Good Strife: How dance music swapped pleasure for for pain

Think of your favourite dance tracks and chances are they're mostly about the whomp-whomps rather than the sob-sobs. During house music's genesis in the late-80s and 90s, its vocal anthems were stuffed with platitudes about going higher and being loved-up on the dancefloor, setting a rich tradition of rousing hooks and deep, sensual grooves. It's always been about celebration and getting off.

But fast forward to 2015 and, while we might be inundated with 90s-esque piano house tracks about "my love and my touch", loads of our favourite producers have been giving our heartstrings a big ol' yank. Caribou, Flying Lotus and Mr G have all turned out the tearjerkers and released albums that should have come with an advisory sticker saying: "Warning, contains lots of feelings." Sad bangers are everywhere; at home under the covers as well as blaring out of the main room speakers at 3am on a Friday.

Techno don Mr G sought solace in the studio after the loss of his father, which resulted in his third album, 'Personal Momentz'. "People told me to sort my shit out, so I went up to the studio one night with a bottle of rum and tried to find my feet and my flow," he told Mixmag in a recent Q&A. "I took a week off, then listened to what I'd made – and it blew my mind a bit." Rather than cranking out thumpers, he realised he had adopted more of an intuitive, songwriter's approach. "It was the first time I could hear a thread between each track; elements that related to each other," he continued. "I'd never done something in such an intense time period before."

'Personal Momentz' is a reflective record. On the most straightforwardly-titled tribute to his father, 'DAD', a gentle piano riff mourns over a belting kick drum and, testament to G's dark comic streak, the voice of a comedian lambasting the price of funerals. "This was different, and I'm so happy people get it," he said of his latest direction, "I was worried people would find it too self-indulgent."

He has a point about self-indulgence. Traditionally, dance music is made for other people, so that those on the dancefloor can transfer their own meaning onto a catchy refrain and gain some sort of release during its climax. Dance music that's deeply personal, however, often becomes dual purpose. The first time I heard Caribou's 'Can't Do Without You', I didn't want to do a fat dab and dance beneath the disco lights – I sent it, pathetically, to my ex; a torch song for our breakup. But still, its warm 4x4 crescendo and the sincere, repetitive chant of its title is equally as perfect for sundown on a boat party in Croatia.

Caribou openly talks about his relatively recent discovery of the euphoria of dance music. But he admits that it would have felt inauthentic to start pumping out the platitudes about love when his experience of it, as a father and a husband, is more complex. As a result, the feelings he emotes on recent album 'Our Love' are "complicated and difficult." He told me in a Mixmag interview last year that "It's not just some kind of *ping* pristine kind of thing that is unchanging; it's both functional and dysfunctional." It had tracks that were triggered by the death of loved ones, too. 'Julia Brightly', a driving slice of Todd Edwards-indebted garage-y house for example, was dedicated to his late sound engineer who died suddenly of cancer, offsetting the frenetic 2-step with a buzzing, almost funereal drone.

Likewise, Flying Lotus's 2014 album was haunted by death, whether his family's, his contemporaries' or his own near misses. "Wow, what about the whole journey of death and my own mortality and fears of that, and the people we lost?'" he told The Fader while contemplating the more spiritual themes for 2014's 'You're Dead!' Indeed, the way the album fizzes from free-jazz cacophony to downbeat synths and stirring psychedelia emulates, says the writer, "the voyage of the spirit after death itself."

Even Björk, high priestess of emotional outpouring, has described how her new album 'Vulnicura' is full of lyrics that are more diary-style than ever. Her last album was about the universe; this is about losing the love of her life and details her breakup with her husband painstakingly. Though not technically a dance album – if you heard it on the terrace at Space at 7am, the pained strings and Björk's about-to-crack voice would likely be enough to make you break down in tears – 'Vulnicura' is the electronic her rawest record yet. "It comes out as a healing process, because that's how I experienced it myself," she told Pitchfork.

Turns out, there is a science behind all this sadness. According to a recent report by the Free University of Berlin, melancholy music can actually be good for you: it encourages the brain to release more than three emotions and can therefore lift your spirits. In other words, pain plus more pain divided by exquisitely produced electronics equals maximum euphoria. I'm not suggesting that these artists made their latest records with that cod mathematics in mind, but it does explain how they have managed to make music that transcends the dancefloor.

Dance music, like all music really, hits harder when it's fuelled by deeper emotions. And right now it's healing for the artist and healing for the listeners, too. The next time producers like Secondcity write a song about wanting to feel, they'd do well to take note.

[ Photo credits: Lead image: bored-now/flickr/ Caribou: Tom Weatherill for Crack]