State Champ Radio Cover Story
Steve Aoki is obsessed with numbers. It’s why the Grammy Award-nominated producer and mega-DJ has a seven-page rider specifying the exact weight and dimensions of the sheet cakes he hurls into the delirious crowds of fans who flock to his shows holding signs that say, “CAKE ME!” It’s why, despite an “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” tattoo on the back of his neck, he knows per one epigenetic measure that he has slowed his aging process down to 0.8 out of 1 thanks to a rigorous biohacking regimen that includes tracking how much REM sleep he’s getting on his WHOOP watch. And it’s why, when asked why he wants to live so long in the first place, he equates life to winning the lottery and quotes the statistical probability of simply being alive on this earth as 1 in 400 trillion.
But there is one number Aoki prefers not to know: the amount he’s getting paid per show. He worries that knowledge might subconsciously affect the energy he brings from one massive outdoor stage to another, that it might cloud the sacred union he feels between himself, the lucky lottery winner, and his fans, who tend to embody the rollicking frenzy of a punk show that Aoki has injected into electronic dance music (EDM).
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It’s a high that he says he has grown addicted to, which explains why he DJ’d 209 shows last year and holds the 2012 Guinness World Record for most traveled musician in one year, and (though they’ve since been broken) the 2014 records for longest crowd cheer and most glow sticks lit simultaneously. It’s fitting, then, that on this Wednesday evening in April, Aoki is Zooming with me from a lounge at the San Francisco International Airport as he prepares for a flight to Australia, where he’ll DJ five shows in 48 hours before headlining the Siam Songkran Music Festival in Bangkok. At 46 years old — or 36.8, if you take into account his 0.8 aging rate according to TruDiagnostic, an epigenetic testing company — Aoki has little interest in slowing down.
“I still have the thirst,” he says. “I still have the enthusiasm, and with music, there’s no greater energy force. There’s no greater high than playing your records at your show in front of a crowd that knows your music and everyone’s just f–king lit up. Like, there’s nothing greater than that.”
Whatever you might make of his persona as a fist-pumping, hair-shaking, Takis-munching, EDM-spinning, sheet cake-throwing party bro who seems to have perpetually lost his shirt, it’s hard to dispute that over the last two decades, Aoki has firmly established himself as a pioneering figure in the world of dance music. That he has done so globally and exuberantly — despite the reserved Asian American stereotypes he grew up absorbing — is a testament to his unabashed confidence, unrelenting work ethic and entrepreneurial instincts, which extend far beyond music.
For starters, there’s the all-electric race boat team he recently purchased to compete in the UIM E1 World Championship against competing owners Tom Brady and Rafael Nadal; the Hiroquest graphic novel he published in April with comic book legend Jim Krueger, about a genetically augmented meta-human who journeys into the multiverse 400 years into the future; and his various forays into science and tech, from investing in brain research through his Aoki Foundation to ventures in cryptocurrency, esports, non-fungible tokens and cryogenics. In 2022, Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa selected Aoki as one of eight civilians to join his SpaceX moon trip, with a yet-to-be-determined launch date.
“There’s always a new thing every year, and the whole team kind of shrugs their shoulders like, ‘OK, let’s go learn how to do this,’ ” says Matt Colon, Aoki’s business manager of 20 years and the global president of music at talent management agency YMU.
“He embodies that spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship that is so inspiring,” says Paris Hilton, a friend of Aoki’s since she was 16 who released her first-ever collaboration with him late last year. “Every venture he takes on, he does it with a sense of style and purpose. He has turned his artistic vision into an empire, and that’s something that I deeply respect and connect with in my own business endeavors.”
Balenciaga hoodie and jacket.
Jessica Chou
Colon sees it as his job to foster his client’s excitement — even if he admits that roughly half of Aoki’s business ideas “get dismissed kind of out of hand because once you get into the details, they don’t really make sense.” Still, Colon notes that it was that out-of-the-box thinking that allowed Aoki to break into the industry in the first place, by way of Dim Mak Records, the Los Angeles-based label he founded in 1996.
In the early ’00s, Dim Mak became a tastemaker by signing acts like The Kills, Bloc Party and Gossip. But perhaps more significantly, Aoki became godfather of the scene that coalesced around Dim Mak Tuesdays, the indie sleaze Hollywood party he threw from 2003 to 2014 to promote the label. With then-rising acts like M.I.A., Lady Gaga, Kesha and Justice clamoring to perform and buzzy guests like the Olsen twins all enshrined by the famed nightlife blog The Cobrasnake, the party took on a life of its own.
Aoki only started DJ’ing to fill the time before performances at Dim Mak Tuesdays, and in the beginning, “he admittedly was not a great DJ,” Colon says. But Aoki attributes his success today to his willingness then to keep trying, to fail in public, sweat bullets and then ask for help. “I don’t have any kids, but if and when I do, that’s one of the most important things I want to share: You need to have that shamelessness,” he says. “It’s such an important rule of thumb.”
“He’s an early adopter,” Colon adds. “It’s in his blood, and it’s often because he doesn’t have the shame of being afraid to ask. Most people just wait until it’s offered to them. Steve will always ask.”
Despite his far-reaching business interests, Colon says DJ’ing remains Aoki’s primary revenue stream, both internationally and in Las Vegas, where he lives and maintains residencies at three venues. As a producer, he has proved agile at working deftly across genres, collaborating with everyone from Linkin Park and Hayley Kiyoko to Lil Jon and Diplo.
“When you’re on the road that much, you come across new people, new trends and new sounds,” Lil Jon says. “He’s just really easy to work with. He’s not overly pushy in the studio — he lets me do my thing but still has input. Neither of us half-ass anything.”
Versace shirt.
Jessica Chou
Aoki’s reach also spans continents, having worked with South Korea’s BTS, Mexico’s Danna Paola, Japan’s Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and Colombia’s Maluma. This hodgepodge has bolstered Aoki’s international appeal; he says his global fan base is particularly receptive in Central and South America.
He plans to release his ninth album this summer, featuring collaborations with Big Freedia, a rework of Lil Jon’s “Get Low” (called “Get Lower”) and a lead single with Ne-Yo called “Heavenly Hell” — a phrase he’s quick to point out inspired the title of a chapter he’s working on in the sequel to Hiroquest, which also happens to be the name of his last two albums that also spawned a line of trading cards meant to bolster his graphic novel’s intellectual property (IP) across platforms.
This is the way Aoki’s mind works — seemingly at its best when it has at least seven tabs open, all the better to connect the various dots that compose the Aokiverse. It’s an impulse he attributes to his father, Rocky Aoki, the wrestler turned powerboat racer turned founder of Japanese restaurant chain Benihana, who died in 2008 but remains Aoki’s North Star, a larger-than-life figure who seemingly did it all.
“He would just fly in like Superman, coming in to pick me up and take me on an adventure, and then drop me off [at] the humble abode of my mom’s house,” says Aoki, who was raised by his mother, Chizuru, whom he calls “my rock,” in Newport Beach, Calif. “So when I was with him, I just experienced all these things that he was doing. Like ‘Oh, my God. This life is crazy over there.’ ”
I was in college while you were coming up in the early aughts, and it felt kind of shocking to see someone who was Japanese American, like I am, take up so much space so aggressively in alternative culture. Were you thinking about ideas of representation back then?
I’m not going to go down memory lane too deep, but I remember when I first got into music in high school, the first thing I did was sing. You just didn’t see Asian singers. You just didn’t see Asian people in music, period, and if you did, they were really quiet, like the singer of Hoobastank, whom I looked up to. Actually, I am reworking [the Hoobastank song] “The Reason.” I guess we can announce it here: There’s a Steve Aoki-Hoobastank record coming soon. But it was cool to actually work with that guy [singer Doug Robb] because I remember looking up to him when I was in high school.
The other main artist I looked up to big time was Chad Hugo from The Neptunes. This is when I first got into production, around 2003. I was in L.A., and I remember hiring someone on Craigslist to teach me how to use Pro Tools because I just started dabbling on the computer. And I was like, “Chad Hugo, that’s my hero because he’s Asian, but he’s also quiet.” I’m always like, “Where are the loud ones?” I wanted to see someone Asian that’s just loud and in charge and commanding audiences.
Balenciaga hoodie, robe, jeans and shoes.
Jessica Chou
Did you become that character because you wanted to see it, or did that exuberance onstage come naturally to you?
One of the really important things that music gave me was a voice because I really, truly felt invisible. Growing up in Newport Beach, the statistic was 96% of the population is white — this is in the ’80s and ’90s. So I’m already kind of out there, I’m already different, and Asians, generally speaking, don’t rock the boat. Japanese people are quiet. My mom’s quiet.
Your dad wasn’t quiet.
No, he wasn’t, but I was raised by my mom. I mean, I’m sure I was inspired by my dad going, “Holy sh-t, my dad’s doing his thing and is successful, and it’s not bothering him that he’s Japanese, he’s just connecting with the world.” That is what I loved — the idea that it shouldn’t bother you.
But when I was a kid, I was bothered, and that’s where music gave me the voice. You could just belt your sh-t out. A lot of it was just understanding who I was, finding my identity through the music and allowing me to be unabashed about it. I grew up in the punk hardcore scene, and they thrive off that. It’s thriving off these underrepresented voices. That’s how the culture grows. So I was in the right place to foster this kind of attitude to be heard.
As someone who’s known for being a prolific collaborator, how do you connect with other artists? Do you still reach out to people?
It goes both ways for sure. In some cases, if we meet in person, the energy of that meetup ends up becoming something. When I met up with BTS in 2016 at a house in L.A., we just hit it off really well, and in 2017, I ended up remixing “MIC Drop,” which later led to [the BTS collaborations] “Waste It on Me” and “The Truth Untold.” But sometimes I just do cold DMs. I’ve always been very unabashed about that. Whoever I want to work with I just send a DM, and if it hits, it hits.
What’s your success rate?
I would say my success rate is pretty low. You know, of all the collabs I’ve done that are out, I’ve reached out to far greater [than have reached out to me], like 80%.
How does that make you feel?
It’s like a game of baseball. That’s how I see it. I don’t have a problem as long as I hit the ball and I get the home runs, you know? Like the best baseball player in the world hits the ball three out of 10 times. So if you hit the ball two out of 10 times, you’re actually above average. If you hit the ball once, you’ve made the cut. If I can make a record that’s meaningful to culture, meaningful to my fans, meaningful to what I’m doing, what my purpose is, then it’s worth it and I’m excited. I never lose my excitement on this stuff. I think that question would provoke a different answer if I was tired. If I was jaded. If I wasn’t really into what I do. When you love what you do, you still fight for it. You still have the hunger.
Balenciaga hoodie, jacket, pants and shoes.
Jessica Chou
What do you like about collaborating with such a wide range of artists? I think some producers would find that really challenging.
It is. It’s extremely challenging. It’s challenging on many different levels, too. It’s not just challenging on the creative side, but it’s challenging to your fans. Like whenever I started collaborating in a different space, I would get a lot of hate; I get a lot of criticism.
What’s an example?
When I started working with hip-hop artists in the early 2010s, there was a lot of negative criticism, even when I did Kolony, which was an entirely hip-hop album that I produced in 2017. You know, I’m a sensitive guy. I don’t like seeing negative sh-t just pile up.
Do record sales matter to you?
