Back in 2023, I headed over to Amsterdam to talk about the histories contained in Join The Future at Rush Hour Records. The host was a Rotterdam-based British dance music journalist called Holly Dicker – one of the few music journalists who had not only written sensitively about the Netherlands’ often-demonised ‘gabber’ culture, but also other hardcore dance music movements. When we headed to the pub afterwards, Holly filled me in on a book she was writing – one that attempted to tell the history (or at least ‘a history’) of hardcore.

I was quite excited by this development. While hardcore heads would no doubt dismiss my music collection as largely being on the “fluffy” side, I’d long been fascinated by hardcore in its many forms, as much as a collective musical movement – or, really, movements – as a related set of hard, intense and full-throttle sub-genres.

Hardcore dance music has never been particularly fashionable – most music journalists are musical snobs and balk at the relentless rhythms and weapons-grade assault of TB-303 acid lines prominently featured in many hardcore releases – but it is, in some parts of the world at least, hugely popular. Furthermore, hardcore music and the communities of ravers and music-makers that power it had long been demonised in the media.

It was clear that a history was needed and I was delighted that Holly would be writing about it – the lack of prior histories and the piecemeal way in which it hard been documented (in the UK at least) meant that it was one of the most glaring gaps in the published record of dance music history. Aspects have been covered extensively at different points in time, but Holly’s book – published earlier this year by Velocity Press as Dance Or Die: A History of Hardcore – is the first to provide a historic overview of hardcore and the ebb and flow of the culture since 1990.

It’s a fantastic book, even for those like me who are not dedicated hardcore heads. It provides accounts of some of the key interlocking strands of hardcore dance music culture while foregrounding the voices and ideas of those who created the culture. It’s an impressive piece of dance music scholarship, but also beautifully written.

It has taken a while, but Holly has finally found time in her packed schedule to sit down and talk to Join The Future about it. You can listen to the conversation via the embedded media players below. In it, we discuss her journey as a raver and dance music journalist, what hardcore is (a more weighty and complicated question than you may think), media narratives around gabber, her adopted home city of Rotterdam (and whether its psychogeography influenced the sound of hardcore), the documentary on Rotterdam rave culture she co-directed (it premieres in early 2026), the process of writing ‘Dance or Die’, UK free party culture and much more besides. As a guide, you’ll find a list of timestamps – a kind of guide to what we discussed, and when – further down the page.

An edited version of this conversation, accompanied by hardcore cuts selected by Holly, will air on Noods Radio on Wednesday 24^th September 2025. If you’re in the UK, you can grab a copy of Dance Or Die (and you should – it’s a brilliant book) direct from her publisher (and mine), Velocity Press.

Join The Future: BONUS EPISIDE – ‘The Hardcore conundrum’: Holly Dicker in conversation

00:00:00 – Mescalinum Unlimited – We Have Arrived (Aphex Twin QQT Mix)
00:01:35 – The response to ‘Dance Or Die’
00:04:45 – Holly’s journey as a raver and dance music journalist
00:09:20 – Media coverage of hardcore and particularly gabber
00:12:45 – ‘Coded’/snobby hardcore coverage in UK media
00:15:40 – Gabber and hard right politics
00:19:20 – Rotterdam and hardcore
00:22:00 – History and culture wars
00:24:38 – 30 Years of Rotterdam Rave documentary
00:29:20 – The psychogeography of Rotterdam
00:33:55 – Rotterdam v Amsterdam and football hooliganism
00:40:45 – Document darker aspects of hardcore culture
00:43:45 – How Holly wrote ‘Dance or Die’
00:53:15 – The Hardcore conundrum: what is hardcore?
00:56:08 – Simon Reynolds and hardcore/rave
01:02:00 – The building blocks of hardcore dance music
01:06:20 – Holly’s hardcore glossary in ‘Dance or Die’
01:08:00 – The impact of Spiral Tribe
01:11:15 – Intergenerational raving/free parties being culturally embedded in the UK
01:13:45 – Where does hardcore go next?
01:19:50 – Outro
01:20:33 – Spiral Tribe – Breach The Peace (excerpt)