It’s why I make music,“ says Holland after dropping her exclusive remix of ‘Unforgettable Runway’ for East London duo Super Drama, due out in 2020. When people enjoy your tracks with that kind of energy, it’s fucking amazing. There’s an electricity you just don’t get with other crowds, a fabulous chaos that allows people to let go. Harnessed bodies and hunks in leather chaps and cowboy hats pass poppers beneath dangling foliage in a glassed conservatory like a homoerotic Eden. In the smoking area art students in shopping carts and a topless woman dressed only in fishnets mingle with muscle-bound bears en route to the notorious dark room. Physics teachers bump hips with off-duty drag queens and models straight from Fashion Week, while sweat-drenched bodies writhe from the toilet cubicles to the heaving dancefloors.
The Cause and adjoining space Grow are united by a sexually charged, lawless hedonism. They come to live their best lives and dance like they don’t give a fuck.” “I’ve been to clubs where you feel on edge before you’ve even got in I wasn’t going to let that happen at Adonis,” he explains. Shay puts inclusivity and a desire to throw unpretentious off-grid parties at the forefront. Combine that with Gideön ( NYC Downlow, Block9 founder and DJ), who also acts as co-curator and Adonis’s in-house queer music pioneer, and it’s no surprise it’s getting so much hype. With a pummeling and progressive sonic aesthetic fuelled by DJ and creator Shay Malt, past events have included under-the-radar sets from lauded selectors Daniel Avery and Saoirse as well as Berghain/Panorama Bar veterans Roi Perez and Tama Sumo. Read this next: Queer the dancefloor: How electronic music evolved by re-embracing its radical roots At a time where many London clubs feel either over-policed or strangely segregated and the soundtrack of queer dancefloors for so long has been industrial-scale cheese, what Adonis offers up is the antidote. Unapologetically dark, debauched and banging, Adonis is breathing life into the new-gen underground club scene for a multitude of reasons. The room is at boiling point, but Adonis’s second birthday is just getting started.Ī converted mechanic’s workshop in the depths of London’s down-at-heel Tottenham might seem like an unlikely birthplace for a queer underground clubbing renaissance, but from the moment Adonis kicked open the doors of The Cause in 2017, it was clear that something very special was bubbling.
Front and centre, Adonis resident Hannah Holland tears into her 1:AM set with Fold’s feverish track ‘Bend Sinister’ while dancers climb and claw at the cage that surrounds the DJ booth. Blood red lasers cut lines across a sea of sweat-soaked bodies that jack and undulate in a thick, humid haze.