UK garage is having another loud year, and the bass is getting meaner. Sammy Virji packed Finsbury Park in August 2026, Interplanetary Criminal and MPH are still setting the club pace, and a lot of new UK garage is sitting closer to 135–140 BPM with reese-style bass and midrange bite instead of the round, filtered lines of the late ’90s. Into that lane walks Astro Eric with NEXT GEN, a track tagged UK garage and also filed under brostep, riddim, and tearout. The title is doing a lot of work. This is not a polite garage revival cut. It is a bass-music producer treating garage drums as a frame for heavier weight.
Astro Eric keeps the bio short. On Spotify it is simply “i make music.” On Instagram, @astroeric.music, the picture is clearer: based in Oklahoma City, working in dubstep and drum and bass, open for bookings. The catalog backs that up. Releases go back to 2023 with Inzo Inspo and Dejected Love, then a 2024 run that includes Me and You, Falling Back in Line, Enlightened Mind, and a Let You Down remix. Stand Your Ground arrived in 2025, and the project also landed on the compilation Dubs From The Den Vol. 4. Falling Back in Line and Me and You are the streaming anchors so far, each sitting in the tens of thousands of plays, with the artist page around a thousand monthly listeners.
The turning point was The Collection, a six-track EP out in June 2026 on Astro Records. Five of those tunes had already lived on SoundCloud. The new one on the EP was Runnit. In the release note, Astro Eric said the project started as a drum and bass DJ and producer, and that The Collection marked a shift into dubstep, with more dubstep tunes queued up. Bounce followed in July 2026. NEXT GEN is the next step in that 2026 run, and the genre tags show the direction: UK garage as the home, brostep, riddim, and tearout as the pressure.
That mix makes sense if you know the rooms these sounds share. UK garage still runs on shuffled hats, swung percussion, and a skip that feels like a two-step even when the bass gets ugly. Brostep is the festival-era dubstep lane: saw leads, half-time drops, and bass that is meant to be felt in the chest. Riddim strips that back to minimal, repetitive bass patterns and tight drums. Tearout pushes the same idea into distortion, screeches, and drops that barely leave room to breathe. A producer who came up on drum and bass and then moved into dubstep already has the rhythmic habits for all of that. Garage gives the track its swing. The other tags explain why it might not stay polite once the drop hits.
Locally, the sets match the catalog. Astro Eric has played upstairs at The Speak in OKC alongside other electronic DJs, opened for San Holo at the OKC Farmers Market, and turned up at Sailor and the Dock for themed nights. That is a working DJ schedule, not a studio-only alias, which matters for a track pitched at UK garage and tearout. Those genres live or die in a room. Garage needs the skip to read on a system. Riddim and tearout need the low end to stay clear when it gets loud. NEXT GEN is built for that kind of test.
The wider scene is leaving space for exactly this kind of independent cut. UK garage and bassline kept a steady release pace through 2026, with labels such as ATW Records, Time Is Now, and Pogo House still feeding DJs, while Beatport crates mixed classic two-step energy with harder speed-garage and bassline. At the same time, brostep, riddim, and tearout never really left the bass-music circuit. Producers who can move between a swung garage groove and a half-time tearout drop are useful in a set that has to cover both sides of the night. NEXT GEN sits in that overlap, from an artist who has already documented the jump from drum and bass into dubstep and is now testing garage as the next frame.
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What do you think of this UK garage and riddim crossover? Drop a comment if you want the swing, the tearout, or both.