Honestly, no. In the beginning, it does matter, when you have your first hit, when you have something that’s just catching steam. But then, going back to your question about collaborating across different genres, I can’t think too much about what the world thinks. Of course, it’s incredible if I have a song that breaks 100 million streams on Spotify. That’s pretty f–king cool. But I can’t put my emotional place there. That would probably make me jaded. That would probably hinder my creative spirit, 100%. It’s more about, “How does it penetrate the culture? Do the fans at the festivals and the shows sing along? Are they connected to it?”
It sounds like the measurement for your success is more experiential than data-driven. How else do you gauge that?
Yeah, it is something that grows over time. You could sort of gauge it on some level of metrics, but then there’s a lot of other layers. You can’t just type in “What’s Steve Aoki’s biggest song on the festival circuit?” If you type that in, you might not get the correct answers. [Artificial intelligence] cannot generate that. For example, “No Beef” is an old song of mine that I made with Afrojack in 2011. That was before streaming was actually a big deal, but everyone knows the vocals to that at my shows.
As an artist, what are your thoughts on AI?
I’m still a novice in the usage or utility of AI, but I use it mainly for lyric generation. It has actually helped me quite a lot. If I have an idea of what lyrics I want to put down on a record, I’ll work that out with AI, and if I have a songwriting team in my house and we get stumped, we can always use AI. As far as sampling, I’ve used AI to get a particular female sound using certain words, and that has been fantastic.
What about the fear of it replacing producers and DJs entirely?
See, of course that’s the conversation topic because the possibilities are endless. But when that happens, I’m assuming, just like everything that we do with technology, we’re building safeguards. And you can’t stop AI. It’s not like, “Oh, f–k. AI is going to take away our jobs. F–k technology, it’s going to take away jobs.” You can’t. You just have to ride the wave with it and just start building safeguards as we go. We’ve been doing this the whole time with the internet.
Versace top, shirt, jeans, and shoes.
Jessica Chou
Let’s pivot to another serious topic: How does it feel to throw a sheet cake into someone’s face?
OK, there’s a lot of points here. One, I think it really goes along with this idea that people are singing your songs at your show and your music is their music. So we’re all part of the same culture. You’re partially responsible because you created that music and that experience. That’s what the cake is. I’ve been able to share an experience that was such a silly idea, and now it’s a thing. As a culture, people want to get caked, and it’s a very Steve Aoki thing.
How many years have you been doing it now?
Thirteen.
Wow. That’s a lot of cake.
Yeah, over 20,000 cake faces. It’s pretty epic.
How consciously are you aware of yourself, Steve Aoki, as a brand?
It’s interesting because when I see “Steve Aoki” on things or I see the logo, I look at it as a company. And I’m just part of that company.
You’re just another worker?
(Laughs.) I mean, really. It’s like, “Oh, my God. There’s a person with a Steve logo or a tattoo on his arm.” It does excite me. I’m like, “Wow, that’s so incredible.” But that’s the music, you know? It’s not me personally. So I finally started separating myself from that because I’m the same kind of fan. I have a band [tattooed] on my back that inspired me when I was in high school called Gorilla Biscuits. It’s not someone’s name, but Steve Aoki is like a band to someone. So I understand the way music moves people and why you do that. It’s a community. That’s how I see the brand.
I think a lot of this is not just about the music, too; it’s the experience, you know? And the experience itself is something that can last a lifetime. That’s why the live show is so important. It’s not just about being a producer in the studio and getting the music out there and having people connect with the music in their homes. A lot of my IP is based on the actual experience [of a live show], and unfortunately, I can’t clone myself because as an entrepreneur, you would think, “How do you scale that?”
Is that why you play so many shows?
Yeah. It’s like you get this momentum going when things are happening, and I’ve seen a lot of friends, a lot of artists, taking their brick and just disappearing. And they didn’t have the same momentum to come back as strong as they were.
Are you scared of that happening to you?
I am. I think I am. I mean, I don’t want to say that, but I think it does have this effect on me because the thing is, I love what I do. Like, to be able to be onstage and the high that you get after a show, it’s just incredible.
What’s the secret to keeping this so fun after doing it for so long?
I’m glad you asked this question. I just was in South Africa and I did two shows out there, and during my extra time, I worked on music with two South African artists. I actually connected with more African artists from different regions as well and their beats, like Afrobeats and amapiano, have definitely been coming up inside my beats. The sounds, the rhythms, the percussions, I have a strong affinity to this music. That was so much fun. That’s what keeps things going.
I think being a global artist, being able to travel all the time, my natural way to connect with different cultures is to musically connect and collaborate with different people of that culture. And fortunately, they’ve allowed me to work with them in different capacities that have brought out some of these incredible global records that connect my sound to their sound. And the more and more I do it, the more exciting it is and the more it’s connecting with a whole different world of people, with a different culture. You see it at the shows. It just becomes more exciting to do more outside of what you normally do. It’s a challenge, too, and I love the challenge.
This story will appear in the April 27, 2024, issue of Billboard.
In addition to our Steve Aoki cover story, check out this Q&A with Jessica Chou, who photographed Aoki for Billboard‘s AAPI issue.Tell us a little about your own background.
I’m from the San Gabriel Valley – a suburb in Los Angeles. Interesting fact: the city I grew up in was the first city in the U.S. to reach a majority-Asian population according to the 1990 U.S. Census. I feel like growing up in a suburb with a majority-minority population has informed my views and experience on American life.
I’ve been working as a freelance photographer for 13 years, focusing on portraiture, photographing everyday people and high-profile public figures alike. I come from a photojournalism/documentary background and I think those observational qualities of storytelling have definitely informed how I approach my portraiture.
You’ve worked with Billboard for a long time – you shot Steve for us 10 years ago, spending 36 hours with him, playing on your background in reportage. What are your standout memories from that shoot?
Gosh, 10 years. Yikes! It was such a whirlwind experience. I remember flying into Vegas and from the second I got to Steve, it was non-stop action for the next 36 hours, going from his residency in Vegas to his headlining performance at Tomorrowland in Bethel Woods, New York. I don’t think I had ever seen this kind of mix of business and play on such a high level at that point. There was such a huge intensity/euphoria that came from his fans both in Vegas and at Tomorrowland – I mean, people were begging to get caked in the face – and then there was the other side of being an artist with producing music and creating business collaborations. And Steve seemed to have this limitless amount of energy – I remember at some point thinking, “Omigosh, can we just like not do something for just a little bit? I can’t keep up.” [Laughs] But it was exhilarating. It’s still an experience I carry with me as a photographer.
What was your impression of Steve before the shoot? And what stood out to you most about him once you met?
I had some impressions of Steve before the shoot, mostly from the Cobrasnake era of the early 2000s, and him being a staple of the parties of those days. When I photographed Steve in 2014, it was at the height of EDM music in the U.S. and his show antics were such a part of that time. I just remember Steve being a very high-sensation seeker and he had a way of provoking and creating that experience. I think it’s what sets him apart as an artist and an individual. And so much of house and techno music is about freeing your mind for new experiences, but there are only so many personalities that can follow through on that mantra while still being put together.
How did that experience influence how you came up with the creative for this new cover and feature with Steve? Can you talk a little about that concept?
I think Steve’s level of energy with this laid-back attitude has always been an interesting hook for me and I was wondering what would be a good way to show this. This one afternoon, when I was driving out of another photoshoot in Los Angeles, I saw the billboard for the new Guy Ritchie series on Netflix (The Gentlemen) and thought, “Oh, that’s the right amount of polish and intensity” — but I needed that to feel less English and a little more Californian flair. This then led me to think of The Dude of The Big Lebowski. So it turned into The Dude meets Guy Ritchie’s energy with Steve Aoki’s signature. Something about this mixture just felt like the right balance for Steve’s style of fun, irreverence and action.
Last year, Billboard also had its first-ever K-pop issue, for which you shot Chairman Bang of HYBE for the cover. Tell us a little what he was like a subject and what the shoot was like.
Chairman Bang was probably the opposite of Steve Aoki – in the sense that Chairman Bang is a very behind-the-scenes guy. Creative yet controlled. And he was a more than gracious sitter – I remember that he wasn’t feeling very well that day, yet he still showed up and was game to try anything.
This is Billboard‘s first AAPI issue – what does it mean to you to be part of it?
I couldn’t be more honored to be a part of this and to be a part of highlighting contributions of AAPI community to the culture at large. I grew up not feeling very seen, represented or proud of what was represented in the mainstream media. Being able to find and see paths of “what could be for you” is an important part of self-actualization. When I got older, I started learning more about the contributions of the Asian community to culture at large – particularly in the arts and entertainment. I started realizing how much has been done before me and how those stories were readily available. Culture and celebration is informed by the stories we tell. I’m proud to be part of an issue that is blazing this path in one of the world’s most important music magazines.
On a hulking gray building on a wide boulevard once bisected by the Berlin Wall, a silver call button grants access to an expansive, shadowy, unfurnished foyer. Ascend a winding set of stairs and open the door at the top, and you’ll find the office of the CEO: South Korea-born Peggy Gou, who has swiftly become the world’s most in-demand female DJ-producer working in dance music today.
Inside Gou HQ, the bright overhead lights contrast with the early-April rain outside. The sprawling room — which has a vibe that’s more “friend’s apartment” than sterile corporate sanctum — is outfitted with a wooden meeting table, full bookshelves and a plush green velvet couch from which Tasos Filippou, Gou’s touring manager, arises to serve Gou and me black coffee in little terra cotta mugs on peace sign-shaped coasters. Gou wears baggy jeans, a black sweater that covers her many tattoos and sunglasses with silver reflective lenses that offer only occasional glimpses of her eyes. Her hair is piled in a loose bun, her skin is flawless, and even in casual mode, she’s giving cool-girl glamour. She offers a quick handshake, closes the window to make sure the room is quiet, then sits down to attend to business.
In the last 12 days, her slick brand of house has taken her to Miami, Mexico City and Buenos Aires. Of course, it’s not unusual for DJs to party hop across continents — what’s less typical for a DJ is having an office. But Gou’s story is defined by a business acumen that could be characterized as corporate hustle if it didn’t also happen inside dark techno clubs.
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A Korean woman in a scene dominated by white men, Gou, 32, has orchestrated her own dizzying rise, immersing herself in Berlin’s electronic scene upon moving here 10 years ago, then ascending to white-hot producer/fashion tastemaker thanks to last summer’s viral single, and her first Billboard chart hit, “It Goes Like (Nanana).” This new ubiquity — ever-higher billing at the world’s major music festivals, a German Vogue cover, a 2024 BRIT Award nomination for international song of the year — has neatly teed up Gou’s debut album, I Hear You, coming June 7 through eminent indie label XL Recordings.
The rare self-managed marquee artist, Gou has achieved much of her success on her own, and the room we’re sitting in functions as an extension of the command center in her mind.
“I remember meeting managers who told me, ‘I can make your life easier,’ ” Gou recalls. “I was like, ‘How? Tell me.’ Even if you take care of all these emails, you still have to come back to me because no one can make decisions for me. Every decision has to come from me.”
Peggy Gou photographed March 26, 2024 at Maison Celeste in Mexico City. Sentimiento tracksuit, Tercer Mundo vest, Cruda shoes, AYANEGUI earrings and necklace.
Aaron Sinclair
These decisions have produced an expansive business that includes heavy touring; A-list brand deals; her label, Gudu Records; and a merchandise line, Peggy Goods. With strong fan bases across continents, Gou will next be raising her profile even more in the United States ahead of and beyond I Hear You’s release.
