SHERELLE: Real Name, 160 Footwork and the 2026 Ten Pound Tour

SHERELLE is the London DJ and producer who turned 160bpm into a movement, fusing Chicago footwork, 90s jungle and hardcore into some of the most physical club sets in Britain. Per her Wikipedia entry, her full name is Sherelle Camille Thomas, and she performs mononymously as SHERELLE, stylised in all caps. If you have arrived here after hearing her name attached to a viral Boiler Room set, a surprise debut album, or a tour with a ten pound ticket cap, this is the piece that ties it all together. Below is a working DJ and producer's guide to who she is, what "160" actually means, and why she matters in 2026. The facts here were checked against current sources in August 2026.

SHERELLE at a glance

• Real name: per her Wikipedia entry, Sherelle Camille Thomas, born 3 September 1993 in London.
• Where she is from: raised in East London, in Walthamstow.
• The sound: high-speed club music at 160bpm and above, spanning footwork, jungle, drum and bass and hardcore.
• Breakthrough: a Boiler Room set in London on 7 February 2019 that went viral, passing a million views within weeks.
• Labels she runs: BEAUTIFUL, a label and project for Black and LGBT musicians, and Hooversound, co-founded with fellow DJ Naina.
• Debut album: WITH A VENGEANCE, self-released via Bandcamp on 9 April 2025.
• Big awards: DJ Mag best British DJ in 2020, BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix of the Year 2020, and DJ Mag Best of British 2025 Breakthrough Producer.
• Radio: former BBC Radio 1 resident, now on BBC Radio 6 Music from September 2023, plus Rinse FM and an NTS show with Naina.
• 2026 news: the SHERELLELAND 2026 tour, announced 21 January 2026, with a ten pound ticket-price cap in partnership with Music Venue Trust and Save Our Scene.
• Education: attended Goldsmiths, University of London, and started out on air at London station Reprezent.
• Identity: openly gay and a vocal advocate for Black and LGBTQ+ representation in electronic music.
• The fabric myth: she curated the "fabric presents SHERELLE" mix in November 2021, but there is no confirmed fabric residency.

Who is SHERELLE?

SHERELLE is a British DJ and electronic musician, born in London on 3 September 1993 and raised in East London, in Walthamstow. In the space of a few years she went from a radio presenter with a following to one of the most talked-about names in British club music, and she did it without softening the thing that made her stand out. Her sets run fast and hard, built on footwork, jungle, drum and bass and hardcore, and they hit with a physical force that translates in any room with a proper sound system.

The one-line pitch is simple. SHERELLE is the DJ who made 160bpm feel like the centre of the map rather than the far edge of it. Where a lot of dance music sits comfortably in the 120s and 130s, she planted a flag at 160 and above, and pulled a generation of listeners along with her. She is also, crucially, a builder. Alongside the DJing she runs labels, hosts radio, and has spent years pushing for better representation of Black and LGBTQ+ artists in a scene that has not always made room for them. That combination, a serious selector who is also an organiser and an advocate, is what has made her one of the defining British electronic figures of the decade.

She attended Goldsmiths, University of London, and cut her teeth in radio as a presenter at the London youth station Reprezent, where a lot of the city's broadcasting talent has passed through. She is openly gay, and representation is not a side note to her work but a stated part of the mission, something she has returned to again and again in interviews. The mononym, always in capitals, is part of the branding: SHERELLE, no surname on the flyer, the name itself doing the work.

What is SHERELLE's real name?

Per her Wikipedia entry, SHERELLE's full name is Sherelle Camille Thomas, born 3 September 1993. That is the documented, verifiable version of her name, and it is the one worth citing precisely because most editorial coverage does not use it. Search her name across the major outlets and you will find her referred to almost exclusively as SHERELLE, the mononym, with the surname left off the page. That is a deliberate branding choice, and a common one among dance artists who want the stage name to travel cleanly.

