Hi, Who are you?
PullUp Recordings, founded by Sam Southan & John Lewis (yes, like the shop!)
What’s your ethos?
I think a guiding ethos for us is to always be friendly and accessible.
I think it’s seen as “cool” to be inaccessible and mysterious and brooding, so a lot of people act up and try to be nonchalant, but that’s not really us. When we started in music we met a lot of people who were stand-off-ish and not interested in us because we weren’t a certain size brand or whatever and that can actually knock your confidence a lot when you’re 18/19. And equally if we met someone who was really sound you’d remember that chat for ages and it would be so motivating.
So we’ve always said to ourselves and our artists, as we start to get some momentum, let’s make sure we always try to have that positive impact on the people around us. Obviously it’s not always possible, you can’t answer every DM and sometimes you can’t stop for a chat at an event if there’s time pressure, but if we can we’ll always be on the front door saying hello to people and keeping ourselves open to our community. We want to know the people that are coming to our events and streaming our music, I’ve never really understood why people don’t want to. It’s important to hear feedback.
Tell us your origin story?
The brand started, as all good brands do, as a series of kitchen, flat and house parties that eventually spat into a club night and naturally evolved from there. There’s always been a crowd and community around PullUp – some of the originals are still here but there’s also a hell of a lot of new members in our community too. It’s really grown from this like fun little idea where 100 or so mates were meeting up in a club to listen to music they liked, not really about headliners or anything just genres, into this like shared online and in person space where people interested in good parties and good music are connecting and enjoying their shared interests together
Tell us about your local scene…
Cardiff, South Wales – there’s a great dance scene with so much history. Human Traffic’s set here, acts like High Contrast and legendary drum & bass outfitters Concrete Junglists. Down the road the infamous Escape Swansea the award winning trance and hard core club and eventually music festival, that John and I were lucky enough to work on in its later years. South Wales has been a hub for dance music acts, events and raves for decades.
We grew up hearing the stories of these institutions, but for us really the come up was during the time of Buffalo, Kongs, Undertone, Vaults (a former bank vault) and Frontal Lobe Warehouse, the free running warehouse that had raves at night – floors were made of trampolines, crazy gaff.
Promoters and labels like Bedlam, Dazed, Sticky Lemons & Shangri-La were on the circuit at that time. Standouts for me during that era were Incurzion, a minimal and 140 label from Penarth, and Canopy, the drum & bass and jungle night that dominated Cardiff for years and went on to be instrumental to the rise of DNB Allstars. Aperture run by the team behind Concrete Junglists was pretty much the gateway to the underground for years in Cardiff.
Nowadays, Cardiff looks a bit different – the landscape’s changed and we’ve lost a lot of venues. There’s still a thriving dance music scene though, but people just have to do things a little differently. Promoters and labels like Calypso Sounds, YGM Collective, Hidden Records, 166, CUE, Shift are on the scene now – District, Vaults, Jacobs Rooftop, Paradise Garden and Six Feet Under are some of the regular clubs. MASH stand out as a group of young guys who’ve made it work with limited venues. The music landscape’s a lot more media focused now too – TenToezTV, Radar Mag & Silk Crayon are some of the media brands that are amplifying Welsh music and voices.
So, in short, there’s absolutely loads going on here.
Do you have a specific sound or vibe?
It’s interesting really, it’s never been genre bound, it’s just always been what we’re feeling at the time as a team. I think our music taste has really changed these last 5 years and the label’s journey probably reflects us all growing up from teenagers to where we are now as mid 20 year olds.
It’s really just “party music” I’d say. We have quite an open discography and a lot of multi-genre artists on the roster. The brand’s always ultimately been focused around promoting good parties and we release music that would fit in at those parties. That said, a lot of the BSEARL album is more emotional dance music rather than party music per se, but I feel like all the records he’s producing still really fits our daily life.
Maybe our sound’s more “soundtracking our life”, not sure. But, it’s definitely something to do with sound tracking what PullUp and the group of mates behind it are up to, and that, like the music, is ever evolving and developing.
Who can we see releasing with you?
BSEARL & SEMPA are definitely our front runners for releases currently, having both been with us for some time, but we try and work with artists from all walks and areas as much as possible
Tell us about your A&R process…
If it sounds good and we can see the vision of the track naturally, that’s usually the first indicator that we will want to develop that into a project and work with that artist in the long-term. We’re typically more focused on projects like EP’s than singles, PullUp is a bit more of a 360 offer with the events and festival and media support, so developing an artist project over a while as opposed to a one off swing at a single is normally our preference.
What makes you different from other labels?
We’re definitely quite far from any organised or corporate structure! We are just a big group of mates, in all honesty. We have our “Big Fat Mondays” which is our big weekly meeting, but other than that really we’re just a group going to the gym, the pub, on holiday, to festivals all together.
We definitely can drum up a lot of organic support and interest as a label because we’re just an active group that’s constantly listening to our music in the car, showing new people, playing it at shows etc, so I guess genuine, grassroots, word of mouth interest in our music is probably the unique thing we bring.
What does it take to run a bass music label in 2026?
The role of labels is changing – customers want to hear directly from their favourite artists about new music and projects, I do think the days of listeners being a die hard label fan and listening to only what one label puts out has changed. Or certainly mostly, I think labels like EC2A still do a really good job of providing that old school label experience.
But for 90% of labels I think our role has moved into this more behind the scenes role where we handle the nitty gritty and the boring bits and give the artist time to be creative and shine naturally. If you want a crash course guide, I guess it’s work with a good distributor, have a solid schedule and process, strong media and social presence helps – and good, creative ideas for getting your music to new ear drums and eye balls.
What have you got coming up we should look out for?
BSEARL’s ‘NO MORE PAIN X+</3’ debut album just dropped, and has been received so well, couldn’t have asked for a better response to a project which has taken up a lot of man power and dedication by our team, but mainly Brandon himself over the last 15 months.
We’ve got a new single from SEMPA coming out March 26 called ‘REDUNDANT’, a chunky, 140 piece, which really develops on his darker sound this year and slowly cementing his name into the 140/Dubstep crowd.
We’ve also just launched ‘Production Line’, an Apple Mix Series, based out of ‘Industry Ink’, our amazing Merchandise Distributor in Cardiff, really cool location with workers and machines in the background, we kicked it off with Hans Glader, one of our favourite artists coming out of the states currently and we’ll be releasing them weekly, so keep an eye out for those.
Follow PullUp Recordings: Website / Instagram / TikTok
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