There is a kind of music that rewards you for paying attention to it and punishes you for treating it as background noise. ANZ's All Hours is that kind of music. I tried to have it on while cooking once, early in my listening to it, and I found myself standing with a knife I wasn't using, not doing anything, just listening. Something in the production kept demanding that I stop and pay attention to whatever just happened. A snare fill that arrived slightly late, suggesting something. A chord stab borrowed from a house record that must be twenty-five years old, appearing here as if it had just been invented.
Rochelle Ang, ANZ, has been one of the best DJs in London for years before this record, and you can hear that in the production. She understands how music functions in a room. She understands the relationship between expectation and fulfilment, between tension and release, at a level that most people who make music for clubs only learn by spending years in them. All Hours is her first proper statement of work and it's one of those records where you keep having to remind yourself you're listening to a debut, because the confidence is so complete.
The Vocabulary of a London That Doesn't Publicise Itself
The London underground club scene of the last decade has produced a distinctive sound, something that draws on UK funky, on house, on garage, on the particular rhythm of the city's cultural mixing, that has started to appear in the work of a specific cluster of artists and producers, many of them connected by nights and studios and friendships in ways that outsiders don't always see. ANZ is central to that network. Her mixes have been circulating for years as objects of study among people who care about this stuff. All Hours takes all that accumulated intelligence and converts it into a record.
What's remarkable is how the record breathes. It doesn't rush. There are moments of stillness that feel intentional and courageous, moments where the production drops away and you're left with something sparse and almost vulnerable before the rhythms come back in. That structural sophistication is not common in dance music, which tends to favour constant forward momentum. ANZ understands that the pauses are part of the music. The space between events is as considered as the events themselves. That's a lesson most producers learn late if they learn it at all.
The Time-of-Day Architecture
One of the things that makes All Hours unusual as a structured listening experience is the concept behind the sequencing. Each track correlates to a time of day. That framing is not decorative. It shapes how the whole thing moves, from the tentative early energy of the opening to the fuller, deeper rhythms that arrive as the sequence develops, to the moments of introspection that follow peak intensity. The NME called it a dancefloor journey through the decades, and that captures something real, but it also understates the intimacy of the structure.
The time-of-day architecture is what allows the record to do something most dance records cannot do: justify its existence as a record rather than as a collection of singles or a mix. It gives you a reason to start at the beginning and end at the end. It gives the stillness I mentioned a function, because stillness means something different at 3am than it does at noon. ANZ built a world here, and the world has a clock in it. That is craft.
Before the Record: What Built the Foundation
ANZ's reputation before All Hours was not thin. She won DJ Mag's Breakthrough DJ award in 2020, which in that publication's context carries real weight as a measure of industry recognition among people who are close to what's actually happening in club culture. She joined BBC Radio 1's Dance Residency in March 2021, which gave her a platform to demonstrate her taste in a sustained, public way. Those are the kinds of credentials that tell you an artist has been doing the work.
But the thing that made her genuinely compelling to people in the scene before any of that institutional recognition was the music itself. "Loose In Twos (NRG)" in 2020 was the track that sharpened attention on what she was capable of as a producer. It moved through electro, through UK garage, through jungle, through UK funky, without sounding like a genre exercise. It sounded like one person's full range of listening compressed into something that functioned on a floor. That kind of track is rare because it requires the producer to trust the listener. ANZ trusted the listener.
The singles that followed, "Real Enough To Feel Good" and "You Could Be" featuring George Riley, landed support from Resident Advisor, Mixmag, DJ Mag, and Pitchfork Selects. That spread of coverage matters because those outlets address different segments of a listening public and rarely agree on the same thing. The fact that all of them responded to ANZ in the same period says something about how clear the work was.
The OTMI Label and the Infrastructure of a Scene
Understanding ANZ fully requires understanding that she is not only a DJ and producer but someone who has built infrastructure. She launched her own label, OTMI. She released a seasonal edit series that now runs to more than seventy tracks. These are not side projects. They are the machinery of a scene, the way that taste circulates and culture compounds over time.
The edit series in particular is worth dwelling on because seventy tracks is a substantial body of work that most people who follow ANZ only know about if they've been paying close attention. Each edit is a conversation with existing music, a way of demonstrating how a track could be heard differently, how its energy could be reframed or extended. It's also, practically speaking, how DJs maintain their own ears. You stay in shape by doing the work continuously, not just when you're making a record.
Launching OTMI is the move of someone who wants to build something that outlasts any individual release cycle. Labels create context. They create the expectation of a sensibility, so that when something appears on the imprint, you have a prior relationship with what it might be. ANZ is London born and was Manchester based at the time of All Hours, and the label sits between those two scenes without being wholly defined by either.
The Hiding-in-Plain-Sight Problem
The reason I said "hiding in plain sight" in the title is that ANZ has not been unknown. Music people know who she is. The issue is that music people sometimes constitute an audience that is also, paradoxically, an obstacle, because when something circulates within a scene with enough intensity, it can create the impression that it has already been widely recognised when in fact it hasn't. The wider culture hadn't fully caught up.
There's a particular unfairness in this, which is that the artists who do the work of building a scene, who play the nights, who do the mixes, who create the context, often get less credit for the culture they've helped make than the people who arrive later and are perceived as more accessible or more legible to mainstream taste. ANZ is not difficult. She is not obscure. She makes music that is immediately pleasurable and rewards repeat listening with increasing depth. That combination should be making her famous in the broadest sense of the word.
I've been putting All Hours on at the start of long working sessions and finding that it creates a particular kind of productive energy, not distraction, not background noise, but something that keeps you alert and moving without pulling you out of whatever you're doing. That's its own skill. I keep coming back to it. I will keep coming back to it.
There's a word I keep reaching for and it's generosity. ANZ makes music that gives you something. Not in the sentimental sense of a gift, but in the structural sense of a conversation where the other person is genuinely interested in your experience, where the music moves toward you as you move toward it. That quality is rarer than it sounds. I keep going back to All Hours and finding it still there, still generous, still interested.
