Kit Rice is one of those people who could probably talk about music for hours and still have plenty more to say. In fact Kit Rice is one of those people who could talk about anything for hours and still have something to say…
From the 14-year-old discovering dubstep and dragging his schoolmates to raves, to the classical violinist who eventually found his voice in drum & bass, music has always been at the centre of his world. And if there’s one thing that comes across when you speak to Kit, it’s just how much he loves it, and how much he wants to share that love with everyone around him.
His debut album, Deep Waters, coming November 20, is a deeply personal record, charting a relationship that began with the promise of ‘Fall’, moved into the hope of ‘Dive’, and ultimately reached the point where love alone wasn’t enough. But it’s also about something bigger: being openly queer in drum & bass, finding your people on the dancefloor, and making space for others to tell their stories, too.
Kit speaks about all of this with the same openness and enthusiasm he brings to everything else, whether he’s talking about the collaborators who helped bring the album to life, the bass shaking in his chest at a Spearhead party, or the little 14-year-old version of himself who never imagined he’d be making this music. Deep Waters is the sound of someone turning some difficult experiences into something beautiful, and bringing a whole lot of heart and fun to the dancefloor in the process.
Hi, how are you?
I’m doing really good here in my new little studio in Brighton, which I’m super happy with.
I’m four singles into the album now. So everything’s ticking along nicely and it’s just nice that I did it on my own label and I’m in control of everything, which is a much more relaxing feeling.
Is there more pressure with self-releasing?
The pro is you’re in control. The con is you’re in control.
So, if you have a couple of weeks off, it’s like, “oh, f***. No, nothing’s moved. Nothing’s changed.” Because I’m the one in control of it.
How does the partnership with Spearhead work?
Spearhead basically does the promo for me. All of the songs have been going out on Spearhead promo which is really exciting. I’ve been in contact with BCee and Spearhead for a couple of years now. I released a song called “I’m Sorry” on their sister label called Future Retro.
We got together to make the first song towards the album, ‘Fall’, and to be honest, we had a great time with it. I wrote it with Solah and Abi Flynn, and we really got into it and had a lot of fun. BCee was like, “Oh, this is a nice one. Let’s release it on my EP with Liqucity.” I was like, “Yeah, sure. Let’s give that a go.” And he stuck it on the end of the EP. It wasn’t given a single push or anything like that. It was just on the EP.
A couple days later it was played on Radio One on Charlie Tee‘s show and we all rang each other really quick like, “Oh my god, I can’t believe that just happened.” We were just testing it out, and for that to happen that kind of jogged me into making an album around this sound. That’s kind of how it all started.
We performed it at a couple of festivals, at his collab show and then the Spearhead XX party Christmas just gone. From there I just got the bug for it and I wanted to make a full album, because that song was so personal and special to me.
That’s quite quick really for an album…
The album is about me having a really beautiful relationship, but in the end the guy who I was in a relationship with was from the Philippines and he told me I was never going to meet his family, I was never going to meet his friends. It all had to happen in secret.
‘Fall’ was about that ‘If they come I’ll be your soldier, they can try but they won’t make it here, every day I’ll be your armour, what do I have to say to make it clear, baby you can Fall, right into my arms’, and that was the beginning of that. Us trying to stay together even though it was a bit of a crazy situation that I’d never experienced before. I tried to support him as much as I could, and that song really represented that.
I just kept writing through the relationship and even when it came to the end, I was still writing as well. I met up with my main collaborator for this album. His name is Ed Carruthers. He’s also a queer songwriter who had a lot to say about the situation. So, we sat down and we wrote ‘Dive’ together. We just kept getting in the studio, he kept coming down to Brighton from London and we kept writing more and more about the situation.
We decided, wouldn’t it be really cool just to really open the lid and show the world what it’s like to be queer in 2026? But also we love drum and bass. We’ve always loved drum and bass. I took the bull by the horns with that.
