Hard Dance

Hard Dance is an electronic dance genre mixing influences from Eurodance, hard house, hard trance, and hardcore. Hard dance incorporates strong synths, percussion and echo effects from Eurodance and a lot of pitched up trance music and is generally regarded as happier sounding music. Hard dance is distinct and separate from hardstyle or reverse bass which typically consists of a deep, hard-sounding kick drum, intense faded or reversed basslines accompanying the beat, a dissonant synth melody, and detuned and distorted sounds.

The color associated with this genre for Monstercat is green.

Commonly Referenced Subgenres:

• Hardcore: typically faster than hardstyle, ranging from 160 - 200+ BPM. Hardcore songs usually have less distorted and more compressed kicks than hardstyle. Hardcore songs, such as Rock the House and The Pressure, have been mislabeled as Hard Dance when in reality they are actually hardcore.
• Eurodance: often carries a positive, upbeat attitude; the lyrics usually involve issues of love and peace, dancing and partying, or expressing and overcoming difficult emotions. The early to mid-1990s Eurodance vocals were frequently done by a solo vocalist or a mixed rapper-vocalist duet. Sometimes non-rap vocals are used. Almost all Eurodance emphasizes percussion and rhythm. The tempo is typically around 140 beats per minute but may vary from 110 to 150.
• Hardstyle: consists of an overdriven and hard-sounding kick drum with a lot of sustain, with intense faded or reversed basslines accompanying the beat. Hardstyle also utilises harsh and distorted synths, detuned and distorted sounds accompanying the main instruments along with a lot of poetry and story telling within the music.
• Dubstyle: tends to have reversed wobble basslines and take the kick styling of hardstyle tracks, while combining them with the rhythm, groove, and dubstep tempo and effects a fusion of elements of hardstyle with a dubstep rhythm, usually a 2-step or a breakstep rhythm.
• Euphoric hardstyle: characterized by highly emotional melodies and heavy pitch-shifting of kicks.
• Rawstyle: a type of hardstyle influenced from hardcore or older hardstyle resulting in darker melodies, screeches and deeper-sounding kick drums.
• Happy Hardcore: typified by a very fast tempo (usually around 160–190 BPM), often coupled with solo vocals or sentimental lyrics. Its characteristically 4/4 beat happy sound distinguishes it from most other forms of hardcore, which tend to be darker.
• Freeform: A subgenre of Hardcore which used to be known as Trancecore. It sits within a BPM range of 140-160, and can be boiled down to a hybrid between Trance & Hardcore. There is a new, derivative form of the subgenre known as Psycore, which is a combination of Psytrance & Hardcore (See the Trance article for a description of Psycore).
• Gabber: characterized by its bass drum sound. Essentially, it comes from taking a normal synthesized bass drum and over-driving it heavily.
• Powerstomp:
• UK Hardcore: a characteristically harder style by its "hicker harsher bassline, as well as less of the breakbeat associated with the happy hardcore music of the 1990s.

Trivia

• Hard Dance began being posted in every 3-4 monthly Monstercat album as of 028 Uproar, due to Stonebank producing this genre more often. It began appearing even more since 030 - Finale, because of Hard Dance artists Darren Styles, Gammer, Kayzo, and others.
• The start of 2015, 2016, 2017 & 2018 began with a Hard Dance song. In 2017, nanobii, instead of a 3rd Stonebank song in 2015, 2016 & 2018, returned to Monstercat with Chipland. 2018 was Sky is Falling by Stonebank And Darren Styles (featuring Emel). 2019 became The Government.
• Since Sky is Falling was the first release of 2018, that means that a Hard dance song was the first ever and founding release of Monstercat: Uncaged and the fourth streak of a Hard Dance song in a starting year.