“Because Peggy has such an incredible touring footprint globally,” XL Recordings head of U.S. campaigns Laura Lyons says, “in the U.S., we’re in a position where, because we haven’t historically had her in the market as much, we need to build on the moments when she’s here in person and also translate the excitement of an international, globe-trotting DJ to the local market.”
One week and 6,000 miles later, the odds will look clearly in Gou’s favor.
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The first time Gou played Coachella, in 2018, the line to get into her show wrapped around the at-capacity Yuma Tent where she was performing at three in the afternoon. “Even one person not being able to see my set, that upsets me,” she says. “So I was like, ‘Maybe next time, I play a bigger stage.’ ”
On the first night of the 2024 festival, that “maybe” has become a firm “for sure.” Gou presides over the Sahara Tent — Coachella’s biggest and most established dance music mecca — from atop a towering stage as an emoji version of herself smiles at the audience from massive LED screens. With the newly expanded Sahara Tent stretching 320 feet, not including spillover — almost a football field long — it’s likely Gou’s crowd is the largest ever assembled to see a female producer in Coachella history. (After the set, she shares Instagram Stories of herself backstage hanging with J Balvin, getting chummy with Will Smith and then getting a burger from an In-N-Out somewhere in the Coachella Valley.)
In March, Gou made her debut at Miami’s Ultra Music Festival, and in May, she’ll play dance mega-festival EDC Las Vegas for the first time. These shows, “from a perception point of view,” Lyons says, “are going to broaden [her] audience from this more underground electronic fan to a more mainstream kind of electronic base.”
Cueva top and skirt, Ket Void jacket, Cruda shoes. Floral Art Installation by Flores Cosmos.
Aaron Sinclair
That might be anathema to some purists, particularly those steeped in the techno-as-religion culture of Berlin. But Gou has been able to maintain her underground cred even while blowing up. The early-April screening of the music video for I Hear You’s third single, “1+1=11,” happened at a smoky Berlin club where the techno went until 3 a.m. on a Wednesday, and her friend group includes revered producers like Four Tet and Floating Points, whom she was recently hanging with in Mexico City. “I love those guys,” she says. “So nerdy. Like, ‘Guys, stop talking about how fat your drum is.’ ”
I suggest to Gou that her underground pedigree, paired with a forthcoming debut album that’s refreshingly accessible, might make her uniquely well-suited for the United States, where the so-called “underground” styles of house and techno have become the scene’s prevailing commercial forces in the live space. For her, that idea is beside the point. “Some people are like, ‘She’s really underground,’ or ‘She’s commercial,’ ” Gou says. “I don’t care. I’m just going to keep doing my thing and you can say what you want.”
Growing up in South Korea’s third-most populous city, Incheon — where she was born Kim Min-ji — Gou listened to “sh-t,” “good music” and “everything.” She lived in the shadow of her older brother, who’s “like super genius, one of the crazy Mensa IQ people.” Meanwhile, “Study wasn’t my thing. I was kind of rebel. So if you tell me to stay here, I will not stay there. If you tell me to go, I will stay. I didn’t like people telling me what to do even from when I was a kid.”
Her parents, recognizing that their 14-year-old was not “doing well” in South Korea, asked if she wanted to study English in London; she did. In the United Kingdom, Gou lived with guardians but snuck out to parties, fostering a clubbing habit that matriculated with her into the London College of Fashion. She began DJ’ing, booked her own residency at a club in Shoreditch, finished school, moved to Berlin and worked at a record store by day while she was indoctrinated into techno by night. “After one month, I’m like, ‘OK,’ ” she says flatly of her first trips to the city’s notoriously exclusive techno institution, Berghain. “Three months later” — her voice grows louder and more forceful — “ ‘OK.’ Five months later, I was like, ‘I finally get it.’ ”
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By 2016, she was making her own music, and by 2018, revered dance label Ninja Tune was releasing it. She started her own Gudu Records in 2019; that same year, she released the groovy house track “Starry Night,” which featured her singing in Korean and became a dance world hit.
All the while, she was touring. As her own manager, “I was the only person who was pushing me,” she says. “I didn’t need to be there. I didn’t have to do that. I think I got hyped. I got too excited about the shows and getting many shows.” In 2019, she played in 25 countries, including some, like Lebanon, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, that are far from the well-trod dance world circuit.
“Imagine a bullet train,” Gou says, speaking rapidly. “This was me in 2019. When it stopped, it didn’t stop slowly; it had to stop super fast.”
When the pandemic started, she returned to South Korea and spent three months at home — the longest amount of time she had been with her family since she was 14. She recharged even as life in South Korea — which introduced what many considered one of the world’s best COVID-19 control programs — continued without large-scale lockdowns. (“Asian culture is different because when you have a flu, you wear a mask,” she says, “so it was not that difficult for Asian people to keep the rules.”)
In Incheon, Gou had the time and head space to focus on music. She echoes a pandemic-related refrain prevalent among DJs who tour heavily: “It was a hard time for a lot of people, but for me, it was one of the best things that happened to me.”
Peggy Gou photographed March 26, 2024 at Maison Celeste in Mexico City. Sentimiento top, Tiempos pants, Tercer Mundo belt, Frank Zapata shoes, AYANEGUI necklace. Batán Chairs by Taller Batán.
Aaron Sinclair
She kept working upon her return to Berlin in mid-2020, finding that the ’90s dance music she was listening to during the pandemic had “changed my taste.” While she had been making her debut album for a while, she decided to make ’90s dance the center of the project, evident in the interplay of the bass and chimes on a track like “Lobster Telephone,” which sounds like it’s sprinkled with powdered sugar. The “It Goes Like (Nanana)” bassline is pure Jock Jams — the 1995 compilation that introduced a generation of suburban adolescents to dance music — and has helped the song aggregate 72.2 million on-demand official U.S. streams and 565.3 million on-demand official global streams to date, according to Luminate. Altogether, the album, on which she sings in both Korean and English, is dance music distilled down to its most polished essentials — and you don’t have to be a hardcore fan of the genre to get into it.
The sonic opposite of EDM maximalism, I Hear You may very well represent the future of main-stage electronic music. “In my career, I never once thought, ‘I’m on the next level now,’ ” she says. “Only when ‘Nanana’ happened did I realize that people were recognizing my song before my face. That’s when I really realized, ‘F–k, this is different.’ ”
Gou’s North American agent, Stephanie LaFera of WME (which represents her worldwide), says the song’s success has created “significant growth in her U.S. audience” that’s “only increasing the demand for her.” LaFera is focused on opportunities that serve Gou’s “super-engaged fan base that cuts across a lot of different spheres” while also introducing her to new listeners.
“For [“It Goes Like”] to become this global song of the summer and be Peggy’s first song to hit No. 1 on the U.S. dance radio charts was just such a fantastic tone-setter for this album,” Lyons adds, “and for what we believe she’s capable of achieving in the U.S.”
If you’re Peggy Gou, it’s entirely possible that the person seated across from you at Thanksgiving dinner may turn out to be Lenny Kravitz — which was exactly the case when, in 2022, she went to a friend’s house in Miami for the holiday.
“He had absolutely no idea who I was,” Gou recalls. “The only thing I could mention was that I did [two songs] for [his daughter] Zoë’s movie [The Batman].” It was a solid in. The pair talked over turkey, and her friend told Kravitz to check out Gou’s music. Not long after, Kravitz asked if she wanted to collaborate.
She sent Kravitz a track — a song that she had struggled to find a singer for after artists including The Weeknd and Giveon turned it down — and heard nothing back. “So I decided to go to the Bahamas,” where Kravitz lives, she says. “My friend was like, ‘You want to have Lenny Kravitz on your album? F–king book your flight, go there and get it.’ ” There was, Gou says, some “opinion clash” during the recording process, as “I’m a perfectionist and he’s perfectionist.” She adds with a smile, however, that Kravitz did ultimately tell her she was right about a part of the song they had disagreed on. Their slinky “I Believe in Love Again,” the second I Hear You single, arrived in November.
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Gou’s single-minded professional chess moves manifested her deal with XL in the first place, years after she reached out to the label about an internship back when she was a student in London. XL didn’t respond then, but it got in touch after the success of her 2018 single “It Makes You Forget (Itgehane).” “I did make a joke,” she says of her first meeting with XL, “like, ‘Check your inbox.’ ”
Gou acknowledges that working with her can be “very difficult because I push the team always harder… If you have so many opinions and you’re a woman, people call you a b–ch, but [XL] doesn’t see it that way. They think it’s a pleasure to work with someone who has a clear vision.”
XL also most likely enjoys working with a talent who’s changing the face of electronic music simply by being one of the most popular artists making it. “As incredible as it is to see a Korean woman occupy this space in dance music culture,” says Lyons, who herself is Asian American, “it’s not the reason why I’m excited by her.”
While a new level of streaming and chart success would be a nice outcome for I Hear You, to Gou, they’re “very 1D hopes.” She’ll consider the album a success if people listen to it and — she puts a hand over her heart — “get a feeling.”
Bottega Veneta coat, AYANEGUI earrings.
Aaron Sinclair
The feelings are clearly being felt at Coachella, where people in the crowd — many of them, like Gou, also wearing sunglasses though the sun set long ago — are flailing around, arms in the air and dreamy smiles on their faces. A crew of six dancers pop and lock, vogue and gyrate onstage. Gou will take this show on the road this summer for a run that includes European festivals like Primavera Sound, Glastonbury and Creamfields. In August, she’s hosting and headlining her own one-day mini-fest at London’s Gunnersbury Park; the show’s 8,000 tickets sold out within days of going on sale.
Unlike her early years of touring alone, Gou now travels with her tour manager and a road assistant or two. She “doesn’t always fly private,” but says the primary appeal of a private jet is a preference for efficiency that she says is part of her heritage: “I’m someone who [doesn’t] like wasting my time. I’m very efficient. I think that’s from Korean culture. Efficiencies are very important in Korea.”
A private jet “saves a lot of time,” she continues, “and you can sleep half an hour or even one hour more. Also, you don’t need to worry about the baggage weight.” Perhaps most crucially, though, flying private lets her move through the world while maintaining maximum control. “Hotel lobbies and the airport,” she says, “give me so much anxiety.”
These days, Gou’s team also includes a security detail, as she has experienced stalkers and people “waiting at the hotel or waiting at the airport for 10 hours.” She “can’t go to Italy alone” and brings two security guards to Argentina where the crowd is “quite wild.” She recalls spending the entirety of a commercial flight to Ibiza facing the window after half the plane recognized her while boarding. “I was like, ‘My neck,’ ” she says with a laugh, feigning pain. “It’s nice, but sometimes it gets a lot for me.”
“She can see 100 meters ahead in the airport. She notices the colors of things, remembers what people are wearing and is just super, super sensitive,” touring manager Filippou says, “especially when there’s a lot of people around.”
But her skin has gotten thicker as her career has grown. “In the beginning, I remember [people saying], ‘You will never be bigger than this person. No one’s going to buy your record. No one knows your name.’ I heard these things so many times.”
