Bickering over genre definitions is a time-honoured tradition in dance music. One of the weirder etymological developments of recent years is the changing meaning of the word “club”. There’s the familiar noun, obviously: the place where we go to dance. There’s the verb: you club, I club, we all go clubbing. But as a genre? Well, there’s club music — and there’s club. (Already the word is becoming surreal, like words always do when you stare at them too long.) It’s a concept that’s worth unpacking: within those four letters is a modern story encompassing technology, race, class, and globalisation.

In the UK, a soundsystem culture stretching back to the Windrush generation has been the motor of dancefloor innovation for decades, audible in every major stylistic shift from jungle and rave through grime and dubstep. But in the last decade, many elements of that culture — particularly the underground ecosystem of pirate radio, dubplates, record shops, and raves — have faded away, usurped by digital technology.

In their place, club culture has moved online, drawing from scenes and styles around the world as it’s sucked into the fast-moving currents of global exchange. New genres are still emerging: not in a linear fashion, in the manner dubbed the hardcore continuum in the early ’00s, but through new, horizontal connections across geography and history, assisted by the internet’s ability to flatten time and space into an endless, hyperlinked soup. What’s coming out the other end right now is a sound that we seem to be calling “club”.

As a genre, club is both specific and vague. Club is not house or techno, though it might include elements of both. There might be breaks, but it’s not drum & bass. It’s intimately related to another vague non-genre, “bass”. The word club tries to capture the cross-pollination of previously hyperlocal sounds as they make their way across continents and back again, but in clumping those disparate sounds together, the cultural specificities that gave rise to each style can become blurred or forgotten.

Club isn’t a genre in itself, but if we try to imagine “UK club” as something distinct, it seems to be an outgrowth of soundsystem culture that looks sideways rather than forwards, listening out for shocking new sounds to splice into its vision.