As soon as I put the word out, all of my collaborators from the previous singles wanted to get involved with this album. I spoke to everybody I could on WhatsApp and Instagram from the last 10 years and just said, “Would you be up for being involved with a debut Kit Rice liquid album?” Most of them said yes.
I had a couple instrumentals from BCee. I had a couple from Hiraeth. I love, Hiraeth. Luffone who actually had been sending me instrumentals over Instagram and I’d been listening to like 50 or 60 instrumentals from him. So I picked out a couple from him.
I was working with some amazing writers as well like Paleblu, we met at Antisocial, which was really cool. It’s a big songwriting camp that happens in London every November. And we randomly met at that. Luffone’s backing track was on my laptop and I was like, “Oh, let’s just play that, see what this is like.” And the whole group in there really loved it.
Pyxis is one of my long-term collaborators. She sent me something straight away that she’d been working on with Eddy Don’t Sail. They brought in Jordvn Emanuel. And that turned into a mega track. ‘Dive’ has probably been the most successful one out of all of them. It had a thousand Shazams in the first month. I was like “Okay it’s on the dance floors, people are dancing to it and hearing it and Shazaming it!” Which is really really cool.
The title track “Deep Waters” is with a guy called Native C, and he’s a brilliant producer as well. We’d actually already written Deep Waters a couple of years previous to making this album. I knew that it was a little bit of a religious reference, and then it ended up being the album title.
What does the title track mean to you?
The reason it was called Deep Waters is because by the time you get to this point in the album, I’ve been through the opening of realising who this is that I’m dating and him showing his struggles and “Dive” being like “It’s okay, let’s dive in together” and then “Deep Waters” was the realisation that the water is so deep I can’t feel the ground.
The little spoken word bits in the middle and at the end were completely how I was feeling at the time. We were just going out into deeper and deeper and deeper waters and I couldn’t pull him back to Brighton shore and he had to keep going in the direction that he was going. It came down to me or his country and I’m not that special.
It’s definitely about the ocean and how we got taken apart from each other. It just shows that there’s more in between two people in 2026. We live in a lovely bubble here in the West. As soon as you pop out to a different country, it’s like, “Oh my god, okay, I’m not safe here.” He was going through so much and it was safer for him to not carry on. There’s no closet big enough for me. There was no way I was going to be able to hide from that.
In the end, we just decided to part. But that single is the one where we completely part ways and I don’t hear from him again. Which leads on to a much more reckless part of the album.
The album’s chronological. Why did you decide to do that? Was that cathartic for you?
It was therapy. Music for me has always been therapy. If I can’t explain my feeling with words, I’ll explain it with melody and then try and add some words to it. Instead of having all of these dark holes in my life that I look back and I go, “That was really dark. That was scary.”
I fill those with art, with glitter and beautiful fabrics, cover it all up with something that’s beautiful. So that when I look back and I go, well, what was happening that year, and I’m looking through my photos on my iPhone instead of just seeing those photos and getting sad, I remember the relationship is the songs that I wrote about it.
That’s why it was in chronological order because it was happening in real time. The whole armor of “Fall” and saying, “I’ll protect you” into “Dive”- “Let’s just run away together. It’ll be fine. Our love is enough”. “Deep Waters” realising that love isn’t enough- it takes more than that. It takes foundations and everything that we basically didn’t have and he couldn’t give.
The next track was “Ghosts”, which is about me going a bit off the rails and going out into the world and having a few one-night-stands here and there. The hook line for that one is “I don’t need to know your name. Tomorrow we’ll be ghosts again” That really explains a lot of what happens in my community, there’s a lot of sex positivity. You can go out there.
I found writing this album has pushed my career so far forward. Just by pushing that creativity into the world. It’s some kind of spiritual thing, but when you write the next song, you’re imagining the artist that you’re going to be next. And then one day you wake up and you are that artist. That’s definitely how it’s happened with me.
