For SHERELLE, the perfect album is one that can soundtrack all the moments of your life. “I think the sound of a good album is one that, whilst cooking or on a train journey and you’ve accidentally fallen asleep, you don’t turn it off,” she tells tQ. “A certain album can be very aggressive, or have lots of different elements – but when you listen to it when you’re all rested, then you start to pick up certain elements.”
Music has often provided an escape for the footwork and jungle DJ, and many of the albums on this list have accompanied both stress and respite. Coming from working class roots in Walthamstow, Sherelle was raised by her mother, and then her older sister when their mother was diagnosed with cancer. Going to high school in nearby Woodford, a white dominated, middle class area, she would bond with others over their love of grime, indie and R&B, and at times feel outcast as a closeted queer person of colour.
She’d work her way through a number of jobs including the tumult of retail to a more fruitful period at Reprezent Radio during her university years. But it was during her time at dance magazine Mixmag that SHERELLE would score an early career win. Her wheel up of Fixate’s high tempo remix of ‘RipGroove’ during her 2019 Boiler Room set became the stuff of legend thanks to the DJ’s insatiably riotous energy spurring on her ultra-kinetic crowd.
Off the back of that one set, SHERELLE became a go-to name to represent the underground jungle movement. She became so inundated with gig offers that she quit her job at the magazine to pursue music, as well as launch her platform Beautiful which supports Black and LBGTQ+ voices in music. But being a DJ full-time was also a poisoned chalice; in 2023, she entered a depressive episode from burnout and industry fuckery.
It was a love for unabashedly joyous music that nursed her back to health, enough to make her debut album. The breakbeat vet purposely shunned dance music in favour of more soulful cuts to create With A Vengeance, which dropped to everyone’s surprise last year. She’s dryly witty as she speaks to tQ today, waxing lyrical about the many albums that couldn’t make the list: from dance legends like Chemical Brothers and Basement Jaxx to R&B icons like Aaliyah and her gay awakening, Mariah Carey.
Now, halfway through her SHERELLELAND gig series at grassroots venues across the country, and with the BBC Radio 6 Music Festival in Greater Manchester taking place at the end of this month, she guides tQ through 13 perfect albums.
SHERELLE will broadcast from the BBC Radio 6 Music Festival in Greater Manchester, from 25 to 28 March and presents each Saturday on 6 Music from 11pm to 1am.
To begin reading her Baker’s Dozen, click ‘First Selection’ below