The criticisms “used to really affect me,” Gou continues. “I used to want to scream, like, ‘That’s not f–king true.’ ” But as time went on, she realized she was the reason her feelings were getting so hurt. “I was not happy,” she says of her pre-pandemic life. “I was so focused and tunnel-visioned. My relationship with boyfriend wasn’t doing well. Friends, workwise — nothing was happy. I learned a lot about myself during the pandemic.” Learning to listen first and react later has been huge for her. It’s why she’s wearing a mirrored headpiece that reflects her ears on her album cover and why she named the project I Hear You.
Sentimiento tracksuit, Tercer Mundo vest, AYANEGUI earrings and necklace.
Aaron Sinclair
One of the biggest early critiques Gou experienced side-eyed her interest in fashion, which made her fear “that people would never take me seriously.” So during her early years in Berlin, she sported the de facto DJ uniform of black (and sometimes, maybe, white) T-shirts — a fit that never felt authentic. Around this time, a mentor told her to turn her perceived weaknesses into strengths, so she ditched the tees for couture.
Dressing in brightly colored, flowing sets and racing gear helped her catch the attention of top fashion houses like Louis Vuitton, with which she has had two partnerships. She was good friends with late DJ-designer Virgil Abloh; after his 2021 death, she posted on Instagram that “I will forever be grateful that in the infancy of my career, Virgil showed support at a time when not many others would.” Her own Peggy Goods line creates custom merch for each of her shows; at the “1+1=11” music video screening party, more than one person wears a bomber jacket with the song’s title embroidered on the back.
Gou documents the fabulousness of it all on her Instagram, which has 4.1 million followers and which — yes — she runs herself. To her, the account is a natural evolution of her old Tumblr, where she would post photos of her outfits, meals and outings. She uses the same approach now on Instagram — except the outfits are by Ferragamo, the meals are on a beach in Ibiza and the outings are playing for tens of thousands of people screaming her name. Her glamorous aesthetic, and the size of her audience, has yielded deals with brands including Don Julio, Coca-Cola and Maybelline.
Now other DJs ask her how they can expand their own brands into the fashion world. It’s speculative, but the most obvious answer seems to be to work as hard as she has. “People see that I’m riding in a Rolls-Royce now, but I used to take a f–king bus,” she says. “I did an interview in Korea recently, and the first [comment] was, ‘I smell old money.’ No. My dad was poor. My mom was average. I’m not from a rich family. I worked hard to have a glamorous life.”
Like most anyone who has achieved major success and its attendant visibility, people still give Gou sh-t. But in a true boss move, she has come to enjoy it.
“Now when I hear criticism, it means I’m doing super well,” she says. “So go ahead: Say my name.”
This story will appear in the April 27, 2024, issue of Billboard.
In addition to our Peggy Gou cover story, check out this Q&A with Aaron Sinclair, who photographed Gou for Billboard‘s AAPI issue.Tell us a little about your own background.
I was born and raised in L.A. and spent most of my life growing up in downtown. I spent a lot of time with my Korean grandmother who moved around a lot, so I got to experience different parts of the city. When I became a teenager, I really dove into music making, photography and filmmaking. This led me to pursue photography at Art Center, where I continued to explore my interests and also took film classes.
During those years, I was really into the local music scene, going to shows almost every other night to watch my friends’ bands. These experiences heavily influenced my creative interests. Now, at 30, I’m still deeply engaged in these pursuits, always striving to improve.
What did you know of Peggy Gou before the shoot?
I actually DJ as well, and I think I was looking for new songs to add to my set when I came across her song “Starry Night.” I found the music video right after, and I was immediately blown away. The shots, the colors, and the way it worked so well with the song, it made me wish I had made it. The Korean element struck a chord with me too.
What was the vibe like on set?
The vibe on set was cool. I think Peggy and I are both pretty particular when it comes to our work, so doing the shoot together was a great match.
Peggy mentioned how happy she was to see “so many of my Asian brothers and sisters here” on set. What did that feel like for you? Is it rare to have that kind of representation on a shoot?
It’s not something you see often, but when it happens, it’s noticeable. I’ve only experienced it one other time, and each time, it’s a reminder of the importance of diversity in our industry.
This is Billboard‘s first AAPI issue. What does it mean to you to be part of it?
Being part of Billboard‘s first AAPI issue means a lot to me. It’s an opportunity to showcase the diversity and talent within the AAPI community on a prominent platform. It’s not just about representation; it’s about celebrating our stories and contributions in the music industry and beyond. I feel honored to be part of this historic moment and hope it paves the way for more recognition and visibility for AAPI artists and creators.
On the scale of regular to rock star, being stuck in traffic leans hard into the mundane. And yet on a humid March afternoon in Texas, this is where I find Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay — the French electronic music legends better known as Justice.
Augé (44, bearded, tall, taciturn) is in the back seat of an air-conditioned Uber, texting. De Rosnay (41, clean-shaven, shorter, chatty) sits beside him, playing the trivia game on the tablet hanging from the back of the passenger seat, pressing answers with long, skinny fingers as the SUV lurches through the streets of Austin, gridlocked amid South by Southwest. (He gets most of them right — but asks for help when asked to identify New York state by its shape.) The pair arrived here yesterday from Paris, and de Rosnay’s luggage still hasn’t shown up. Last night he went on his first-ever Target run, to procure fresh underwear.
It’s cliché to assume that famous musicians exist in a fantasy bubble of perpetual ease, but you’d be forgiven for being somewhat perplexed by the idea of one-half of the revered duo buying a pack of Hanes at the self-checkout. Still, de Rosnay and his Justice collaborateur Augé look the part: the latter in a brown suit, a vintage ’80s T-shirt and a big belt buckle of gold metal forming the words “Beach Boys,” de Rosnay in dirty white Chucks, skinny black jeans and a black leather jacket strung with fake pearls. Streaks of silver run through his otherwise black hair, and the diamond stud in his left ear appears real. Both indoors and after dark, they keep their sunglasses on.
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But despite looking like ’70s prog-rockers, in the Uber, they’re amiable, relaxed, funny. De Rosnay recounts the time France’s American Film Festival asked them to present a list of their favorite films but cut them from the program seemingly because their choices were too lowbrow. (“But Die Hard is a masterpiece of action film, you know?” he declares.) At this story’s photo shoot, they pull a plastic skeleton lurking in the studio into the frame between them, de Rosnay pouring it a fake cocktail of Diet Coke and Augé inserting a prop cigarette between its jaw bones. And while they partake in their bony friend’s faux cigs for the shoot, they don’t smoke, instead pulling on the little black vapes they intermittently produce from their jackets.
As Justice, Augé and de Rosnay are two of the most respected figures of the last 20 years of electronic music. Their 2007 debut, Cross, brought a fresh, swaggering, hard-edged rock aesthetic — “like the Led Zeppelin of the electronic scene,” says their longtime manager, Pedro Winter — to their native France and the world beyond, and it arrived just as blogs and file-sharing platforms fundamentally shifted how audiences access music. Beyond Daft Punk, they are arguably the best-known French electronic artists of all time, entering the public consciousness alongside a gang of Ed Banger labelmates who felt like the coolest guys at any given art school.
“I guess the U.S. electronic scene was not dormant, but focused on house, and we just entered like punks,” Augé says of the bold and pioneering rock-disco-electronic hybrid they stormed the scene with. Two lauded albums followed — 2011’s Audio, Video, Disco. and 2016’s Woman — and in 2019, Justice won the best dance/electronic album Grammy Award for the live set Woman Worldwide.
Joel Barhamand
Now, the guys are in Texas for 36 hours as they prepare to release Hyperdrama, the first Justice studio album in eight years. Upon its announcement, the news rippled across the electronic music world like the second coming of Christ. But here over dinner — Augé has shrimp cocktail, tuna crudo and a margarita, de Rosnay steak frites and sparkling water — they seem sincerely unsure about who, if anyone, might listen to it.
“Because the album cycle is so long every time, we’re both like, ‘OK, is there going to be anybody that’s still interested?’” Augé says with a laugh.
“For real, no?” says de Rosnay. “We still feel like rookies every time.”
Given Augé and de Rosnay’s singular and perpetually evolving sound, their refusal to market themselves in inauthentic ways and the changes in the industry landscape between each of the duo’s albums, Justice has always existed on the fringes of market demand. But with Hyperdrama, there’s an ambition to “reach a wider audience,” says Winter, who has managed Justice since its formation; founded the act’s label, Ed Banger; and managed Daft Punk until it broke up in 2021.
“EDM has been so much on repeat in the U.S.,” Winter says over Zoom from his home in Paris, a tabby cat perched on his shoulder. “I think and I hope American people are ready for a new cycle and maybe a bit more ambitious music.”
Joel Barhamand
Hyperdrama originated in February 2020, when the guys — still fairly fresh off the Woman cycle — started talking about new music. Having just played live shows that “almost contractually have to be fun immediately,” says de Rosnay, they were interested in making the less straightforward and less danceable music that has characterized their studio albums.
But the pandemic started weeks later, and by December 2020 they’d stopped working on the project entirely, since they couldn’t meet in person safely. Instead, Augé made his debut solo album, 2021’s Escapades, and de Rosnay enjoyed months of uninterrupted time with his daughter, who’s now 12 and whose photo is his phone’s wallpaper image. “It had been like 15 years that I hadn’t been in the same place for more than 10 days,” he says. “Four months in one place with my daughter — it can’t be cooler than this.”
Close friends for two decades, the guys kept in almost constant contact, and as the pandemic waned, they reunited in de Rosnay’s Paris home (a converted horse stable in the city’s 18th arrondissement) and got to work. For previous albums, they’d first spend countless hours digging for granular samples to build on. This time, they made those samples themselves. The idea was to combine the aggressive, visceral energy of techno, particularly its hardcore ’90s subgenre gabber, with what Augé calls “disco sauce.” The music would be at once mechanistic and human, cold and hot, synthetic and organic. (Each Justice album cover iterates the same monolithic cross logo; Hyperdrama’s art, conceived alongside visual artist Thomas Jumin, features a transparent cross with a set of ribs and a nervous system, which de Rosnay says reflects a body of work “about confronting digital things that are perfect and clean with more organic things.”)
In de Rosnay’s living room, they could simply hang out, cook, read and then work when inspiration came. “When you’re in a commercial studio,” says de Rosnay, “you can feel there’s an atmosphere of having to deliver something, having to be productive… and the environment is always a bit sterile. Sometimes you just want to spend half an hour in the home studio, but that’s going to be a good half an hour.”
Their pace was, he says, “very slow,” but over three-and-a-half years, they found the sound they’d been searching for, knowing they’d hit particularly good material when the music inspired them to shake hands and dance. (“If the track is on the album,” Augé says, “it means we high-fived over it at some point.”) Extending the album’s organic theme, this human chemistry (“the technician is Xavier, the harmony is Gaspard,” says Winter) has always been essential to their output.
“Having this moment by yourself, then sending it over on Dropbox and saying, ‘I think it’s kind of good; have fun on the other side,’ ” de Rosnay continues, “it would be impossible [for us] to do it at a distance like that.”
Joel Barhamand
The first track to inspire such celebration was “Incognito,” a three-part opus that shifts gears between ’80s AM radio psychedelia, peak-hours techno and funk. Travis Scott’s multi-movement “SICKO MODE” made them realize that they were “still thinking about music almost in an ancient way,” de Rosnay explains. “Almost by reflex we were like, ‘OK, this song has to be a verse, a chorus, then a shorter verse, then a double chorus.’ ” Instead, they just made what “we wanted to hear, even if it doesn’t make sense in terms of music theory.”
