House Music Subgenres, Explained Without the Snobbery

House music has been splitting into subgenres for forty years, and most of the names were invented by record shops and journalists rather than by the people making the music. That does not make them useless. Each label points at a real set of production choices. Here is what those choices are, without pretending the boundaries are sharper than they are.

The common ancestor

All of it traces back to Chicago in the early 1980s, and to DJs — Frankie Knuckles most prominently — who were extending and re-editing disco records for crowds that wanted them longer. The defining elements were set early: a four-to-the-floor kick at roughly 118 to 128 BPM, an open hi-hat on the offbeat, and a bassline with more swing than a rock bassline. Almost everything below is a variation on that skeleton.

Deep house

Deep house keeps the skeleton and softens everything on top of it. Kicks are rounded rather than punchy, chords are jazz-derived seventh and ninth voicings, and the overall register sits lower and warmer. Vocals, when present, are usually sung rather than chopped.

The word "deep" has been abused badly — for a while in the 2010s it was attached to any pop remix with a muted piano chord — but the original meaning is fairly precise: harmonic complexity, restrained percussion, and a mix that leaves space.

Tech house

Tech house is what happens when house rhythm meets techno's sound design. You keep the swing and the bassline-driven groove of house, and you borrow techno's dry percussion, sparse arrangement and preference for tools over songs.

In practice, tech house is the most club-functional strain: tight low end, minimal harmonic content, and a structure built for long mixing. It is also the strain that gets criticised most often for sounding formulaic, which is a fair complaint when producers copy the formula and an unfair one when they use it well.

Soulful and gospel house

This is the strain that never let go of the vocal. Full song structures, live-sounding keys, real chord progressions, and singers with actual range. The rhythm section stays supportive rather than dominant.

Soulful house has a devoted audience that overlaps very little with the tech house audience, which tells you something about how much the vocal changes the function of the music. You dance differently to a song than to a tool.

Afro house

Afro house has become one of the most influential strains of the last decade, and the name covers a lot of ground — South African, Angolan, Nigerian and diaspora traditions all feed into it. What unites the records is percussion: layered hand drums, polyrhythms that run against the four-to-the-floor rather than reinforcing it, and a groove that pulls sideways as much as forward.

Harmonically it can be sparse or lush. Rhythmically it is almost always more complex than European house, and that complexity is the point.

Progressive house

Progressive house is defined by structure rather than sound. Tracks are long, build slowly, and are arranged as a single continuous rise rather than a loop with variations. Breakdowns are extended, and the payoff is deliberately delayed.

It moved from clubs to festival main stages in the 2000s and its reputation suffered from association with the most formulaic end of that world. The underlying idea — patience, and a track that goes somewhere over eight minutes — remains sound.

How to use these labels

Treat them as directions, not addresses. A record can be deep and Afro at once; a tech house track with a great vocal is a soulful record with a dry mix. When you are digging for music, the labels are most useful as a starting filter and least useful as an argument.

If you want a practical way in: pick one subgenre, listen to ten records from it in a row, and pay attention to what stays constant. That constant is the actual definition. Everything else is marketing.