When you hear Hedex, you hear “My Home Is The Rave”. This movement started when he used the slogan as a visual during one of his sets, and it blew up from there. With an eponymous track in 2023, a documentary that premiered in 2024, and now a debut album, there is no stopping him.
On both his documentary and his debut album, Hedex shows himself from a different side, as a guy who is just like us, someone with ups and downs, but mostly someone who does not give up. With numerous collaborations on the album, he continues to expand his drum & bass world. He calls it “the culmination of everything that is Hedex,” containing sounds ranging from the quintessential jump up sound we know him for to liquid and jungly sounds.
We had the opportunity to grab Hedex for a chat and talk about everything that’s happening.
Congratulations on your debut album! Why did you feel like now was the right time?
I’d released what I consider as LPs before this, but they didn’t have the whole campaign and aesthetic behind them. We’ve been building up to it for a while now, and this was the right time to release an album. When we first came up with “My Home is the Rave,” we were just thinking of things we could use for visuals, and this was the first one we came up with, it resonated with me. After we did the first show, a lot of people were taking photos of this visual, so it started to resonate with other people.
What makes you feel at home in the rave?
It’s been my only constant for the last 15 years now. When things in my life have not stuck around, music has been the thing that’s always been there for me. When I started making music, it was the only way I could explain myself without words. I first heard drum & bass when I was in a science class in year seven, I would have been 12. The older kids were playing High Contrast ‘If We Ever’ and I was blown away by the drums, the synth, the keys, all of it. I went home and started exploring the genre, and I never looked back.
Since discovering drum & bass, I feel like the sound has changed a million times. So many people come and go, and there are so many corners of drum & bass to explore. The internet has connected us all and social media now allows you to see things that you wouldn’t see. You get recommended videos and that in turn allows people to find new styles.
Talking about videos on the internet, you’ve really mastered the TikTok game.
Thank you, there never has been a strategy behind it. I just wanted to show up as myself. People might think that all we do is think about social media, but the generation that I’m from, we’ve grown up with the growth of social media. It’s gone from MySpace to Facebook to all of these other websites… It’s always been something that I felt was important. McDonald’s and all of these other brands are spending billions a year on marketing, so I don’t know why we don’t focus on that as well. Obviously, music is the main thing, but it’s hard to be known by the world if the world doesn’t see your art. You have to get the music to the people. I consider TikTok like a gallery. You don’t just sit and have it hanging on your wall, but you put it in the best gallery possible, so that people can see it.
Another way you’re showing yourself, is with your documentary “My Home Is The Rave”. When did you decide that you wanted to make a documentary?
That’s a good question. I think I’d always wanted to make a documentary. I always knew that one day, we’d use this footage that we’d been filming three years for. I feel like the documentary portrayed the life of a DJ quite well and that was the main idea behind it all. We premiered the documentary all over the UK in 2024, because the album was meant to come out then as well. But anyone who knows me, knows I’m a crazy perfectionist. So every time I thought the album was done, I changed some stuff up. The same thing happened with the documentary, there’s three versions of it where we stopped filming and were ready to finish it, and then something crazy happened so we carried on filming, and then something else crazy happened and we carried on filming…
I’m happy with how the documentary turned out, because it opened up a lot of conversations.
At the premiere tour, I had people come up to me that were saying, “Well, I don’t necessarily like your music but I wanted to see what this was about and now I’ve got a crazy respect for you,” and I was thinking, that’s mental. And there were other people that had been fans for ages, it allowed them to truly understand who Hedex was. It was really cool because I got to meet so many people.
On your album, we can hear a lot of different sounds that people might expect from you. What was the creative process behind it?
It was my first time creating an album where I sat down and wrote a proper aesthetic. When you go through your whole life with the rave as your home, you’re constantly making rave bangers, I’m just in that mindset. With the album, I was allowed to sit down and create these other pieces. I’ve always loved making other music, and this felt like the right place to do it, to show that side of myself. My collaboration with Maverick Sabre is getting a lot of love, for example, and I’m reaching a new audience with this music, which is really nice to see.
Where did you get your inspiration from?
I’ve got a list of 10 songs that I was listening to on repeat while creating the album, and it’s such an eclectic mix. You’ve got everything from ‘OK Time for Plan B’ by Enter Shikari, to The Smiths, Thursday, and even some Playboi Carti. I’m into all kinds of music, but drum & bass is my passion, it’s what burns inside me. It’s what I always come back to. I think it’s because it’s so wide as well, and that’s what draws people to the genre. Regardless of what people say about me, whether I’ve ruined drum & bass or whatever, there’s always going to be those other corners full of amazing beautiful underground music, whether it’s hard or soft. I think that’s what is so incredible about drum & bass for me. It’s a genre that knows no bounds.
There are quite a lot of collaborations on your album. Can you tell me more about those, and why you chose to work with these artists in particular?
Yeah, there are a lot of them on the album. I really look up to these artists, and I like what they do. A lot of collaborations come from the fact that I like that person. For example, you’ve got Sullivan King, a lovely guy, crazy music. Why would I not want to make a tune with him? He’s a legend. But you’ve also got people like FindMyName on the album, who people might not know about yet. I’m a massive Enter Shikari fan from way back, when Take To The Skies came out, with ‘Jonny Sniper’, so I’m stoked to have Rou Reynolds on this album. The Maverick Sabre collaboration is another one I’m so proud of, I’m such a big fan. To be able to work with these people allows me to step out of my comfort zone. When you’re working with other people, you learn a lot from them.
The album is a culmination of the entire time of Hedex. When I say “My Home Is The Rave” it’s not always just jump up, and that allows me to explore the other subgenres. The album in itself is like a show, it’s meant to take you on a journey. If you listen to it from track 1 to 17, hopefully you get the live experience that you’d get if you went and saw Hedex. This is an album you can listen to in the morning, afternoon, evening, or night. Your home is the rave, so with this album you can take your home with you.
Any last thoughts?
People are really taking in the album and I’m very very grateful. I’ve dedicated my heart to it and lost my mind in the process of doing this. The album as a whole means so much to me, it’s like sharing your home with your listeners, inviting people in to live in it. You really get every side of me.