They ultimately amassed over 200 versions of some tracks, and their only disagreement during the production process was about whether to include bongos on the song “After Image.” De Rosnay wanted them and Augé did not; the latter prevailed. (“I recorded the bongo part and it sounded perfect,” de Rosnay says. “I also knew when I was making it that he would hate it.”)
But what most listeners will notice first — maybe even before pressing play — are Hyperdrama’s featured vocalists, who make up the highest-profile collection of guests ever assembled for a Justice album. They’d had Kevin Parker in mind as a vocalist for “almost a decade,” ever since Justice was asked to remix Tame Impala’s 2012 single “Elephant.” (They turned the project down because they didn’t think they could make the original any better.) Parker sings on the album’s lush, punchy lead single, “One Night/All Night,” as well as the gliding album opener, “Never Ender.” They were already friendly with Thundercat and Miguel through Los Angeles nightlife, and they appear on the tough, cinematic album closer, “The End,” as well as the swaggering “Saturnine,” respectively.
One notable artist who doesn’t appear on the album: The Weeknd. In January, a demo of a track Justice did for him leaked online around the same time that the pop star shared several Justice-related images on his Instagram story, fueling rumors that he’d appear on Hyperdrama. The guys now say they never planned to have The Weeknd on the album and that they didn’t even hear the leaked demo before it was taken down. “Like many of those kinds of artists, The Weeknd is working with 10 different producers,” Winter says, adding that “there might be some collaboration happening” between the two acts “in the future.”
I ask Winter if working with more high-profile vocalists was an intentional move to grow Justice’s fan base. “No. No, no, no. It’s definitely not systematic,” he insists. His take is that the duo — which he calls “the boys,” of whom he is “a proud daddy” — is simply more mature, more confident in its production skills and “don’t have that much to prove anymore,” inspiring the act to partner with collaborators who felt like authentic fits.
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“Justice has been a band saying ‘no’ to everything, exactly like when I used to work with Daft Punk,” Winter says. “They really wanted to focus on their own music. Now it has been a 20-year career, so it’s time to open the door and work with other people.” He does admit that having names like Parker or Miguel on the track list can’t hurt. “Of course, a lot of [their fans] will not get the Justice sound… but out of those millions, let’s try to grab the attention and love of some of them.”
Still, de Rosnay says, he and Augé “have no idea who the average Justice fan is. We have no idea if that person likes ‘D.A.N.C.E.’ or likes ‘Stress,’” he continues, referencing two early Justice singles. “We have no idea if they like stuff like Woman. It’s impossible, so we decided not to take that into account at all.”
Regardless of who may comprise that fan base, there’s no doubt that it exists in large numbers. Like Cross, Woman reached No. 1 on the Top Dance/Electronic Albums chart, while Audio, Video, Disco. hit No. 37 on the Billboard 200 in November 2011. Justice has singles scattered across 13 Billboard charts, and its catalog has aggregated 63.3 million official on-demand U.S. streams, according to Luminate. This body of work has also amassed 224.2 million on demand global streams since 2020, when Billboard’s global charts were launched, a number that’s particularly significant given that the act hasn’t released a studio album during this time frame.
Of course, devotees don’t need any data beyond “new Justice album” to get hyped.
When they first got together, after meeting at a Paris house party back when they were both graphic designers, even Augé and de Rosnay weren’t sure what Justice was. They’d met Winter through visual artist So-Me, the Ed Banger art director who was also the duo’s roommate; the trio had gone to Augé’s parents’ house for raclette and “Pedro invited himself because his own home was raclette free, and he was craving for one,” de Rosnay says. Their first release, “We Are Your Friends,” a remix of Simian’s 2002 “Never Be Alone,” was released on Ed Banger in 2006 and almost immediately became the defining anthem of the indie sleaze era.
Emmanuel de Buretel, the head of Ed Banger parent label Because Music, signed Justice around the time it released that remix, having seen the global appetite for French electronic music after he signed acts like Daft Punk and Air. “We love him,” de Rosnay says, “because he’s really a believer that things don’t always produce results immediately.”
The duo’s first original production, the brash, distorted “Waters of Nazareth,” sounded nothing like “We Are Your Friends,” with the song “alienating people” immediately upon release, says de Rosnay. “Even Pedro didn’t want to release [“Waters of Nazareth”] at first.” (It was the late DJ Mehdi, he says, who convinced Winter to put it out.) Every time Justice played it live, audio techs rushed the stage to see if there was a problem with the cables. Friends suggested something might have gone wrong with the vinyl pressing.
“We thought maybe we should have done something else, but then slowly, it started to get noticed,” de Rosnay says, “and it dragged in another crowd of people that were more interested in rock. Like, if The White Stripes made an electronic track, it would sound like ‘Waters of Nazareth.’ ” The act’s second single, the giddy earworm “D.A.N.C.E.,” featured a children’s choir singing over nu-disco production and further confused things. Then, the pair’s third single, the cacophonous and aptly named “Stress,” “alienated the people who liked ‘D.A.N.C.E.’ “
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But the strength of those early singles helped Justice get booked for Coachella in 2007, appearing on the lineup’s bottom row; two months later, Cross came out, becoming a critical and commercial hit despite the fact that making it had been, as de Rosnay puts it, “a struggle at every level, because we had no idea what we were doing” (the duo had also just bought a computer for the first time two years prior). The album’s success validated the act — to an extent. In the wake of Air and Daft Punk — the latter of which wrapped its groundbreaking Alive tour in 2007 — Justice almost assumed such success was standard for a French electronic act. “When we started making music in 2003, thanks to them it was almost normal that you put out a record and everybody on the planet listened to it,” de Rosnay says.
But by the time the duo released Audio, Video, Disco. four years later, its sound had changed again (de Rosnay calls that album “inspired by our love of agricultural ’60s British rock”), along with almost everything about how music was distributed and the broader dance landscape: The EDM boom’s neon and MDMA world was the sonic and spiritual opposite of Justice’s dirty jeans and cigarettes vibe. By the time Woman arrived in 2016, the dominance of digital service providers had increased even more exponentially.
It’s fair then that, sitting here at dinner, the guys aren’t really sure who Hyperdrama is for, or how it will be discovered. They’re unlikely to seek new listeners on TikTok, a platform de Rosnay says they are not “naturally inclined to do” (and anyway, as Winter notes, the four-plus-minute-long songs on Hyperdrama aren’t exactly “TikTok- or Spotify-friendly”). Synchs have helped Justice’s exposure and revenue — the act’s music has appeared in ads for brands like Nike, Adidas and Volvo, in films like John Wick 4 and on TV shows like Netflix’s The Gentlemen — and at an album listening event for music supervisors in Los Angeles last winter, a label representative advised the group to keep Hyperdrama in mind “for your car chase and fight scenes.” The handful of DJ sets the act plays annually (mostly for friends or “events that we feel are interesting for us,” de Rosnay says) are both lucrative and no doubt a reminder to old and new fans that Justice is still a tastemaker.
Still, de Rosnay admits, “[We] have no idea how much we get paid from streams. Not that we don’t care, but we don’t really look out for that.” (With so much time between projects, he continues, “every time we finish making a record, we are, like, ruined.”
“Like, bankrupt,” Augé says.
“Like, we don’t have any money left,” de Rosnay adds. “Because every penny we make with Justice, we invest into stuff that’s not necessarily commercially viable” — like the duo’s live albums (which he calls “almost like a preplanned commercial failure”), complicated and costly concerts and performance films like 2019’s IRIS: A Space Opera by Justice.
Yet, the two agree that “as long as we are not in dire need, we don’t need to earn more money,” de Rosnay says. “We have houses. We have fun. We have food. It sounds cliché, but that’s the truth.”
Joel Barhamand
But while they say that Hyperdrama, like everything else they make, is about passion, artistic integrity and creating an enduring body of work, Winter sees more. “It has been 20 years, and of course we can say Justice had a couple of singles, but it’s not a success story yet,” he says. While massive streaming numbers are “definitely not a goal, I’ll be happy if the songs [get more than] 1 million plays on Spotify. One million plays — we are a joke compared to electronic music today. We are not chasing that, but I think they deserve it.”
And anyway, anyone who has seen the act live knows there’s no better Justice marketing tool than a Justice show — a quasi-religious experience that amalgamates the entirety of the duo’s catalog into a wall of pummeling, pristine electronic glory. The guys spent months working with a team of seven computer scientists to make their new live show, which they’ll debut April 12 at Coachella — a proving ground for ambitious dance productions dating back to Daft Punk’s historic unveiling of its pyramid in 2006. Having risen to the second-from-the-top line of the lineup in the 17 years since their first appearance, they’ll close out the festival’s second-largest venue, the Outdoor Stage.
“Coachella is the festival of all festivals,” Winter says. “To start the tour there is the best promotion you can have.” After that, Justice plays two dates in Mexico (the duo’s leading territory, according to Winter), then a flurry of European summer festivals before returning to North America for four East Coast dates and more on the other side of the country that will be announced in the coming weeks.
“There is definitely big ambition in the U.S. market,” Winter says, adding that South and Central America are also “huge.” The tour ends at Paris’ Accor Arena in December, with a second night added since the first sold out. Winter says he’s “sure they will do a live album” in conjunction with the tour, as is their tradition.
Augé takes French fries off de Rosnay’s plate without asking and recalls throwing him a 40th birthday party in the French countryside last summer, an event for which they bought out a small hotel and had their friends who run the kitchen roast several pigs. De Rosnay’s daughter is starting to understand what her dad does for work. When she heard him playing a demo of “One Night/All Night” on his phone, she told him it was “surprisingly good, for something you made.”
Xavier de Rosnay, left, and Gaspard Augé of Justice photographed on March 13, 2024 in Austin, Texas.
Joel Barhamand
Twenty years into their career, de Rosnay and Augé discuss their relationship in couples therapy terms (outside of Justice, both are unmarried). The secret of their success, de Rosnay says, is “patience, good communication. We’re in a band together; we are friends on a very intimate level. It’s likely that there’s not a lot of our romantic partners who can claim to know us better than we know each other.”
They still seriously consider a backup plan if things don’t ultimately work out in music. Augé says many of their musician friends are no longer pursuing careers in the industry, given its volatility; de Rosnay is confident they could still get work as graphic designers. But he also admits that should they follow that path, it’s “not going to be as cool as being in Justice.”
And for the time being — regardless of who they think their audience is or is not — they’ve got millions of prospective new listeners and a devoted global fan base that considers them actual rock stars.
“Please don’t break the news,” de Rosnay says with a smile, “that we are not.”
When South African singer-songwriter Tyla turned 22 years old in late January, she was on top of the world — literally.
Her label, Epic Records, invited a few hundred music executives, artists and fans to Harriet’s Rooftop in West Hollywood, Calif., for her birthday bash. The party was a dual celebration: Tyla had also recently scored her first Grammy Award nomination, for best African music performance — one of three new categories the Recording Academy introduced this year — with her 2023 breakthrough hit, “Water.”
Waiters surprised Tyla — who had transformed a corner of the rooftop bar into her own private VIP section, complete with glam shots of herself decorating the walls — with a glittery sheet cake. Epic chairwoman/CEO Sylvia Rhone and president Ezekiel Lewis presented her with three plaques commemorating the success of “Water”: gold and platinum certifications in over 18 countries (including the United States and South Africa); surpassing 1 billion views on TikTok; and reaching No. 1 on Billboard’s U.S. Afrobeats Songs, Rhythmic Airplay and Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay charts.
