It’s that time of year again… The Drum&BassArena Awards is back for another annual celebration of all things jungle, d&b and 170-ishBPM and it’s time for fans, supporters, and card-carrying crew to get involved some love.

From now until Friday October 22, you can nominate your favourites across 13 different categories: Best DJ, Best Producer, Best Newcomer, Best MC, Best Vocalist, Best Festival, Best Club Event, Best Track, Best Remix, Best Artwork, Best Label, Best Newcomer Label, Best Newcomer Label, Best Live Streamed Set

As it’s the first round of the voting process, nominations are open to literally everyone and the top 10 nominations in each category will then go through to the second round of voting later this month. The results will then be revealed and winners will be interviewed in the online show co-hosted by UKF.com editor Dave Columbo Jenkins in early December.

It’s a really interesting year for the awards as 2021 has been very much a game of two halves: a bewilderingly bleak lockdown for the first half and an ecstatically vibey second half when all restrictions were lifted in the UK, US and many parts of Europe. This means the Best Event category will be a very hot contender, but there are still remants of covid in the categories as the award for the Best Streamed Set is still included this year.

Musically, it’s been a fantastic year for both club bangers and forward-thinking albums as artists start to unleash the fruits of their lockdowns. Diversity-wise drum & bass has become more increasingly vibrant and healthy this year. And also globally, it’s been a great year with more international D&B acts making serious waves than previous. New Zealand especially.

As always, the awards takes a while to warm up. Artists and brands play it cool and pretend they don’t care. Fans seem to sleep on this round and then start moaning when they see the nominations come through. Standard procedure. But this the most critical round in the process and those who make the most noise now have a great chance of going against the big established names and brands in the second round.

Whether you decide to play it cool or get stuck in and vote / start asking your supporters for votes is up to you, the Drum&BassArena Awards is happening and – due to how we’ve come out of one of the weirdest eras any of us have ever experienced – it’s going to be one of the most interesting sets of results the awards has seen to date.

Let’s make some noise and get involved. We have until October 22.