A new label, but steeped in old Yorkshire dance culture

Emerging from the depths of Yorkshire’s dance music underground, Moonunit is a new label run by Sara Garvey AKA Comfy Bella set to release its debut single next week.

If the name is familiar, that’s because Leeds-based Garvey was the singer in the Nightmares on Wax live band for at least a deacde. But she’s also a songwriter, DJ, producer, and event promoter whose varied CV also studio sessions with Flood, collaborations with Chris Martin, Youth and MJ Cole, and – most recently – an anthemic summer single alongside house legend Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley on Hard Times Records, the superb ‘All I Need’.

Moonunit started life many years ago as a sporadic party – an excuse for Garvey to throw occasional events rooted in dancefloor-friendly musical eclecticism featuring like-minded DJs who had previously never played in Leeds before. The inspiration to launch a spin-off label came earlier this year, when Garvey realised that the ‘secret weapon’ she’d been playing in her sets for years was in fact the work of her good friend Sy Sez, a DJ/producer best known for his regular Mi Soul Radio show, residency at London’s legendary Soul Heaven parties and previous releases on Defected and Soul Heaven Records.

That track, ‘Change The System’, opens the first Moonunit 12”. Unlike anything Sez has put out before, it recalls the breath-taking sonic weight, early morning sleaziness, soundsystem culture influences and analogue-driven headiness of early Yorkshire bleep & bass. Beginning with smoky reggae toaster samples, the track is underpinned by a raw, mind-mangling bassline inspired by LFO’s ‘LFO’ (a record co-written and co-produced by Garvey’s friend and Leeds legend Martin Williams AKA DJ Martin) and marked out by heavy percussion, clonking melodic motifs and strobe-lit, warehouse-ready intent. It’s genuinely brilliant and could easily become one of the most rave-igniting tunes of 2024.

It comes backed with a particularly personal track from Garvey as Comfy Bella – a song called ‘Knights’, which was originally inspired by the tragic murder of her brother some years ago and is (in her words) “an ode to young men and women out there in these streets”. Featuring instrumental contributions to Peven Everett and Nightmares on Wax collaborator Hamlet Luton and Kenny ‘Hurricane’ Higgins of the Haggis Horns, ‘Knights’ is deep, dusty, unflinchingly emotional, and gently musically expansive, with live, looped instrumentation and Garvey’s impeccable vocals riding hypnotic house beats.

Already being compared to the work of Detroit house masters like Kenny Dixon Jr (Moodymann), Amp Fiddler and Alton Miller, as well as Chicagoans Roy Davis Jr and Ron Trent, it offers a first snapshot of what’s to come from Garvey’s forthcoming debut album, which is set to hit the streets in 2024, along with, no doubt, more unmissable, floor-slaying vinyl from the Moonunit camp.

To pre-order your copy of the ‘Change The System’ 12″, scheduled for a January 15 release,