It’s not like Zach Bruce, known to the world as UK garage maestro Interplanetary Criminal, hasn’t had big years before. This is the man, after all, who scored a UK No.1 (and a DJ Mag Best of British Award) with one of the decade’s biggest earworms, ‘B.O.T.A.’ with Eliza Rose. But as a DJ, 2025 hit different. The Manchester selector played major festivals like Glastonbury and Coachella, toured everywhere from the White Isle to the Southern Hemisphere, and put on a headline show in Brixton that he calls “the highlight of my career so far”.
He credits “keeping an ear to the ground with new artists” as being vital to maintaining a fresh sound, and describes how he prefers longer sets that allow him to go deeper as well as shell down. But his ongoing accomplishments are also the result of a reset in his approach to DJing. He explains how in the wave of post-‘B.O.T.A.’ success in 2023, he “got lost in that space of [crowd] pleasing too much’ and quick mixing to satisfy the TikTok audience. “I actually played a show with KETTAMA the following year and he gave me a great piece of advice that was ‘the people don’t realise that they want that second drop’, and that was so true. So the past couple years I’ve gone back to letting the tracks breathe, long blends, no cheap thrills. For me every track is something I would scrambling for an ID in the club if I heard it.”
What’s perhaps most impressive about the rise of Interplanetary Criminal is how committed he is to his roots in the North of England and to the underground. He’s undoubtedly a superstar, but he’s using his platform to champion everything from hard house and donk classics to cutting-edge garage/tech-house crossovers. It’s this confidence that sets him apart. He’s not changing his style as the stages get bigger, he’s just bringing the rest of us with him.
Other nominees:
LTJ Bukem
Mandidextrous
Neffa-T
Shanti Celeste
