After a landmark 2026 that kicked off supporting Fatboy Slim on his Acid Ballroom Tour at Alexandra Palace and saw her handpicked by Madonna to play Club Confessions London, DJ, producer, and author Jodie Harsh returns to her core element with her new 4-track EP, The Dance Floor. Released via her own label Harsh Beats, the project distils two decades of night-time hedonism, queer club heritage, and raw dance floor euphoria into a four-chapter love letter to nightlife. Fresh off releasing her debut memoir You Had To Be There, Jodie opens up about bottling the magic of sweaty late-night rooms, taking creative cues from visionary mentors SOPHIE and William Orbit, and why the dance floor remains the ultimate space for liberation, connection, and pure escape.
How did writing your memoir, You Had To Be There, shape the sound and energy of your upcoming The Dance Floor EP?
It was like opening a very dusty, very loud filing cabinet of club memories. Going back through those early years reminded me just how many different sounds, scenes and tribes I’d encountered on all those dance floors – from sweaty little rooms to much bigger, more ridiculous nights out. I realised I didn’t want to make an EP that belonged to one particular era or genre. I wanted it to feel like the accumulated experience of all those nights: house, electro, disco.
There’s also something about remembering a night out that makes you remember the feeling of the music rather than just the track. That was the starting point for The Dance Floor – trying to bottle that feeling.
The first single, “The Night Is Yours,” asks clubbers to turn their phones off. How important was capturing that sense of pure escape for this project?
Massively. I’m not anti-phone, I’m anti-being somewhere incredible and experiencing it through a tiny rectangle. There’s something slightly tragic about standing in a brilliant club, with a brilliant DJ, surrounded by 2,000 people, and watching everyone film the same 20 seconds for clout.
Being present is one of the great luxuries of a night out. You don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, you don’t know what the DJ is going to play next. That’s part of the magic.
“The Night Is Yours” is really an invitation to put the phone away, stop documenting it, stop worrying about how it looks — dance badly, dance brilliantly, fall in love with a record, talk absolute rubbish to a stranger.
You cover the whole arc of a night out across four tracks. What specific moments from your own nights out did you take inspiration from in order to create that structure?
I’m a bit of a magpie when I’m out. I’m always listening to what’s being played, Shazaming things, asking DJs what something is, noticing when a room suddenly changes temperature because they’ve dropped the right record. So the structure came quite naturally from those experiences. There’s the anticipation at the beginning when everyone’s still relatively fresh and pretending they’re going to have a sensible night. Then you hit that point where the room locks in and nobody wants to leave. Then comes the slightly delirious, 3am bit where your relationship with reality becomes more negotiable. And finally there’s that comedown when the lights switch on and everyone suddenly looks about 14 years older. I wanted the four tracks to move through those states. It’s essentially a night out in four chapters
Both William Orbit and SOPHIE were true visionary mentors for you and leave behind such massive legacies. Reflecting on the time you spent in the studio with them, what core lessons or creative freedom did you carry into producing this new EP?
The biggest lesson from both of them was that there are no rules and no correct speed at which you have to make something. William and SOPHIE were completely themselves. They worked at their own pace, followed their own instincts and didn’t seem particularly interested in following a formula. That was incredibly liberating. I’ve tried to carry a bit of that spirit into this EP: make the record you want to make, give it room to breathe, and don’t let too many people into the room while you’re still figuring out what it is.
Moving your weekly party Feel It to XOYO brings you right back to Shoreditch. How does testing new music in front of your home crowd feed into your studio work?
Being back in Shoreditch makes Feel It even more personal because there’s so much history there for me. I’m making music for people who understand clubs, but I’m also learning from them. The dance floor is still the best A&R department in the world. Playing new music in a club gives you information you simply can’t get sitting alone in a studio. You can feel when a track changes the energy in a room, when people suddenly move differently, or when something you thought was incredible gets absolutely no reaction whatsoever. That can be humbling.
Between opening for Fatboy Slim and playing Madonna’s Club Confessions, 2026 has been a huge live year. Has playing these massive stages changed how you approach writing music?
It is a fairly good way of reminding yourself to bring your A-game. There’s nowhere to hide when you’re sharing a stage with artists you’ve listened to and respected your whole life.
Touring Europe, opening for Kylie Minogue and warming up Charli XCX’s Brat era, are major crossover moments. How do you tailor your sets when transitioning between giant pop arenas and sweaty underground clubs?
I’m a believer in not completely changing your sound depending on the size of the room. The trick is understanding what the room needs without patronising it. In an arena, you have to think about scale, impact and reaching the back row. In a small club, you can be much more mischievous. You can take a left turn, play something obscure, stretch a moment out and trust that the people right in front of you will come with you.
Peggy Gou debuted “I Feel It” at Primavera Sound. What was it like seeing a track you crafted for the club take on a life of its own on a massive festival stage?
I genuinely wasn’t expecting it! I woke up to a bunch of people tagging me in stories and realised Peggy had played it at Primavera. I was like, hang on — how did you even get this?! I hadn’t sent it to her! Peggy is the best, and watching something I made specifically with the club in mind suddenly work on that scale was pretty surreal.
As a sober, overtly queer artist in an industry often dominated by straight cis men, what message do you hope this EP sends to people looking for their own place on the dance floor?
Dance music was largely created by Black, Latin and queer communities, and I think it’s important we don’t allow that history to become footnotes while the mainstream enjoys the music. Thankfully, there will always be artists keeping that spirit and heritage alive from the underground upwards. Look at someone like Honey Dijon,for example – she’ll never let you forget where this music comes from. For me, part of being an artist is understanding the context of your craft and respecting the people who built it. I’m a scholar of the founding fathers and mothers in all my disciplines. I want to know who came before me, what they were doing, what they were fighting for and why it mattered. And when it comes to being sober, the dance floor should be a place where people can arrive as themselves whether that’s with added stimulation or not. You don’t need to fit a particular mould to belong there. You just need to find the right room.
Now that you’re running your own label, Harsh Beats, what is the most liberating part of having complete creative control?
Doing what you want is the ultimate freedom. That said, I’m not one of those artists who thinks every bit of outside input is evil – I actually respond really well to feedback from people. Harsh Beats gives me the freedom to do what I want, but I’m very open to the possibility of letting someone else pay the bills in the future.
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The Dance Floor is out now: https://linktr.ee/jodieharsh
