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Ten years ago, if you’d asked the average electronic music fan where the next wave of innovation in electronic music was likely to originate, they might have suggested London, pointing to the myriad variations of future-facing, bass-heavy music that emerged from dubstep’s smoky haze in the late ’00s. These days, though, you’re far more likely to hear new sounds coming out of the clubs of South Africa than a sweaty basement in Shoreditch.

Over the past decade, styles like amapiano, shangaan and afrohouse have spilled out of South Africa’s townships and on to the global stage, as Durban and Cape Town have supplanted Berlin and London as the hotspots for invention and creativity in the electronic music world.

Perhaps the most influential style to come out of South Africa has been gqom, a hard-hitting, minimal take on house music that substitutes that genre’s predictable 4/4 pulse for a syncopated, asymmetrical The South African gqom trio on dream collaborations and their love of FL Studio thump, typically anchored by wall-shaking bass and adorned with synths and samples spliced together in FL Studio.

“Percussion and bass. Those are the elements that make gqom music,” Omagoqa tell us when we ask what makes their tracks tick. Hailing from Durban, Omagoqa is made up of Ma_A (Andile Mazibuko), KB (Franco Makhathini) and Chase (Njabulo Sibiya), three producers that specialise in what they’re calling ‘uThayela’, a raw, invigorating take on the genre that translates literally as ‘corrugated iron’.