Like another of the year’s biggest pop records, Olivia Rodrigo’s You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, the second full-length from the self-proclaimed “emotional junglist” Nia Archives is an album of two halves. The first documents its protagonist falling in love at breakneck speed; the second, the whiplash of sudden heartbreak. Unlike Rodrigo, Archives didn’t grow up starring on Disney Channel, a predestined route to success, but in Bradford, cutting her teeth on early 00s pirate radio, dancehall and landfill indie.

More than most major artists, Archives has carved out her own path. After leaving home at just 16 to move into a youth hostel in Manchester, she started teaching herself to make beats; eventually, she uprooted to Hackney and studied music production, and used her student loan to fund the promotion of her self-released debut single. Since then, she’s made history as the first electronic/dance act to win a Mobo in decades (after publicly campaigning for the inclusion of dance music at the awards in 2022). With her 2024 debut album Silence Is Loud, she became the first junglist to be nominated for three Brit awards, and the first to be nominated for the Mercury prize since 1997 – before she was born.

Emotional Junglist feels like the big sister to Silence Is Loud, with a stronger sense of self and a more sophisticated record collection. Its melodies – airlifted from indie-pop and R&B and re-situated within the chaos of syncopated breakbeats – are stickier and more evolved. It’s also Archives’ first time stepping out with a full live band, and the album’s heft reflects it: you feel every bass throb, cymbal crash, and tearful swell of strings. And where Silence Is Loud paid tribute to Britpop, Emotional Junglist finds a kindred spirit in the angst-ridden indie bands of the early 00s. The ominous yet frenetic guitar riff of Around tha Bend would sound right at home in a Bloc Party song, while the breezy Dance With Me 2Nite could be mistaken for an early Arctic Monkeys cut (it’s unsurprising to see the name of Monkeys collaborator James Ford pop up in its credits). The difference, of course, is that both are underpinned by anxious rhythms that nod to the DJ decks – particularly on the former, where breathless breakbeats and a chanting melody seem to circle one another menacingly.

Those who love Archives as a no-holds barred DJ – see the heady mania of her PinkPantheress remix – may be disappointed to realise that on this record, she isn’t afraid to drop the BPM to a slow roll and wear her heart on her sleeve. Sometimes, it even feels as if she’s losing her stride, particularly on the songs that sound most traditionally like indie-pop: This Could Be… is a bouncy ditty that could be by Kate Nash; the twinkling Superlust feels so much sleepier than the desire it apparently describes. But the melancholic second half of the record provides some of Archives’ best pop songs ever. The bruised heart of Almost Always is a piercing, icy ballad reminiscent of Dido or Natalie Imbruglia, while in Lovers Grief, she blends gloomy indie rock with skittering drums beneath some of her most frank, casually devastating lyrics: “I could go to bed, but then I’ve got to get up and do this shit again.”

Alongside all the heartbreak, Emotional Junglist contains some truly sultry moments. Danger emerged from a top-secret writing camp for Rihanna, where Archives was feeling her fiery, devil-may-care contribution so much that she decided to keep it to herself. In the process, she bequeaths us with the neologism “pussy-blushing”, and the confusingly sexy combination of an X-rated nursery rhyme chorus with some of the record’s most muscular drums. Former collaborator Jorja Smith joins for the feathery R&B track Get Me Down, a musical “u up?” text that combines shimmering vocal harmonies and shuddering bass. And if Smith is the perfect collaborator for the record’s flirty first half, who else do you call but Sampha for the heartache of part two? The south London king of velvet-voiced ballads joins Archives on Tender, a piano-drenched encapsulation of the moment reality cracks a romantic fantasy.

Much has been made of Archives being a rarity in a male-dominated subculture – and she herself has claimed to be “feminising” jungle by infusing it with an emotional sensibility. But it would be reductive to think of Emotional Junglist as purely “jungle for the girls”. Instead, it’s an ambitiously expansive and quintessentially gen Z project that puts jungle in conversation with a myriad of other genres, weaving a narrative through them all. The fact she – for the most part – pulls it off so cohesively makes Archives something more like a curator, a storyteller, and, dare you say it, a pop star.

This week Aimee listened to

Anaiis – P4P
The London-based, French-Senegalese artist’s latest is a slice of rousing, sunlit neo-soul, with flutes and synths mimicking a chorus of birdsong.

• Alexis Petridis is away