Originally drum and bass obviously was for everyone, peace, love, and unity. But over the years it’s been hard for the gay community to settle into the drum and bass scene. You’ve had people like Nathan X and Charlie Tee doing more mainstream events. How does it feel to be baring your personal journey in a scene which sometimes isn’t very friendly.
Do you know what? The only hate I’ve had is from Russia. I’ve definitely had some homophobic comments coming from there. But generally the response has been really good.
I remember the abuse happening with Nathan X on his streamed set. I was looking through the comments like texting him every 5 minutes like “It’s all right. F*** that guy. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” It was brutal.
What was beautiful was in the first 24 hours seeing some of the veterans getting up in Nathan’s face and then all these hundreds of comments coming in against the comments. Then waking up the following day and seeing Becky Hill, Pola & Bryson, goddard. and many more rushing to his defense and saying, ‘No actually, that’s not how we all feel, so carry on doing what you’re doing Nathan. I messaged him at the time and I sent him a couple of the tracks and I was like “Do you think I’m going to get some hate for this?” He said “Potentially but, just go for it anyway!”
But I haven’t had too many problems, which has been really lovely. I started raving when I was 14, I think I saw Chase & Status at SE1 and Kano was rapping. Everybody was just so lovely and that’s the thing with drum and bass. It may have a hard exterior with all the wobbles and the intense drums and all of that, but I’ve always experienced so much love in a drum and bass rave.
Even if you’re just sitting in the smoking area with a cigarette and you’re just chatting to a few friends or whatever. I’ve always found love in those places. When I started releasing music in 2015, and I started performing it at raves, I was worried.
I had a song once again and it was about another relationship that I’d been through. But I looked out into the crowd and there were all these guys sobbing and then, one came up to me at the end and was like, “I sing that for my wife. I play this for my wife. I love this song. Thank you so much for coming and performing it live.”
And I was like, do you know what? I think I’m going to be fine in this community. Most people seem really, really lovely. I’m sure there’s a few guys that want to have a fight and get their testosterone pumping and whatever. But for me in general, it’s been okay in the drum and bass world. In other worlds, not so much. But in the drum and bass world, it’s been really great.
And I’ve had a good reaction from Discover magazine, which is a Brighton magazine. So, I’ve been getting a little bit of a Brighton following going on and people walking up to me and saying, “Oh, Can you sign my Discover magazine?”
You’ve had good reactions across different communities then?
We’ve had BBC introducing support for every single, which I’ve never had before. People are hearing my music. We’ve got support from all the radio stations in Brighton, which is really nice.
People call in and everything and it’s always been love, which is really nice.
The thing is with it being so vulnerable, is that I’m quite a good songwriter, so I don’t kind of keep it so explicit, it works for the raves but it also works doing it acoustically for a performance in New York. Or like I did a little tour with a Canadian artist called Noah Malcolm, and I performed all the songs just acoustically with no drums.
Bless Nu:Tone he mixed and mastered this album to perfection, and he was a lovely guy because I said, “Could I have a couple different versions? Could I have some PA versions? Could I also have some versions with no drums?”
I saw Nu:Tone play at the XX Spearhead party and directly afterwards I thought “I’ve never felt bass shake in my chest like that before” It was a track he made with BCee called “Glitter Balls.” So I asked him; “Okay, can you make my album shake like a m*****f*****?” Those were my exact words.
He was like, “Consider it done.”
And he didn’t mind when I turned up and I was like, “Can I just give you one more piece for “Deep Waters? I really want to have the sea next to my house in Peacehaven.” I live in a little village and the sea sounds a particular way here. I just put this 360 microphone into the stones, I sat and just meditated for half an hour and let it record the sea.
He managed to merge the sea with the synths. I sat and listened to it after it came through. I couldn’t believe it was me. I was so proud.
The little 14-year-old kid that was dancing at the raves, I never thought that I would be cool enough to be on the other side of that fence and be making this incredible music. I’m a classical violin player. That’s how I started. I played for many musicians over the years from Ed Sheeran to Tom Jones and Beverley Knight, James Morrison, Leddra Chapman and Toploader.