Then, five nights later, Tyla got the best belated birthday present of all: her first Grammy, the inaugural win in its category, which Jimmy Jam presented to her during the awards show’s premiere ceremony. “I was in such shock,” Tyla recalls on an early March afternoon. “It’s something that a lot of people strive toward and want to win at least once in their lifetime. And I’m so blessed to have received one so early in my career.”
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But for an artist reflecting on such a joyous moment, Tyla sounds a bit blue speaking to me about her Grammy win today — and understandably so. Just six hours before our chat, she had posted a letter on Instagram announcing the kind of news no young artist wants to reveal: Due to “an injury that’s tragically worsened,” she would be delaying her first headlining North American and European tour and dropping out of a handful of festivals, including Coachella. “It’s difficult because I want to go. It’s the moment that I’ve been waiting for,” she tells me. “It’s not an easy decision, but it’s the right decision.”
Four days later at her Billboard cover shoot, Tyla maintains a level of poise that suggests nothing’s wrong. She gamely plays the part of the glamorous burgeoning pop star, in a fur-print puffer jacket, bra top and mismatched gold hoops that complement the edginess of her eyebrow slit.
This is, after all, a role Tyla has prepared for her whole life. Her co-manager, Colin Gayle, clearly remembers his first meeting with her: “I was like, ‘What do you want to do?’ She said, ‘I want to be Africa’s first pop star.’ ” Gayle, who is also co-founder and CEO of Africa Creative Agency, had recently moved to South Africa when Brandon Hixon — the New York-based co-founder of FAX Records who started managing Tyla in 2018 after discovering her on Instagram — reached out to see if he would meet with Tyla and consider becoming her on-the-ground support. By 2020, Gayle had joined her management team.
AREA jacket and boots, Rui top, Cori! Burns skirt, Hugo Kreit earrings and Jacquie Aiche necklaces.
Ramona Rosales
As a new generation of young African women has broken into mainstream pop music over the past few years (including Beninese Nigerian singer Ayra Starr, whom Tyla collaborated with on “Girl Next Door,” and fellow South African DJ Uncle Waffles, whom she performed with in September in New York), Tyla has emerged with a unique blend of sounds dubbed “popiano” — a hybrid of pop, R&B and Afrobeats with the shakers, rattling log drums and soulful piano melodies of amapiano. It really popped when she released “Water,” a summer anthem with a sweltering pop/R&B hook (and a subtle sensuality recalling Aaliyah’s “Rock the Boat”) that floats over bubbling log drums.
“Water” opened the floodgates to the global recognition of Tyla’s dreams. The song debuted at No. 67 on the Billboard Hot 100 in October and by January had reached a No. 7 peak. Its viral TikTok dance helped catapult the track onto radio, and Travis Scott and Marshmello eagerly hopped on its remixes. “Water” hit No. 1 on U.S. Afrobeats Songs in October, ending the record 58-week reign of Rema and Selena Gomez’s “Calm Down,” and it has now spent 24 weeks (and counting) atop the chart. Tyla’s catalog has earned 283.7 million official on-demand U.S. streams, according to Luminate — and “Water” is responsible for 236.7 million of them.
On the morning of Nov. 10, 2023, Tyla’s Epic team told her to tune in to the Grammy nominations livestream from her hotel room in New York. “I didn’t even know the label submitted some songs,” she recalls. “When I saw my name, I was like, ‘There’s no way.’ My best friend was jumping in the room with me. I still have the video, and I’m wearing this bodysuit that’s half open. It’s a hectic video, but it showcases the excitement in that moment.”
This year’s best African music performance nominees were predominantly Nigerian artists — Burna Boy (“City Boys”), Davido (“Unavailable”), Asake and Olamide (“Amapiano”) and Starr (“Rush”). Tyla and Musa Keys (who’s featured on Davido’s “Unavailable”) were the only South African acts. Considering the significant inroads Afrobeats has made in the American music market over the last decade, Tyla’s win with an amapiano song wasn’t necessarily likely.
“That category is something that was introduced in my lifetime, and I was the first person to win it. And I’m able to bring it home back to South Africa,” Tyla marvels now, adding that her father has already claimed the trophy to be displayed in his study, along with the rest of her award hardware. “The South African genre of amapiano just started bubbling, and I’m so proud that South Africa has a genre that people are enjoying and paying attention to. I’m super proud of my country and where our sound has gone.”
Diesel dress, Dsquared2 shoes, Jenny Lauren Jewelry bracelet, Letra ring and UNOde50 bracelet and ring.
Ramona Rosales
That sound is just one element of how Tyla represents her home country in her craft, sometimes in ways that the average non-South African consumer might miss. For a late-2023 performance on The Voice, she transformed the stage into a shebeen, an “unlicensed, underground space for drinking and music” where Black South Africans could gather and “speak freely in protest” during apartheid, according to Lior Phillips, author of South African Popular Music (Genre: A 33 1/3 Series). And at the very end of the repeated prechorus of “Water,” Tyla softly exhales “haibo,” a Zulu expression of shock or disbelief. “It’s similar to ‘Yo!’ where you can use it multiple ways,” she explains. “In that [song], I kind of use it in a sassy way.”
But when she performed “Water” during her debut U.S. TV performance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in late October, Tyla replaced it with another South African expression: “Asambe!”
“ ‘Asambe’ in South Africa means ‘Let’s go!’ And she screamed it on the mic. That was pivotal,” recalls her choreographer, Lee-ché Janecke. “It felt awkward at first when we were rehearsing it because we were like, ‘Are we really going to do this on national television in America? Um, yeah, we are!’ As much as it’s one word, it meant the most to South Africa.”
Growing up in the “very lively” city of Johannesburg, Tyla Laura Seethal was always the center of attention. “Even before I could remember, my mother would tell me stories about how when I was small, I would always want to sing for people,” Tyla recalls. “I would pose for people just so they [could] take pictures of me. And I danced for everyone.”
Her parents exposed her to American R&B icons like Stevie Wonder, Brian McKnight, Aaliyah and Whitney Houston; South African pop and house acts like Freshlyground, Mi Casa and Liquideep; and Nigerian Afrobeats superstars like Wizkid, Burna Boy and Davido. When Tyla was 11, she started uploading videos of herself singing covers to YouTube and Instagram, from Billie Eilish’s “Ocean Eyes” to Boyz II Men’s version of “Let It Snow,” and DM’ing them to superstars like Drake and DJ Khaled.
Brielle catsuit, Nissa Jewelry earrings, UNOde50 necklace, Alejandra de Coss bracelet, Letra rings.
Ramona Rosales
While her countless reachouts went unanswered, her Instagram covers caught the attention of Garth von Glehn, a Zimbabwean director and photographer based between Cape Town and New York. When he first emailed her, Tyla worried it was a scam — but after a few weeks, she agreed to meet von Glehn with her parents.
Ultimately, Tyla spent every weekend of her final year of high school at his studio loft, writing and recording music, shooting music videos and conducting photo shoots with her best friend Thato Nzimande. Von Glehn’s loft was “a creative artist hub,” says Janecke, who worked on music video sets with von Glehn and was tapped by him to help train some of the in-house artists during their early development period. One of those artists was Tyla.
“She just had this thing in her eyes that she wants this!” Janecke exclaims. “And wanting it makes me feel like, ‘OK, I’m going to push more with this person.’ If you’re hungry, and that hunger never stops, that’s my girl. And she has been that girl since that point.”
Tyla’s parents, however, remained skeptical that the path of an artist was the right one for her — so, to appease them, she applied to university to study mining engineering, a field she picked only because “it was the job that was going to give me the most money.” But after “a lot of convincing and a lot of crying,” her parents allowed her a trial gap year after she graduated from high school in 2019 so she could prove that a full-time music career would pan out.
Working with Kooldrink, a producer living in von Glehn’s house, Tyla started “to experiment and find out the sound that I wanted to have.” At the time, amapiano was taking over South African dancefloors and radio stations alike. Meaning “the pianos” in Zulu, amapiano originated in the South African townships in the mid-2010s as a hybrid of deep house, jazz and kwaito music and was popularized by Kabza De Small and DJ Maphorisa, among others.
Ramona Rosales
After first hearing amapiano in high school, when a classmate played her Kwiish SA’s “Iskhathi (Gong Gong),” Tyla wanted to put her own spin on the genre. “Amapiano songs were like eight minutes, 10 minutes at that time,” Tyla told Billboard in October, when she was honored as R&B/Hip-Hop Rookie of the Month. “And I was like, ‘Oh, that’s a bit too long! Let me make an amapiano song that has the normal format of a pop song or an R&B song.” She experimented with that formula on her scintillating debut single, “Getting Late,” featuring Kooldrink. But after shooting one scene for the video at the beginning of 2020, the coronavirus pandemic broke out and production shut down. With just one year to prove herself to her parents, Tyla feared she had run out of time.
“Even if it only gets 270 views on YouTube and my career fails, I’ll just watch this video on repeat for the rest of my life and I’m pretty sure I’ll be happy,” Tyla posted on Instagram days before the “Getting Late” video eventually premiered in January 2021. The outcome quashed all of her previous concerns: The clip, which has since garnered more than 9 million YouTube views, earned a music video of the year nomination at the 2022 South African Music Awards, and FAX Records’ Hixon sent it to Epic’s Rhone and Lewis.
“This could be the vehicle to take Africa to the world in a way that it has never been exported before,” Lewis recalls thinking. The “Getting Late” video started a label bidding war, but thanks to Hixon’s established business relationship with Lewis and Rhone — and with a little help from multiple “Love, Sylvia Rhone from Epic” billboards with Tyla’s face on them placed around Johannesburg — Tyla chose Epic.
“It was a very competitive signing. We wanted something authentic, sincere and personal — especially since we’re 10,000-plus miles away,” Rhone says of her tactic. “That’s what sealed the deal.”
Tyla can still picture the first time she left South Africa, in 2021. “I remember looking outside of the plane and crying,” she says, “and being like, ‘What the heck is this?!’”
She was en route to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where Epic had assembled various American, European and African songwriters and producers, including three-time Grammy winner (and former Epic president of A&R) Tricky Stewart, and put them in a writing camp just for her. “At the time, we couldn’t get the resources and the people [to South Africa] to make it happen,” Lewis explains. “So I figured out randomly by looking at the map that Dubai would be a place that would host us all. That’s a very expensive proposition, a very ambitious sort of undertaking, but she was worth it.”
Ramona Rosales
For the next two-and-a-half years, Epic’s development of Tyla became a truly global endeavor, taking her and a rotating group of hit-makers to Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, South Africa, Jamaica, the United Kingdom, the United States and beyond to write and record her self-titled debut album. The sessions helped Tyla gain more formal studio recording experience, while also establishing her “Fantastic Four” team of creative collaborators: Ari PenSmith, Mocha Bands, Believve and Sammy SoSo, who all contributed to “Water,” the “summer banger” that Tyla felt had been missing from her album. In keeping with the project’s international genesis, the song was “produced in London, then finished in LA, written and vocal demo done in ATL then recorded in Cape Town,” as SoSo wrote on Instagram.
