The main room upstairs is throbbing with the ceaseless bass of house music, that four-to-the-floor boom-boom-boom-boom that has been dance music's go-to sound for ages. The tourists are into it, as are the curiously made-up girls from New Jersey and the few lady-slaying sailors in town for Fleet Week. There's a big-room purposefulness to the music upstairs, a workhorselike aspect to its time-tested thump. It's the kind of music people want when they drop $20 every now and then to do the dance-club thing.

The scene downstairs is markedly different. The crowd is a mix of finicky music-obsessives and stylish scene-makers here to check out Drive By, New York's hottest home for the hottest new sound in dance music. Those in the know are tipping flutes of champagne, the drink of choice for their subcultural compatriots over in beat-loving London. In the middle of the floor, the good dancers are bouncing and flailing, sticking their moves with an angularity those on the edges are still trying to work out. The music is really new and different, the beats snapping in crisply slanted ways that make the house tunes upstairs sound old-fashioned. It's all precision and shine down here.

The DJ drops some remarkably irony-free remixes of chart-topping hits -- "Survivor" by Destiny's Child, Bell Biv Devoe's "Poison" (twice!?) -- alongside the genre-making tracks that have just started making their way to the States. An MC spits out gritty freestyle on the mike, toasting Jamaican dancehall style. "Hometown NYC ... Drive By ... . We're gonna spin you out," he belts. "Bring your energy, bring your love ... Let's get sexy ... It's time for two-step garrraaaaaaggggeee!!!"

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If you're really into dance music, you probably know two-step garage. If you're not -- if the difference between house and techno seems like little more than the punchline-ready distinction between country and western -- maybe you've seen it referenced in a magazine. Maybe it meant something, or maybe you just wrote it off as another example of dance music's tendency to spit out new genre names as signifiers of readymade revolution. Either way, two-step is a legitimately distinctive new style that owes a lot to drum 'n' bass and the futuristic minimalism that dominates American pop and R&B. But its debt extends equally to every other strain of dance music that has cropped up in the past 25 years. Giddy disco, soulful house, mechanistic techno, rhythm-crazed hardcore, bouncy Jamaican dancehall, big-bottomed Miami bass, gin-sipping G-funk, glitchy ambience -- they're all there.

It's an unfortunate circumstance in electronic music that such terms mean the world to some and nothing to others. If you follow the music closely, the distinctions are both meaningful and necessary. They all connote something specific, even if they often bleed into one another and break down when it comes time for precise definitions. But keeping up with the linguistic free-for-all can wind up amounting to a full-time job. And it unfortunately guarantees that the newest sounds get discussed most interestingly in coded language that only alienates those who don't have a working knowledge of the vocabulary. This isn't exclusive to electronica, but the music's largely wordless and hyperspecialized nature certainly doesn't help.

With this in mind, two-step offers an interesting way out of the classic postmodern jam. For all its exposed roots and historical ties, the music amounts to much more than the sum of its parts, both in its sound and in its ability to juggle specialized progressivism and audience-courting populism behind a premise that relies on disregarding the conflict altogether.

Two-step really is a new sound, one that was cooked up as both an inevitable offshoot of everything that came before it and a marked departure from the history it tries so hard to revise. But while its big-picture history gives it some serious conceptual underpinning, its most immediately noticeable trait is its delicious accessibility. In England, where it's been positively huge for a couple of years now, two-step (or U.K. garage, as it's interchangeably known) appeals equally to both screaming teeny-boppers and underground DJs who disseminate it through pirate-radio stations and specialty record shops. The secretive white-label culture that dance music is famous for —- DJs trading unlicensed remixes, trainspotters trying to steal ideas, etc. -- is a big part of two-step. However, in England at least, the same tracks that get passed around like Samizdat in the underground can end up sitting pretty atop the singles charts, with no love lost on either side of the cultural divide.

If you've ever sat around and wondered what might one day pop up as a new sound that could make waves, however big or small, you'd be right to be intrigued by this. There's a lot going on in two-step garage, both on the surface and beneath it, that speaks to both the present and the future in illuminating ways. It's not likely to change the world in any magically profound fashion, but there's something inspiring and true in the mere existence of a style that offers something to both jaded aesthetes and their 6-year-old nieces. Two-step's mix of sophisticated stylization and pleasantly Epicurean excess just feels so ... so culturally right.

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