UK garage did not come back in 2026. It sped up, got meaner, and stopped waiting for a long intro. Classic two-step still lives around 128 to 135 BPM, but a lot of the records filling rooms now sit closer to 135 to 140, with bass pressure up front and arrangements short enough to work in a DJ set or a fifteen-second clip. That is the climate MESSIE is walking into with SICKER THAN SICK, a new UK garage release on HARD Recs, and the tagline she keeps repeating says the rest: it’s gonna get MESSIE.
MESSIE is Tessa Hills, the Gisborne-born producer who moved to Wellington to study Commercial Music (Music Technology) at Massey University. She came up as a drummer before the electronic work took over, and that kit background still shows in how her records move. Rhythmic detail is the point, not a garnish. Public profiles of her sound put garage, breakbeat, jungle, Jersey club, baile funk, ghetto tech and juke in the same bag, with sets that lean on bootlegs, rap, grime, early-2000s singalongs and queer club culture. SICKER THAN SICK is filed as UK garage, which fits the lane she has already been working rather than a sudden left turn.
The wider scene helps explain why a cut like this lands now. Speed garage has been one of the louder subgenre stories of the year, with producers and sample platforms reporting a sharp spike in interest, and Beatport treating UK Garage / Bassline as its own shopfront. Names such as Sammy Virji, Interplanetary Criminal, Silva Bumpa, KETTAMA and Notion have kept the swing in festival bills and headline rooms. The old markers are still there: shuffled hats, a kick that refuses to sit straight, sub weight, and vocals treated as chops or attitude rather than a ballad. What changed is patience. Modern UK garage often hits earlier and harder, then gets out.
HARD Recs is not a new address for her. In July 2026 the Los Angeles imprint put out B2B, her collaboration with Auckland producer Juni and UK grime artist sbk, catalogued as HR115. That record mixed Jersey club kick patterns with UK garage syncopation, bassline low end and confrontational bars. SICKER THAN SICK keeps her on the same label, this time under a straight UK garage tag. If B2B was the hostile club collision, this one reads as the garage record in the sequence: skippy, bass-led, built for systems that actually move air.
The resume behind the alias is already loud. Fred again.. hand-picked her to open a surprise Coroglen Tavern show in Auckland in March 2024, then flew her to Perth to open in front of about 35,000 people. She made a UK debut at Glastonbury’s Shangri-La, and the live list since then includes fabric, Boiler Room, Lollapalooza, Reading & Leeds, All Points East, Beyond The Valley and Boomtown. Her official remix of Fred again.. and Anderson .Paak’s places to be has passed five million Spotify plays. Recent originals and edits in the catalog include GIMME A BREAK, TEETH, JOY (No Slip In My Faith) and The Code, with a debut EP, ZONE THREE, on the way. Spotify has her around 57,000 monthly listeners, which is a real audience for an artist still early in the release cycle.
None of that replaces what a UK garage record has to do in the room. The genre still wins when the swing feels physical and the low end does not get polite. SICKER THAN SICK arrives while that demand is high, from an artist whose live sets already jump between UKG and harder global club rhythms, on a label that just hosted her Jersey-club and grime collision. The title does not whisper. Neither does the alias.
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What do you think of this UK garage cut from MESSIE? Drop it in the comments.