As soon as I heard drum and bass and all the rhythms and all the wobbles and everything it hit my brain in a way that I can’t explain. I’d never heard music like it before. And I still feel like that when I go to a rave, there’s so much to listen to and get involved with and feel that bass in your chest.
It took ages for it to really sink in. Like, this is yours. You did it. You made a drum and bass album through grit, determination, a lot of collaboration with all these wonderful people.
That’s a special feeling…
The other special thing that I did for it was I bought a little AI drone. You click it and set it to follow, you can basically walk around with this R2-D2. Next to my house here in Brighton in Peacehaven, there’s these 200 ft white cliffs that have been there for 250 million years, and the sea crashes against them.
It took my mate and I a couple days. We kept having to run inside when it rained, and go back out again when it was sunny. But we managed to get 45 minutes worth of proper footage. I took that footage with me to an album listening party I put on with Tidal in New York. It played on a big screen behind me while I was singing.
We’ve spoken a lot about when you were 14 going to your first raves… What was your musical journey before your first rave?
I was brought up on Luther Vandross and Prince, look at this. [Grabs a giant poster from behind him]. I’ve got a naked picture of Prince in my studio from the year I was born. Amy Winehouse and Snoop Dogg covering his jewels just in case I have to teach here or something.
I grew up on Prince, Luther Vandross, Celine Dion, Mary J. Blige, Mariah Carey. My mum and dad are into singer singers. I trained as a classical violinist from four years old. I was teaching by the time I was 14. I just always loved music.
I was at Brit School for 4 years. Big Apple Records was round the corner in Croydon, which is where Skream, Benga, and Loafer and all of that dubstep was brewing. So I was broken into the rave scene with Dubstep. As soon as I heard that kind of music, I was just completely obsessed.
I started collecting records and I got my little iMac 2008, I got Traktor on there and just started mixing different things together. I started DJing in the canteen at school and introduced dubstep to quite a lot of people. From there, we just started going to raves every single weekend.
By the end of our second year, we’d have our whole year group at the rave, including the dancing girls and the acting guys- there were all these different strands at Brit School. So we would just take over. It would be like a Skream night, and we had like all of these professionally trained dancer girls with us. As soon as the drugs and the music and the alcohol kicked in, they were doing fully choreographed dance routines to ‘Night’, getting on top of the speakers and going crazy.
Raving was this big renaissance for me, music doesn’t have to be classical to have all of these intricate rhythms and amazing bits. There’s a whole other world here. I don’t think I listened to music with vocals in it for a long time after that. I never put two and two together. It took me until my 30s to realise I could do this. I could sing over this.
Amazing… What should we look out for?
We’ve got the full Deep Waters album coming out on November 20, and Bcee’s done a VIP of ‘Fall’ called ‘Fall Deeper’, which is really exciting. That’ll be on the vinyl as well, and it’ll be part of the worldwide release.
We’ve also got an album listening party on November 25 at Bottoms Rest in Hove, hosted by Melita Dennis from BBC Introducing. Tickets are free, so if you want to come along, just DM me on Instagram.
And Anti Social is coming up again soon, which is really exciting because that’s where we wrote ‘Wanna Feel’. I performed at their TikTok showcase last year, and I’m back for their top-tier sessions this year. It’s been a really special place for bringing people together and making music, so it’s lovely to be involved again.
And next year we’re going to launch a “Deep Waters” live show in February. It’s probably going to be at Quarters in Brighton, which is a new club. They have a 360 fan experience. The DJ is in the middle and the fans are all around it. And then there’s a dance floor as well.
I’ve just bought myself a new pair of DJ Pioneer Flex 4. I’m really inspired by people like Ruth Royal, and Craig David, who sing and DJ at the same time.I found my old dubstep and garage collection from 2008 on a hard drive. I’ve managed to get all of that loaded up.
