GETTING WHAT SHE WANTS

Hannah Wants wanted to be a DJ from an early age. “I remember being in a club when I first started going out and looking at the DJ, thinking ‘I wanna be on the other side of the decks’,” she says. “That was that really.”

She got her first set of decks at the age of 16, and pretty much locked herself away in her bedroom until she’d taught herself how to DJ. “When I first started DJing, I played a lot of speed garage, UK garage and bassline house, so I guess it was kind of inevitable that my sound would end up bass-heavy,’ she tells DJ Mag. “I love the atmosphere and energy that bass can bring to the dancefloor.”

Emerging from her bedroom, Hannah began to play in and around her home city of Birmingham in the Midlands, building up her name. In 2010 she spent the summer in Ibiza, which – in the mythical way – acted as a springboard to further her career. “Spending that summer in Ibiza definitely gained me a lot of experience,” she says. “I also landed my first UK residency whilst playing out there, which helped me start to build my name when I returned.”

Citing the likes of bassy house heads Justin Martin and Shadow Child as influences, as well as Chris Lorenzo and Kastle, she says she’s also really feeling the sets that B-Traits is putting out on the radio at the moment. Hannah herself has a weekly show on Kiss FM, every Saturday 1-2am, which will continue throughout the summer months in between her bulging gig diary, and every month or two she records mixtapes and puts them on her Soundcloud for people to be able to download for free. “It enables me to keep people interacted with my sound, and it’s also my way of saying ‘thank you’ to everyone that listens to and supports me and my music,” she says.

Concurrently, she’s dedicated the last few years to learning production too, and she was blown away when the likes of Claude VonStroke and Justin Martin started supporting her releases. “It’s amazing!” she beams. “You work hard for years to be recognised on that kind of level, so when you finally break through it definitely feels like a great achievement.”

Listen/download her wicked DJ Mag podcast here...