We Hold Five Dates on MPH. Not One of Them Is a Room.

Our United Kingdom chart put MPH third this week, at 88.5 out of 180 scored British artists, against the 85 where we start calling a score rising. Over the trailing 28 days the desk logged 2,679 tracked events in British venues. Then we went to check what we actually hold on him, which is the part of this job that decides whether a number becomes a piece.

What we hold is five lines. Not one of them names a room. “San Francisco”. “Miami”. “Osaka & Tokyo”. “EDC”. “Hollywood”. Those are the venue fields in our own appearance ledger for a producer who has spent this year on a world circuit — cities, a festival brand, and a district, harvested out of social captions by a matcher that was never told the difference between a place and a stage.

TWO ROWS WE DELETED

Two of the five were worse than empty. A row reading only “San Francisco” had been resolved, by name substring, to Yoshi's San Francisco — a jazz supper club — and a row reading “Miami” had gone the same way. The mechanism is dull and worth stating: when the venue field is a bare city and no venue handle comes with it, a registry lookup will happily land on any room whose name contains that city. We removed both this week, along with 146 rows across 31 venues that failed the same test, and we published the guard that now blocks them.

The correction had a second casualty, and it is the reason this is not merely housekeeping. Yoshi's Oakland had been sitting at number six in our room index on the strength of four scored artists — two of whom, MPH and Solomun, were these phantom rows. With them gone the room no longer qualifies at all, and Alexandra Palace takes the position on a ledger of five artists across nine appearances that we can actually date. A jazz club had been ranked, in part, on the momentum of two electronic acts who were never in the building.

WHERE HIS YEAR IS ACTUALLY WRITTEN

Away from our file the record is not thin at all; it is simply held by other people. In April he made his major-label debut, “Unconditional”, on Disorder through Capitol. On 14 August he released “Mirage” with Skrillex, his first collaboration with him. In between, a remix of Four Tet's “Only Human” landed through Ministry of Sound in January, and last October, per an interview he gave MusicRadar, Thomas Bangalter played two of his tracks in the first DJ set he had performed in sixteen years. Beatportal has him saying of the Skrillex session: “Skrillex would do some bits and pass the laptop to me”.

Now put the platforms side by side, because this is the shape the numbers make. His own YouTube channel, opened in May, carries 1,140 subscribers and four videos. His Spotify page reports 1,586,991 monthly listeners. His most-played track by a distance, at 23,546,787 plays, is his remix of somebody else's song, Calvin Harris's “I'm Not Alone”. The set that shows him working, the one at the top of this page, is on DJ Mag's channel. “Mirage” went out through UKF's. An artist can be very large and own almost none of the surface his audience meets him on.

That is not a criticism of him; it is a description of how UK garage travels in 2026, and it is also a warning about what our sort of file can and cannot see. We count rooms. His year is being written in other people's uploads.

WHAT WE ARE NOT TELLING YOU

We cannot tell you how any of it sounds. We were not in those rooms — we have just spent four hundred words establishing that we do not reliably know which rooms they were. The genre words here are other people's filings: he describes himself as UKG and bass; UKF files him under a new wave of UK garage; Beatportal reached for the word mercenary. Our own assignment came through a collection route rather than from anything he declared.

Several things that circulate about him did not survive checking and are therefore absent. A Boiler Room set: we found a fan clip and no listing on the broadcaster's own site. Glastonbury and Boomtown: claimed on his profile pages, with no year, stage or line-up we could cite. Coachella: in an artist-authored Spotify biography and nowhere else we could find. There is also a second MPH on Spotify with 93 monthly listeners and a 2019 album, which is a trap for anyone in a hurry, and a stale listings-site biography with a defunct email that predates his current representation.

Even his album count is contested by the outlets that cover him — one masthead called the 2023 record his debut, another gave that title to the 2024 one, a third counts last October's Substance as his third. We are not going to arbitrate it here. The four February rooms on the strip above are the ones this desk could stand behind by the end of the day, and every one of them is a room our own machinery missed.

1Max Dean90.0

2Unit 1789.1

3MPH88.5

4odeal88.0

TOP 4 OF 180 SCORED · RISING THRESHOLD 85

Ground Frequency Data Desk — Western Europe. "MPH leads United Kingdom at 88.5." GF Rising, 2026-W35. https://www.groundfreq.com/charts/rising/united-kingdom/2026-W35/

GROUND FREQUENCY DATA DESK — WESTERN EUROPE EDITED AND SIGNED OFF BY RICHARD SONG 2026-08-25 WHY WE BYLINE DESKS →

@mph_uk · PROFILE IMAGE, MIRRORED

The deepest venue registry we hold — a club economy old enough that movement in it usually means something. This is an organisational byline, not a person pretending to be local — drafted from a locked extract, fact-checked against it, and signed off by a named human editor. The Western Europe desk · Corrections