Ben Hauke asks what comes after broken beat on ‘Future Bruk’
The London producer tears into the softer edges of bruk on a new ten-track album for Woop Records
Ben Hauke has a problem with broken beat. Not with the swing, the drums or the foundations of the sound, but with where some of it ended up. Too clean. Too soft. Too comfortable. Future Bruk is his attempt to mess with that.
The London producer and live musician is back with a ten-track album built around a pretty simple question: what happens if you take the DNA of bruk and push it somewhere else? Hauke’s answer moves through electro, two-step, heavy drums, bass pressure and stranger electronic corners, without losing the rhythmic looseness that made him interested in the sound in the first place.
“I knew there was something I rejected in Broken Beat. I didn’t like how soft and jazzy it was, so I thought, why not make what I wanted to hear?”
That frustration became the starting point for Future Bruk. Mark Mac’s Vintage Bruk was an influence, but Hauke wasn’t interested in recreating it. Instead, he started thinking about what a more aggressive, club-facing version of the sound could become.
The first result is FYS, released on September 17. It’s raw drums and bass with very little getting in the way. Across the rest of the album, though, Hauke keeps changing the temperature. SPOOOOKY, featuring Sheiva, gets darker and more unsettling, while No Regulation with Nigerian artist Meso-IX carries a strange balance of weight and optimism.
Then there’s No Bruk On Splice. The title comes from something painfully simple: there isn’t a bruk category on Splice. It’s funny, but it also gets at something bigger about the record. Broken beat has been around for decades, yet it can still sit awkwardly outside the neat genre boxes used to organise contemporary electronic music.
Hauke seems comfortable in that gap.
Tuned Into Happy pulls things back toward London and his own upbringing. It looks at a version of the city where being young could mean romance, excitement and violence almost simultaneously. That tension feeds naturally into a record that rarely settles into one emotional space for long.
Most of Future Bruk was made between July and December 2025. Hauke produced roughly 15 other tracks along the way before cutting everything down to ten. The final selection wasn’t about making a record that worked exclusively at 2:00 AM in a club either. Some tracks hit immediately, others make more sense when you sit with them.
“I feel the style has more room to evolve. I wanted to explore that and think about what the future of electronic music looks like to me.”
That idea feels more important than trying to decide exactly which genre each track belongs to. Hauke has spent more than a decade moving between house, techno and broken beat anyway. Outside his own productions, he plays live in King Krule’s band and has toured across the US and Europe, while his music has appeared on fabric’s Broken Beat compilation and Mount Kimbie’s fabric presents.
But Future Bruk isn’t really about looking backwards at that history. Hauke is taking a sound he loves, identifying the parts that don’t work for him anymore, and ripping them out.
The swing stays. The groove stays. Everything else is up for grabs.
Future Bruk lands this October via Woop Records. FYS is out now.