“I was actually driving in Portland [Ore.] with my family and I started listening to [“Water”] on my phone. I literally stopped the car and pulled over,” Hixon recalls of his initial reaction. “My wife and my kids were like, ‘What’s going on?’ And I was like, ‘Yo, this sh-t is crazy!’ ”
Tyla and her team instantly knew “Water” was going to be big, and she wanted to find a way to make it even bigger. One night at around 10:30 p.m., a few days before the song dropped, Tyla called Janecke and Nzimande to brainstorm choreography ideas. She had always loved the Pretoria-based Bacardi style of dancing — which synchronizes booty shaking and intricate footwork with a song’s fast-paced rhythm — and had incorporated it into a different song from her live sets that always generated a crazy crowd reaction. Tyla asked Janecke if he could create a Bacardi-inspired dance for “Water,” and within an hour, he drafted a TikTok video of his original routine and sent it to her. “She goes, ‘Post! Post this right now!’ ” he recalls excitedly. “She was going crazy over this pocket of hands up, hands down, throw it to the side, boom. Booty on log drum! Throw it to the other side. Booty on log drum!”
When she performed the dance for the first time at the self-proclaimed world’s biggest Afrobeats festival, Afro Nation Portugal, in July, Janecke had Tyla’s backup dancers pour water bottles on her. A month later, while rehearsing for her Giants of Africa festival set in Rwanda, she suggested simply pouring the water bottle on herself — a choreography tweak that proved to be social media gold. One festival attendee posted a video of the revised “Water” routine on her Instagram Story and Tyla asked for the footage, reposting to her own account shortly before jetting back to South Africa. When she landed almost four hours later, the video had amassed more than 5 million views. (It now has over 21 million.)
Tyla’s natural dance ability — and her instincts for the kind of performance that would most resonate on the internet — continued to draw in fans as she began performing on TV, appearances that, co-manager Gayle says, “cemented her as an artist.” But keeping her audience engaged and growing required more than one hit single. The Tyla EP arrived in early December, with “Water,” its Scott remix and three new songs — intended, Lewis explains, to give fans “a taste of other layers of the artist so that it becomes bigger than a track proposition and turns into an artist proposition.”
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The mini project also introduced a playful new focus track, “Truth or Dare,” which came with its own viral TikTok choreography. “Truth or Dare” and another EP track, the 1990s R&B-inspired “On and On,” became two more top 10 hits on the U.S. Afrobeats Songs chart for Tyla, peaking at Nos. 3 and 10, respectively, and “Truth or Dare” has been steadily climbing at radio, reaching No. 22 on Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay and No. 24 on Rhythmic Airplay.
The momentum of her other songs perfectly set the stage for the March 22 release of Tyla’s self-titled debut. It’s bittersweet that she can’t promote it live — yet — in the way she has proved to be so skilled, and for the moment, neither Tyla nor her label will reveal anything more about her injury. So for now, the music will have to speak for itself.
Over 14 tracks, Tyla polishes her popiano sound, finding the sweet spot between African and American music with R&B melodies, amapiano production and exquisite pop writing. “We traveled the world to make this record, and that’s why the world is reflected in this record,” Lewis says. Mexican American star Becky G joins her for the smooth, Afrobeats-meets-Latin dancefloor number “On My Body”; rapper Gunna and Jamaican dancehall artist Skillibeng help coax out her more braggadocious side on “Jump”; and Tyla brings other stars from her home continent along for the ride, blending beautifully with Nigerian singer-songwriter-producer Tems on “No. 1” and cooing over South African DJ-producer Kelvin Momo’s slow-burning amapiano production on “Intro.” “I had this voice note on my phone of the song playing and people talking in the back. I remember loving the slang that we were using and just the sound of a South African studio session,” Tyla says. “I knew I wanted that for my intro.”
And while her fans will have to wait to see her live (in her Instagram note, Tyla said she hoped to be “ready to return safely onstage this summer”), they can still see the kind of performer Tyla is in her Gap Spring 2024 Linen Moves campaign, which reimagines Jungle’s viral “Back on 74” music video. She wants to keep branching out into fashion, too, or perhaps dabble in makeup and acting. “People are going to see me everywhere,” she promises. “So if you don’t like me, I’m sorry.”
Tyla dreamed for years of becoming Africa’s first pop star — and she isn’t about to let one setback stop her. “I’m really confident in what I’ve created. Now’s a time where I can showcase a performance style where I’m not really dancing as much. Maybe I strip back a little bit more and I’m just serving vocals,” she muses. “But there’s no way to stop me. I’m always going to find a way.”
This story will appear in the March 30, 2024, issue of Billboard.
In February, Nicki Nicole was scheduled to perform in Miami for the first time as part of the Vibra Urbana Festival. But as torrential rain pummeled the 86-acre open-air festival grounds, one artist’s performance was canceled, and others had their sets cut short. Nicki waited anxiously in the wings for nearly three hours, until it came down to her to open the festival when the rain abated for a few minutes.
Wearing a black cutout bodysuit, blue and white motocross pants and her new, light chocolate hair (which she first rocked at the 2024 Grammy Awards) draping over a black headband, the 23-year-old Argentine artist, joined by eight background dancers, performed a 35-minute set that included hits such as “Colocao,” “DISPARA***” and “Una Foto (Remix)” — the collaboration with Mesita, Emilia and Tiago PZK that hit No. 1 on the Billboard Argentina Hot 100 chart in January and spent six consecutive weeks at the top.
Then it started to rain again — but the response from the soaking-wet crowd was still overwhelming.
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“It was very surprising,” an ebullient Nicki says after, still wearing her damp clothes. “With this day, the rain, to see all these people there, and they know all my songs, they’re having a blast — it’s just like I imagined it could be.” Despite the rain, it’s a moment of sunshine for Nicki, who is coming off a roller-coaster week during which she publicly hinted on social media that she and boyfriend Peso Pluma called it quits just five days before her Miami debut.
But Peso is not the topic of conversation as we chat backstage outside Nicki’s trailer, where former Argentine soccer star Maxi Rodriguez has also come to support her show. Her Miami premiere is a big deal for Nicki, and her mother, sister and two brothers are also in town from Argentina for the concert. She says they’re planning to go to Disney World the next day to celebrate.
While this may be Nicki’s first time in Miami, the rapper-singer has been making inroads in the market since April 2019, when she released her debut single, “Wapo Traketero.” That August, she made history on the Billboard Argentina Hot 100 by becoming the first Argentine female rapper to debut on the chart as a solo act. (Cazzu charted first, in July, but as a collaborator on J. Mena’s “Quien Empezó.”) The following year, she made history again, becoming the first Argentine woman to earn a No. 1 with her collaboration on Trueno’s “Mamichula,” which also features Taiu, Bizarrap and Tatool.
Performing a fusion of rap and R&B — but expanding her versatility to other genres like reggaetón and cumbia — Nicki Nicole takes a feminine but edgy approach that paved the way for a new generation of Argentine urban acts — such as Emilia and Maria Becerra — who now also dominate the country’s charts and are playing arenas.
Nicki is tied with Emilia for the second-most No. 1s (both with four), trailing only Becerra, with six. “Entre Nosotros (Remix),” a collaboration with Tiago PZK, Lit Killah and Becerra, topped the chart for 16 weeks, the second-most behind Karol G and Nicki Minaj’s “Tusa,” which ruled for 25.
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While Nicki’s dominance in Argentina is established — she played the last of nine sold-out shows at Buenos Aires’ Movistar Arena on March 10 — her goal now is to go global. She’ll play Madrid’s WiZink Center for the first time on March 21, after headlining Billboard’s inaugural Encuentro de Música en Español on March 19, and will wrap her ALMA tour at the Estéreo Picnic Festival in Bogota, Colombia, on March 24.
The trek — which began in August in Buenos Aires and stopped in Costa Rica, Guatemala and Bolivia, among other countries — is in support of her ultra-personal album, ALMA, that thrives on emotions, spirituality, reason and an awakening to self-love. It was nominated for best rap/hip-hop album at the 2023 Latin Grammys, and the track “DISPARA***,” with Milo J, was up for best rap/hip-hop song.
In the middle of it all, Nicki also publicly addressed her relationship with Peso Pluma after a video of him appearing to hold hands with another woman in Las Vegas over Super Bowl weekend surfaced on social media. “Respect is a necessary part of love,” she posted Feb. 13 on Instagram, where Nicki has over 21 million followers. “What is loved, is respected. What is respected, is cared for. When you are not cared for and there is no respect, I don’t stay there. I leave. It is with great sorrow that I found out the same way you did, thank you for the love you are sending me.”
Nicki Nicole photographed on February 18, 2024 at Vibra Urbana in Miami.
Devin Christopher
The flurry of fan comments, mostly in support of her, highlighted her other side: the singer as social media personality who must focus on her art amid intense public scrutiny. For someone as young as Nicki, she has managed to do so with surprising grace.
“The truth is that I felt that everything was so public that I couldn’t have done it any other way. People already knew it and it was uncontrollable,” Nicki says, explaining why she posted a reaction. “What has healed me the most these days are the people, my fans. I received many messages from women congratulating me on the message I sent,” she says, sounding laid-back and self-assured.
While someone else might have canceled a performance or, in this case, an interview, Nicki did not.
“It’s unprofessional of me to stop every time something personal happens,” she says. “I’m not the center of the world, and there are many people who work for me and with me. I can’t stop everything. My team doesn’t deserve it. My fans don’t deserve it.”
Nicole Denise Cucco hails from Rosario, Argentina, the birthplace of soccer star Lionel Messi. Her interest in music sparked from a childhood admiration for Amy Winehouse, who she looked up to for her soulful, R&B-tinged vocals, as well as her character, resilience and how she treated fans.
“Not only did I empathize with how difficult it is to be an artist but also the internal battles of each person,” Nicki says. “I realized that even though she could be in shambles, she went out to perform, she did interviews, she was with her fans. From her I learned that every person I meet I will always treat them as they deserve and will always give my fans the attention they need.”
Devin Christopher
The youngest of four children (she has two brothers and one sister), Nicki was always the performer at home. “When I was little, I would put on shows in my kitchen and force everyone to look at me singing with the broomstick,” she told Billboard in 2022 during an episode of Growing Up.
Nicki’s mother expected her youngest daughter to finish school and go to college, but she had other plans.
“I explained to her, ‘Mom, look, I really want to make music. I know what I’m proposing is crazy because I’m one in a million who wants to make music, but I really feel that I can make it work, and if I have your support, I can do it,’ ” she recalls. Her mother agreed, and Nicki switched to night school to record music during the day.
She had fallen in love with the more melodic style of Spanish rapper Delaossa, whose music “encouraged me to make bars and freestyles,” and as a teenager, she practiced her freestyling skills at the many impromptu contests held in her hometown.
However, she found the male-dominated scene challenging.
“I would go in, but it was hard,” she remembers. She found that men would edit or change their raps when she was around. “When a man freestyled against a woman, a lot of things were lost — like being able to play with words, being able to say incredible things — and it fell into the basics. I lost a little interest because I felt my rhymes [couldn’t evolve]. So, I decided to freestyle with my friends, to evolve with people who I can rap about the culture, about what happens to me, about the fact that I am a woman — and it helped me a lot to start doing it alone, too.”
Devin Christopher
In April 2019, Nicki launched her YouTube channel with her debut single, “Wapo Traketero” — a slow R&B track fronted by her tender vocals. It was the song’s melodic approach that ultimately helped her stand out in a crowd of emerging Argentine rap and trap artists at the time.
