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 album proper 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 or so 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 an album.
What's remarkable is how the album 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 seems to understand that the pauses are part of the music.
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.
