You do not need a genre glossary to dance. But if Pandemonium is your first contact with this music, a map helps, because the set is the stranger and the stranger has a family tree.
Post-punk, the root
Late-1970s Britain took punk's urgency and traded the shouting for space: bass carrying the melody, guitars scraping instead of soloing, drums played like machines before the machines arrived. Joy Division is the reference everyone gives because it is the right one. Post-punk is the root system under everything else on our floor. When Scandamile Mercury plays, this is the soil you are standing in: tension, repetition, and a groove that refuses to resolve.
Darkwave, the atmosphere
Darkwave is what happened when post-punk met the synthesizer and kept the gloom. Colder, more melodic, more spacious: synth lines like weather, vocals from the next room, drum machines that tick like clocks in an empty house. It is dance music in the way candlelight is lighting. drunkgiantbird works this seam, folded with shoegaze, which is the same melancholy delivered as a wall: guitars stacked and blurred until the melody arrives as texture. Loud, ugly, beautiful. You do not listen through shoegaze; you stand inside it.
EBM, the body
Electronic Body Music is the muscle of the family. Born in 1980s Belgium and Germany (Front 242 named it; DAF beat them to the feeling), EBM strips industrial music to a functional brutality: a 4/4 kick you feel in your sternum, bass sequences like pistons, vocals barked rather than sung. It is the most danceable thing we play and the least polite. No Cool Kids run this current, folded with industrial's harder textures. When the floor moves as one organism at 2 AM, EBM is usually the reason.
How they fit together in one night
A Pandemonium set drifts across all of it, because the genres are one argument continued by different means: post-punk's tension, darkwave's atmosphere, EBM's insistence, shoegaze's weight. The poster is a list, not a hierarchy, and the last act of the night is the one most likely to break a string. You will not get a genre per hour. You will get a room being steered.
Where to hear it in Lagos
Live, in one room, with the bass louder than the lights: the next rite is the answer this site exists to give. The line-up is at least 70% Lagos every time, which matters, because this music has always been local first everywhere it took root: Manchester, Brussels, Berlin, and now, on certain nights in Lekki, here.
Come early, stand near the low end, and let the unfamiliarity do its work. Nobody on that floor knew these genres before the first time either. That is what first times are for.