This is a pattern MNEEMO has traced across the scene, because the "what is their real name" question is one of the most common searches for any electronic act. It sits right alongside the story of Nia Archives and jungle's return to British music, another London artist whose profile is inseparable from her genre, and the tale of another producer profile: Mall Grab, whose given name sits behind a project identity in much the same way. The lesson is the same each time. The stage name is the brand, the real name is the footnote, and both are worth knowing if you want to understand how a modern DJ builds an identity.

What does "160" mean? Footwork, jungle and the 160bpm sound, explained

When people talk about SHERELLE and "160," they mean 160 beats per minute, the tempo band where her sound lives. That number has become shorthand for a whole zone of high-speed club music, and understanding it is the fastest way to understand what she does. Dazed once described her as "the DJ known for her earth-shattering 160 BPM sets," and the phrase stuck because it is accurate. This is music that moves.

The two genres at the heart of the 160 sound are footwork and jungle, and they come from different places that happen to meet at the same speed. Footwork was born in Chicago, an evolution of ghetto house and juke built for dance battles, all stuttering, chopped-up vocal samples, skittering hi-hats and rolling sub-bass, running at roughly 160bpm. Jungle came out of early-90s Britain, a breakbeat-driven fusion of hardcore, reggae soundsystem culture and sped-up funk drums, and while classic jungle sits nearer 160 to 170, it shares that same rhythmic intensity. SHERELLE frames her sound explicitly around footwork's Chicago lineage and 90s UK jungle and hardcore, and the magic is in how she welds the two traditions together into hybrids that keep a room moving without ever settling into one lane.

Here is the thing that makes 160 feel different from other fast music. Because footwork and jungle are so rhythmically dense, a listener can lock onto the track at multiple speeds at once. You can nod your head at 80, dance at 160, and let the sub-bass roll underneath at half-time, all in the same tune. That flexibility is why the sound feels both frantic and hypnotic, and why a good 160 set can hold an energy for an hour that a straight four-to-the-floor set would struggle to sustain. SHERELLE understood this early, and built her whole approach around it.

MNEEMO has spent a lot of time mapping the fast end of UK bass, from the UK soundsystem and bass culture that underpins so much of it to Bristol's bass breakout acts pushing weight over melody. The 160 world sits at the top of that spectrum, faster than most of it, and SHERELLE is the name most associated with holding the line there and making it feel essential rather than niche.

The 2019 Boiler Room set that changed everything

Every modern DJ story has an ignition point, and SHERELLE's is unusually clean. On 7 February 2019 she played a Boiler Room set in London, part of a Bass and Percs special, and it detonated. The recording passed a million views within weeks and turned a working DJ into a name overnight. It is the single clearest example of the phenomenon in recent memory, the set that let her leave everything else behind and go full-time in music.

What made it land was not a gimmick but the intensity of the selection. The set opened with "Brighter Dayz" and ran for roughly fifty minutes of jungle and footwork hybrids, a relentless, joyful barrage that captured exactly why the 160 sound is so exciting in a live room. People who had never heard footwork before watched a DJ visibly overjoyed to be playing it, and the enthusiasm was contagious. It is one of those clips that does more evangelising for a genre than any article could.

Boiler Room is central to this story, and it is worth understanding the platform itself. MNEEMO has written about how Boiler Room built a global underground platform, from a webcam taped to a warehouse wall to a worldwide institution, and about how a Boiler Room set goes viral in the first place. SHERELLE's 2019 set is the textbook case: the right artist, the right music, the right platform, at the moment it could travel furthest. The set is now a reference point, cited whenever the conversation turns to breakout moments in British dance music.

BEAUTIFUL and Hooversound: building platforms, not just a career

What separates SHERELLE from a lot of DJs who go viral is what she did next. Rather than simply ride the attention, she used it to build. She founded BEAUTIFUL, which she has described as a label and musical project for Black and LGBT musicians, an explicit attempt to open doors rather than just walk through them herself. BEAUTIFUL later partnered with the audio brand AIAIAI on an initiative for Black and LGBTQI+ artists, extending the reach of the mission beyond releases into equipment and access.

