Nu Rave - The 2000s Scene That Turned Indie Kids Into Ravers

What nu rave actually was

Nu rave (you’ll also see it spelled new rave or nu-rave) was a short lived British scene that fused scratchy indie guitar bands with the visual language of late 1980s and early 1990s rave culture. Think skinny jeans and neon face paint. Distortion pedals next to glowsticks. It ran roughly from 2005 to 2008, centered on London, and it burned out almost as fast as it caught fire.

If you weren’t there for it, the confusion is understandable. Nu rave wasn’t a return to acid house or a rebooted club genre with its own production style. It was an indie rock movement that borrowed rave’s props and its energy without borrowing much of its actual sound. That gap between the label and the music is the first thing you need to understand about it.

Where the name came from

The story behind the term is stranger than most genre origin stories. Jamie Reynolds, a founding member of the band Klaxons, is widely credited with coining “new rave” as something close to a joke. He described it later as a way of getting music journalists to talk about a scene that didn’t really exist yet, a bit of mischief aimed at the UK music press rather than a serious artistic statement.

The joke worked too well. NME, the influential British weekly, picked up the phrase and ran with it through 2006 and 2007, using it as a catch all for a loose cluster of bands, club nights, and personalities that didn’t otherwise have much connecting them beyond geography and timing. NME even organized a New Rave Revolution tour in late 2006, echoing an earlier “New Rock Revolution” tag it had used for garage rock bands, sending Klaxons and acts like Shitdisco and Datarock out to play for students across the UK. By 2008, the same publication was declaring new rave over, a fittingly abrupt end for a trend it had helped inflate.

Reynolds and his bandmates spent a fair amount of energy insisting they weren’t actually a new rave band, which tells you something about how loosely the term ever applied to any single act.

The sound and the scene it grew from

Musically, nu rave sat at the crossing point of indie rock, dance punk, and electronica. Critics at the time described it as a noisy, DIY answer to the more introspective indie rock coming out of bands like Bloc Party, something built for jumping around a sweaty room rather than nodding along thoughtfully. Guitars, synths, and four to the floor rhythms sat together without much concern for genre purity.

That sound didn’t come from nowhere. Much of the scene’s DNA traces back to earlier London club nights built around electroclash, a genre that had already mixed synth pop nostalgia with a knowing, theatrical attitude. Nag Nag Nag, a weekly night founded in 2002 by DJ and musician Jonny Slut, was one of the key gathering points. Reynolds was a regular there, and the crossover between that crowd and the emerging Klaxons sound helped set the template that NME later slapped a new label on.

Klaxons became the scene’s most visible band almost by accident of timing. Their debut album, released in early 2007, was a dense, science fiction inflected record drawing on writers like J.G. Ballard and William Burroughs for its imagery and song titles, hardly the sound of a novelty rave revival. It went on to win a major UK album prize later that year, beating out more critically fashionable competition, and that win did more to legitimize the scene in the mainstream press than any club night could have.

Beyond Klaxons, the scene included bands like New Young Pony Club, Late of the Pier, Trash Fashion, and Hadouken!, each pulling the sound in slightly different directions, from art school dance punk to something closer to actual electronic music with rapped vocals layered on top.

The look: how you knew it was nu rave

If the music was genuinely varied, the fashion was the part everyone actually agreed on. Nu rave style pulled directly from the visual grammar of early rave culture and turned up the saturation. Glowsticks, whistles, and fluorescent clothing that had once signaled all night warehouse parties got repurposed as everyday streetwear for a much younger, more fashion conscious crowd.

The look leaned hard on American Apparel style metallic and lame leggings, oversized t-shirts printed with bold slogans and cartoonish graphics, and wayfarer style sunglasses in neon tints. Paired with glowsticks and the odd bit of LED accessory, it read as costume as much as clothing, which was part of the point. This was rave imagery quoted with a wink rather than lived exactly as it had been the first time around.

That visibility is a big part of why the scene had such an outsized cultural footprint relative to how few bands actually belonged to it. By 2007, high street retailers had absorbed the look wholesale, turning what started as a small London subculture into a codified, mass produced aesthetic. Once a subculture’s signature look is available at the mall, its underground shelf life is usually already over.

Common misconceptions worth clearing up

The biggest misunderstanding is treating nu rave as a genuine rave music revival. It wasn’t techno, it wasn’t acid house, and the DJs and producers who actually built those genres in the late 1980s and early 1990s mostly had nothing to do with it. Nu rave borrowed rave’s aesthetic surface, the colors, the accessories, the sense of unruly celebration, and grafted it onto guitar based indie music instead.

It’s also worth separating nu rave from the deliberately ironic, self aware “joke” that its own originators described. The scene existed and had real cultural weight for a couple of years, even if the people at its center were uncomfortable being defined by a name they half invented as a prank on journalists.

Finally, don’t confuse the era’s fashion revival with the music itself lasting. The neon aesthetic outlived the bands. You can still see its fingerprints in later 2010s and 2020s fashion cycles that reference 2000s indie style, even though almost none of the original nu rave bands remained active or relevant much past 2008 or 2009.

FAQ

Was nu rave a real music genre? It functioned more as a media label for a scene than a tightly defined musical genre. The bands grouped under it shared indie rock roots, a taste for dance punk energy, and a visual style, but their actual sound varied a lot from band to band.

Who started nu rave? No single person started it as a movement. Jamie Reynolds of Klaxons is credited with coining the term, largely as a joke aimed at music journalists, and NME popularized it through heavy coverage in 2006 and 2007.

How long did nu rave last? Most accounts place its active window between roughly 2005 and 2008, with NME itself declaring the trend over by 2008.

Is nu rave connected to actual 1990s rave culture? Only aesthetically. It borrowed rave’s visual signifiers, glowsticks, whistles, neon clothing, without reviving the acid house or techno sound that defined the original rave scene.