What is hardcore? It means many things to many people, and they’re all correct. It’s best described as a feeling, an attitude, a way of life. Dance or Die is the first critical study of city-based hard dance communities spanning three decades of musical reinvention mapped to sweeping gentrification, political intervention and seismic societal change.

From its 1990 Frankfurt techno genesis, hardcore has shattered into a myriad subgenres and discrete club tribes, but the core of hardcore has always stood for marginalised people worldwide finding family and acceptance in extremis, and in extreme sounds.

Featuring exclusive archive materials and personal anecdotes from veteran Godfathers and contemporary stars of the digital diaspora, paired with voices from trans trailblazers and heroines behind the scenes, Dance or Die is the queer, activistic, and flawed history of hardcore that has never been fully told before.

The story of hardcore begins in an industrial estate in outer Frankfurt in 1989 with a twenty-year-old hip hop head dreaming of being a rockstar, who becomes a doomsday techno prophet instead. From grisly episodic nightmares about the phuture of the planet, Dance or Die plots a dark positive route through the reinforced steel and concrete clubbing institutions of newly reunified Germany to the pre-criminalised outlaw rave movement of the early ’90s, where nosebleed sound systems reclaimed the streets, abandoned buildings and unmanned fields of Britain to party as a mode of resistance and symbol of ultimate freedom, before spiraling in exile through the warehouses and squats of Paris and Amsterdam, and the f*cking hostile wastelands of New York’s outer boroughs.

Examining the intercity axes that developed between crucible spaces and relentlessly touring DJs who sacrificed sleep and sanity for the mission; the youth subcultures that evolved in diehard tangent to the massive gabber movement in the Netherlands, and Number One’s Hardcore Warriors in North Italy; and the autonomous record distribution networks that evolved from stalls set up on the edge of London dancefloors, and from piling into vans to drive across state lines and country borders to sell enough vinyl to fill up the petrol tank, Dance or Die reveals the marrow-deep devotion that defines the global hardcore community to this day.

Riding in convoy behind the artists, promoters and fans who united across gaping sonic and social chasms in their pledge to live for the music or die, this countercultural history of hardcore navigates through the media stigmas, drug overdoses and football violence of the ’90s to the archivists and new generation who resuscitated the culture through the 2010s, whilst addressing the ideological conflict between success and selling out, and the wounding moral panics that have left permanent scars.

Hardcore isn’t for everybody, but everybody is welcome in this enduring phuture rave movement. And once you’re in, you’re in all the way, diehard and dancing to the death. Dance or Die!

“From Rotterdam gabber to Scottish ‘tartan techno’, from the industrial strength beats of Brooklyn to the hedonistic mayhem of UK hardcore, ‘Dance or Die’ explores some of the lesser-documented areas of rave culture with enthusiasm and journalistic vigour, affording them the historical significance they deserve.” Matthew Collin (author of Dream Machines, Rave On and Altered State)

“Holly Dicker‘s definitive chronicle charts the amazing, ridiculous rise of the most outrageous club music in history with a journalist’s eye and a raver’s mania.” Michaelangelo Matos (author of The Underground is Massive)

ISBN: 9781913231859
Released: 6th June 2025

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