Her stance on this has been consistent and pointed. Speaking to DJ Mag for its 2020 longread "SHERELLE: force of nature," she said, "What is the point of DJing if you're not promoting other people? I'm not going up there to be a god." In the same feature she was blunt about why the work matters: "I'm very big on representation and I want people to see different facets of what it means to be Black in the electronic music industry, because there aren't enough of us." That is the philosophy that runs under everything she does, and it is why BEAUTIFUL exists at all.

The second pillar is Hooversound, the label and platform she co-founded with fellow DJ Naina. Hooversound launched with the "BS6" EP and covers roughly the 140 to 170bpm club spectrum, the fast, bass-heavy zone SHERELLE calls home, with the debut release pairing producers Hyroglifics and Sinistarr. SHERELLE and Naina also host a Hooversound radio show on NTS, which functions as a shop window for the whole aesthetic. Between BEAUTIFUL and Hooversound, she has built two distinct engines for putting other people's music into the world, which is a rarer thing than it sounds. Plenty of DJs start a label. Fewer treat it as a genuine platform for a community.

She was also, for a time, part of the 6 Figure Gang, a collective of women pushing the faster end of UK club music, which disbanded in January 2022. Taken together, the labels, the collective and the radio work paint a picture of an artist who has always thought in terms of scenes rather than solo careers.

WITH A VENGEANCE: the debut album with a backstory

For an artist so associated with the DJ booth, the album was a long time coming, and when it arrived it came with a story. WITH A VENGEANCE, SHERELLE's debut, was self-released via Bandcamp on 9 April 2025, a surprise drop that blended Chicago footwork and 90s jungle into a full-length statement. After years of mixes, EPs and other people's records, it was the first time she put her own body of work forward at album length.

The backstory explains the title. An earlier version of the record was lost when her laptop was stolen on a train to Amsterdam, a producer's nightmare, and she had to rebuild it from scratch. By her account she wrote roughly a song a day the second time around, setting short time limits on each section to force momentum, and that constraint gives the record a raw, restless energy. WITH A VENGEANCE is not a polished, over-thought debut. It is the sound of someone remaking a lost thing at speed, and the urgency is baked in.

Resident Advisor published a full review of the album, and reception across outlets was mixed, which is worth being honest about. Not every critic loved it, and the record divided opinion in the way that genuinely personal, un-focus-grouped albums often do. But the context matters. This was a self-release, put out on the artist's own terms, telling a story only she could tell. The mixed reviews do not undo what it represents, which is SHERELLE stepping out from behind the decks and committing her sound to a record with her name on the front.

Awards and status: from Essential Mix to Breakthrough Producer

The recognition has stacked up steadily. DJ Mag named SHERELLE the year's best British DJ in 2020, with Best of British recognition dating back to 2019, an early sign that the industry understood what it had. That same year she won the BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix of the Year 2020, one of the most prestigious accolades in dance music radio and a marker that put her among the format's most respected selectors.

The momentum has continued into the present. She won DJ Mag Best of British 2025 in the Breakthrough Producer category, a fitting nod given the album had just landed, and she was included in Mixmag's Top 25 Producers Who Defined 2025. Add the Dazed 100 listing back in 2019, and you have a career that has been recognised at every stage, from emerging name to established force. The Breakthrough Producer award in particular is telling, because it frames the DJ everyone already knew as a producer newly arriving, which is more or less how the album reset the conversation around her.

Radio has been a constant thread through all of it. She was a BBC Radio 1 resident up to 2021, then launched a weekly show on BBC Radio 6 Music from 16 September 2023, moving to the station where a lot of Britain's most respected music broadcasting happens. She also broadcasts on Rinse FM, alongside the NTS show with Naina. For a DJ, that spread of radio homes is its own kind of status. It means the institutions trust her to curate, week in and week out, not just to guest.

