embracing all new technologies in interesting and innovative ways; it’s widespread prompt-pop laziness they’re afraid of. “AI has the possibility of making creative people quite lazy, including ourselves,” Kennard says. “It’s so hard to do anything original these days. People are so saturated with ideas and content, and it’s easier than ever to make stuff sound amazing, to create tracks, to sample tracks. Everything starts to feel generic in a way, even for us when we’re making music… The title [Generic Everything] is just a reminder to ourselves: don’t get drawn into this easy way of just typing in a prompt and thinking you’re going to find a hit record or some original piece of art, because you’re not.”
Kennard envisions a future when human ideas and performance will become increasingly valued. But for now, C&S warn us to prepare for a few years of generic everything. “It’s going to take a while for people to start realising how to use these things in a non-generic way,” says Kennard. “[But] we’ve got faith in humans.”
They have, after all, seen human creativity in action at its highest level. In 2009 they were among the producers on Rihanna’s Rated R album, and learned much in the eye of Hurricane RiRi. “The size of the operation was epic,” Kennard says. “Jay-Z came over as well, and Pharrell and Beyoncé, taking over six, seven rooms of a studio complex. Drake was there at the same time. For me and Saul to be in a room with all these people still is one of the most surreal and exciting things we’ve ever experienced.” The collaborative, anything’s-possible attitude of Rihanna’s team rubbed off. “The people around her, and her, have that mega attitude of like, ‘f*** it, let’s make that happen’,” Kennard says. “There’s no idea that’s too far-fetched. It pushed us hard to think bigger.”
And here they are 17 years later, enthused and revitalised by working with — and learning from — cutting-edge new acts like Ledbyher and Saam Sultan, launching pizza businesses (Saul’s Slice) and reimagining the standard dance experience at their immersive Section 63 events where, Kennard explains, “You’re not quite sure where you’re meant to be looking, certain if things are part of a show or are they just happening? It’s a bit discombobulating, but in a good way.”
And, of course, riding one of dance music’s most impressive second waves. “There comes a stage in one’s career where you’re like, ‘OK, maybe we’ve had all our commercial success and we’re just gonna become mainly a performing act, DJing’,” Kennard says. “And then out of nowhere, you just make a load of tunes for the dancefloor and they all blow up, and shit changes.” Chase & Status’s secret? “The obsession with finding the new,” Kennard smiles. “Making music that sounds like 2040.”
Generic Everything is out on October 9. Their world tour starts next February and comes to the O2 on April 2
Main image: @segraphy Production: André Marques, De Kunstfabriek