SHERELLELAND 2026: the ten pound tour and the grassroots mission

The most current chapter, and the one that says the most about her values, is SHERELLELAND 2026. On 21 January 2026 she announced the tour with a ten pound ticket-price cap, in partnership with Music Venue Trust and Save Our Scene, focused squarely on grassroots venues. In a period when ticket prices for big electronic shows have crept ever upward, capping entry at a tenner and taking the show to small rooms rather than arenas is a pointed statement about who club music is for.

The dates ran through early 2026: 27 February at Dryad Works in Sheffield, 28 February at Move in Exeter, 6 March at The Crescent in York, 7 March at Bootleg Social in Blackpool, 13 March at Lost Horizon in Bristol, and 14 March at The Old Fire Station in Bournemouth. That is a deliberately un-glamorous itinerary, a run of the kind of mid-size and small venues that form the backbone of British nightlife and that have been closing at an alarming rate. Speaking about the partnership in the tour announcement, SHERELLE said, "It's a pleasure to work with Save Our Scene. Both of us really want to support grassroots venues so much and I am looking forward to touring with them!"

This is where her story connects to a bigger and more urgent one. MNEEMO has reported at length on the pressure on grassroots venues, the economics that are squeezing small rooms out of existence, and it is the exact problem SHERELLELAND is built to push against. When an artist of her stature deliberately routes a tour through the venues most at risk and caps the price at ten pounds, it is a working intervention in a crisis, not a marketing angle. It sits alongside the wider conversation about the best London clubs in 2026 and which spaces are still standing, a live-music ecosystem that needs its biggest names to fight for the smallest rooms.

The SHERELLELAND concept is not new, and it has scaled in both directions. The live and audiovisual version has previously grown to London's Roundhouse, staged around a boxing-ring motif, a "Rumble in the Jungle" idea that turns the show into a whole world rather than a DJ set. Taking that same universe and shrinking it back down to a two hundred capacity room for a tenner is the whole point. It proves the vision works at any scale, and it puts the money and the attention where the scene needs it most.

Is SHERELLE a fabric resident? A quick myth-check

One thing worth correcting, because it circulates a lot, is the idea that SHERELLE holds a residency at fabric. There is no confirmed fabric residency. What actually exists is "fabric presents SHERELLE," a mix compilation released on 26 November 2021 as part of fabric's flagship mix series, running 27 tracks across roughly 75 minutes. It is a real and significant credit, one of the most respected mix-series slots in dance music, but it is a compilation, not a standing club residency.

The confusion is understandable. The "fabric presents" series carries the club's name so prominently that people assume an ongoing relationship, and SHERELLE's association with the London club world only reinforces the impression. If you have heard her name and fabric mentioned together, that 2021 mix is almost certainly why. For the full picture of where fabric sits in the city's nightlife, MNEEMO's guide to fabric and London's club landscape maps how the venue fits alongside its peers. The short version on SHERELLE, though, is clear: brilliant mix, no residency.

Where to hear SHERELLE next

If you want to get inside the SHERELLE sound properly, start with the 2019 Boiler Room set, which remains the single best introduction to what 160 feels like in a room. From there, the "fabric presents SHERELLE" mix is the most structured, curated statement of her taste, and WITH A VENGEANCE is the place to hear her as a producer rather than a selector. Her radio work is the low-effort way in, the BBC Radio 6 Music show, the Rinse FM broadcasts and the Hooversound show on NTS with Naina, all of which function as a rolling education in the fast, bass-heavy end of club music.

For live dates, the SHERELLELAND 2026 tour ran through the spring, and given how active she is, checking Resident Advisor or DICE for later 2026 appearances is the reliable way to catch her. She is one of those artists whose live show is genuinely different from the recordings, faster, harder and more communal, so the tour is where the whole thing makes the most sense. Whichever way in you choose, the throughline is the same. This is a DJ who believes club music should be fast, physical, inclusive and affordable, and who has spent a decade building the platforms and the pricing to prove it.

Why SHERELLE matters

SHERELLE matters because she made a case that a lot of people had stopped making, that the underground can be both uncompromising and generous at the same time. She never slowed her sound down to reach a wider room. Instead she pulled the room up to 160, and then spent the years since building labels, radio shows and a ten pound tour to make sure the people coming up behind her had somewhere to go. The viral moment was the start, not the story. The story is what she did with it, and in 2026 she is still doing it, faster than almost anyone.

Facts in this piece were checked against current sources in August 2026. If something has moved since, that is the nature of a living scene.

FAQ

What is SHERELLE's real name?

Per her Wikipedia entry, SHERELLE's full name is Sherelle Camille Thomas, born 3 September 1993. She performs mononymously as SHERELLE, always stylised in capitals. Most editorial coverage refers to her only by the stage name and leaves the surname off the page, which is a common branding choice among dance artists who want the name to travel cleanly.

How old is SHERELLE and where is she from?

SHERELLE was born on 3 September 1993, which makes her 32 as of the 2026 publish date. She was born in London and raised in East London, in Walthamstow. She attended Goldsmiths, University of London, and began her career in radio as a presenter at the London youth station Reprezent before her DJ career took off.

What genre does SHERELLE play?

SHERELLE plays high-tempo club music at 160bpm and above, spanning footwork, jungle, drum and bass and hardcore. Her signature is welding Chicago footwork together with 90s UK jungle and hardcore into fast, physical hybrids. Dazed described her as the DJ known for her earth-shattering 160 BPM sets, and that fast, bass-heavy sound is the core of her identity.

What does 160 mean in SHERELLE's music?

The 160 refers to 160 beats per minute, the tempo band where footwork and jungle-leaning club music sits, and it has become shorthand for SHERELLE's sound. Because footwork and jungle are so rhythmically dense, you can lock onto a track at several speeds at once, nodding at 80, dancing at 160 and feeling the sub roll at half-time, which is why the sound feels both frantic and hypnotic.

What made SHERELLE famous?

Her breakthrough was a Boiler Room set in London on 7 February 2019, part of a Bass and Percs special, which went viral and passed a million views within weeks. The set opened with Brighter Dayz and ran roughly fifty minutes of jungle and footwork hybrids. Its success let her leave everything else behind and go full-time in music, and it remains a reference point for viral DJ moments.

What are BEAUTIFUL and Hooversound?

BEAUTIFUL is a label and musical project SHERELLE founded to platform Black and LGBT musicians, and it later partnered with audio brand AIAIAI on an initiative for Black and LGBTQI+ artists. Hooversound is the label and radio platform she co-founded with fellow DJ Naina, covering roughly the 140 to 170bpm club spectrum, with a Hooversound show on NTS.

Does SHERELLE have an album?

Yes. Her debut album WITH A VENGEANCE was self-released via Bandcamp on 9 April 2025, blending Chicago footwork and 90s jungle. An earlier version was lost when her laptop was stolen on a train to Amsterdam, so she rebuilt it, reportedly writing roughly a song a day. Resident Advisor reviewed it, and reception across outlets was mixed.

Is SHERELLE a fabric resident?

No, there is no confirmed fabric residency. What exists is fabric presents SHERELLE, a mix compilation released on 26 November 2021 as part of fabric's flagship mix series, running 27 tracks across roughly 75 minutes. It is a significant and respected credit, but it is a one-off compilation rather than a standing club residency. If you have heard fabric linked to her name, that mix is why.

What awards has SHERELLE won?

DJ Mag named SHERELLE the year's best British DJ in 2020, with Best of British recognition dating to 2019, and she won the BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix of the Year 2020. More recently she won DJ Mag Best of British 2025 in the Breakthrough Producer category, and she was included in Mixmag's Top 25 Producers Who Defined 2025. She also appeared in the Dazed 100 in 2019.

Is SHERELLE touring in 2026?

Yes. On 21 January 2026 she announced the SHERELLELAND 2026 tour with a ten pound ticket-price cap, in partnership with Music Venue Trust and Save Our Scene, focused on grassroots venues. Dates ran from late February through mid-March across Sheffield, Exeter, York, Blackpool, Bristol and Bournemouth. For later 2026 appearances, check Resident Advisor or DICE for the current listings.