“I always think about my mentality then and now. At that moment I didn’t know if a song was doing well or bad. For me, it just meant that people liked it and shared it,” she says. “I didn’t know about No. 1s, I didn’t know about charts, I didn’t know about trends. My mentality in music was different. When I started, I didn’t think I had to make hits. I just loved releasing the songs.”
“Wapo Traketero” caught the attention of Duki, who was then leading the Argentine trap scene and who boasted about her to his label, Dale Play Records, founded by Federico Lauria in 2018.
“Duki posted about Nicki on social media, writing, ‘We have a new boss in town,’ ” Lauria told Billboard in 2020 of how he discovered her. “When I listened to her music, I went crazy and wanted to sign her immediately.” Lauria, who launched Dale Play with Duki, added Nicki and producer Bizarrap to his roster. (He also manages all of them.) “All these artists come from the same place — the streets — but they’re all doing something different,” he added.
Nicki struck a chord. At 4 feet 9 inches, she defied the stereotype of the female Latin rapper and of what women in the local music scene could do.
Almost immediately after her signing, Nicki scored her first Billboard chart entry in 2020 with “Mamichula” in collaboration with Trueno and Bizarrap. The song hit No. 1 on the Billboard Argentina Hot 100, leading for four weeks, and became her first entry on the Billboard Global 200 and Global Excl. U.S. charts. That same year, she scored her first Latin Grammy nomination, for best new artist.
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Overall, Nicki has placed 33 entries on the Billboard Argentina Hot 100, tying with Karol G for the second-most among women behind Maria Becerra’s 46. Out of those 33, nine hit the top 10 and four reached No. 1.
On the U.S. charts, “Pa’ Mis Muchachas,” with Christina Aguilera and Becky G and featuring Nathy Peluso, earned Nicki her first top 10 when it debuted at No. 3 on Latin Digital Song Sales in 2021. “Ella No Es Tuya,” with Rochy RD and Myke Towers, became her first Hot Latin Songs entry, and her second album, Parte de Mí, was her debut on Latin Pop Albums that same year.
“All you need to do is see her live in concert to fully understand the impact Nicki has on people,” Lauria tells Billboard. “The artistic flight she has and her musical talent make her unique — how she goes through people, her sensitivity, her lyricism. This was all enhanced with her latest album, ALMA, where she was able to open up from a more sensitive place. And it clearly shows with the success that her tour is having.”
Back inside her trailer at the Vibra Urbana Festival, a cool and collected Nicki is snacking on chips and a banana — as Ivy Queen performs onstage in the background. The Puerto Rican diva’s set followed Nicki’s at the festival, which is fitting, as she has been a major inspiration.
“When I started music, one of the first women who offered me advice was Ivy,” Nicki recalls. “I loved what she said because it is unforgettable — like, ‘Mami, I want you to know that everything you do and the place you have, you earned it by yourself. And here you have a place as a woman. We fought so that you have this place.’ ”
Devin Christopher
The first woman artist to support an up-and-coming Nicki Nicole, however, was Cazzu. The artist born Julieta Emilia Cazzuchelli (and partner of Christian Nodal) became a household name in Argentina in 2018 after gaining momentum from “Loca (Remix)” with Khea, Bad Bunny and Duki. Nicki’s first time onstage was at a Cazzu concert and her first female collaboration was “Cómo Dímelo,” in 2019, with Cazzu.
“When a new woman appears, the patriarchal construction of the public makes them first compare us and then make enemies of us,” Cazzu says. “She was going to shine with or without me, but I was the only woman there. I let her know that she could count on me inside and outside of music because I had to go through endless sexist and misogynistic experiences. That hurt my spirits, and I didn’t want her to go through that. That’s what the movement is about. That one of us cleared the weeds from the path so that others could walk better and waste less time fighting and put it into music.”
That first expression of female support later appeared in other powerful collaborations with female artists from different countries and styles, including “Pa’ Mis Muchachas” with Christina Aguilera, Becky G and Nathy Peluso; “intoxicao” with Emilia; “Formentera” with Aitana; “8 AM” with Young Miko; and “Enamórate” with Bad Gyal.
“I love the woman who does not envy, who does not compete, who wants the best for everyone,” Nicki says. “One of the messages that really stuck with me is that of Young Miko. She was over the moon. She was having a big, explosive moment, and yet she flew to record the music video for ‘8 AM’ and sent me a message that said, ‘If we succeed, we all succeed together.’ What I like most is working with women, because in the studio we flow a lot, we share similar feelings and life situations that we understand among ourselves, and that’s great when it comes to working together.”
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Beyond being a loyal girl’s girl, Nicki’s bold attitude and stage presence have organically earned her the respect of the music industry and fans globally.
In addition to her eight Latin Grammy nominations, she won female new artist at the 2021 Premio Lo Nuestro, performed on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in April 2021 and made her debut at Coachella in 2022. Most recently, on March 5 during Paris Fashion Week, she appeared as a Lacoste brand ambassador.
After her sold-out show in Madrid, she’ll play Barcelona and, later, Mexico. Once she’s done with touring, Nicki promises to spend more time in the recording studio rather than on the road.
“Right now, I feel like there are a lot of things that are happening to me personally and I want to put them into music,” she says without elaborating. “There’s a lot of inspiration,” she adds with a smile.
By now, inside her trailer, she has progressed from snacks to a shot of whiskey, and Nicki raises her glass. “For my first concert in Miami and for my first Billboard cover. ¡Salud!’”
On June 29, 2012, Nick Miller regained consciousness in a Boulder, Colo., hospital room. The day before, he’d overdosed on heroin, the final act of a 10-day drug binge. Coming to, he saw his mother and the sadness in her eyes. He was 21 years old and had been sober for 15 months after time in rehab and years of opiate addiction. He’d been doing so well.
But his mom had known something was off after her son had gone quiet over text and phone. She called a friend of his, insisting they go check on him while she packed a bag and booked the next flight to Denver. The friend found Miller unresponsive, thrust naloxone — the opioid overdose reversal medication — up his nose and dialed 911. If not for his mom’s sense that something was wrong, it’s unlikely that I’d be here in Miller’s house on this chilly February afternoon in Los Angeles to talk with him about his incredible success as electronic producer Illenium. It’s unlikely he’d be here at all.
Sitting in the cave-like home studio within his large and otherwise light-filled house, Miller, 33, dotes on his dogs — the regal Belgian Malinois Grace and a small but fierce blonde dachshund whose dedicated Instagram account has 23,000 followers and for whom the house’s Wi-Fi network, “Palace du Peanut,” is named — holding them in arms covered in sacred geometry and Eye of Sauron tattoos. He makes jokes and direct eye contact, speaks in ski-bum parlance (“fire,” “sick,” “chillin’ ”), endearingly giggles and generally comes off as a person worth rooting for.
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I ask Miller what he’d say to that hospital room version of himself, given everything that has happened since. His answer is immediate: “There’s no way I would have even believed the possibilities.”
Illenium plays Billboard Presents THE STAGE at SXSW on March 16. Get your tickets here.
As Illenium, Miller is one of the most successful electronic acts of the last half-decade, a dance music star in the fireworks and confetti tradition, but with a harder and more rock-oriented sound and sensibility than straightforward main-stage EDM. In a genre known more for talent-heavy festival bills than solo-show hard ticket sales, he’s one of only a handful of artists, like ODESZA and Kaskade, playing venues as massive as stadiums and arenas.
Still, it’s possible you’ve never heard of him. Illenium hasn’t yet had a solo crossover hit (“Takeaway,” his 2019 collaboration with The Chainsmokers and Lennon Stella, hit No. 69 on the Billboard Hot 100 and remains his highest-ranking single on the chart), and unlike some world-famous DJs, he doesn’t frequent fashion shows, post shirtless selfies or chase fame.
He calls himself “very much a homebody,” one who most enjoys staying in and working on music, playing video games and hanging out with his dogs and his wife, Lara. The two met at a festival and married last September in Aspen, Colo., not too far from their primary residence, a 23,000-square-foot estate in the Denver suburb of Cherry Hills. Miller says he only bought the L.A. house in 2021 because “I was spending so much money on hotels and studio spaces here that it made more financial sense.” He has left twice in the last six days, once for a meeting and the other time to play the second of his back-to-back headlining shows at SoFi Stadium.
Louis Vuitton shirt and Askyurself sweater.
Daniel Prakopcyk
These Trilogy performances — so named because they feature three separate Illenium sets over five hours — are the current crown jewel of the Illenium empire. Prior to the Feb. 2 and 3 shows in L.A. (where his team says fans bought $2 million in merchandise alone), last June’s Trilogy concert at Denver’s Mile High stadium grossed $3.9 million and sold 47,000 tickets. It happened amid a 26-date North American tour that sold 191,000 tickets and grossed $15.7 million, according to Billboard Boxscore. His fourth studio album, 2021’s Fallen Embers, earned a Grammy Award nomination for best dance/electronic album, an accomplishment that came months after the debut Trilogy show at Las Vegas’ Allegiant Stadium helped break the pandemic’s pause on live music.
With nearly 33,000 attendees, the July 3, 2021, performance, according to Boxscore, broke the record for the biggest dance music event for a single headliner in U.S. history. At the end of it, Miller told the roaring crowd that for him Trilogy represents “my transition from a f–king sh–ty life. That was my past. So it’s just f–king crazy, this. What the f–k? This is a f–king football stadium.”
Performing from a cryo-spitting tower of LEDs on the 50-yard line was not on Miller’s radar when he started releasing music in 2014. His work helped form the then-emerging future bass subgenre, which, like the bass music that influenced it, is huge and often heavy but also simultaneously soft — like getting hit in the head with a two-by-four wrapped in velvet. Future bass also incorporates more traditional verse/chorus song structures than much of the wilder bass made by Illenium’s influences and peers — Zeds Dead, Excision, SLANDER, Dabin, Said the Sky, Space Laces — and his work also heavily integrates rock, metal, indie and pop sounds. The Illenium oeuvre, developed over his five studio albums, is cinematic, anthemic, often heavy and typically lyrically personal music that mulls deeper themes — love, heartbreak, rage — than standard dance refrains about putting your f–king hands up.
“I’m sensitive,” Miller says, and “for sure” an emotional person. For him, writing music is a form of escape, release and healing, and he thinks listeners can feel the depths he’s pulling from: “A fan who’s going through something — when they listen to something personal, it just bonds in a different way.”
Des Pierrot vest, Jack John Jr. pants, Louis Vuitton shoes.
Daniel Prakopcyk
This bond is a key reason why fans not only love Illenium’s music, but often have devotional relationships with it. The audiences at his shows party and headbang — but there’s also a lot more crying at an Illenium concert than at most electronic sets.
His fusion of bass with traditional song structures has also fueled his broad appeal. UTA’s Guy Oldaker, his longtime agent, came up in the bass scene of Colorado — the genre’s spiritual U.S. home and a huge dance hub, with Denver effectively tied with Miami as the United States’ highest-indexing major market for electronic music streaming, according to Luminate. But Oldaker hadn’t figured out how to cross these artists over into major festivals and Las Vegas residencies, where he says crowds usually want “easily accessible pop music.”
When a promoter sent Oldaker demos by a local producer named Illenium in 2014, “I went, ‘Holy crap, this is exactly what I think will work with this audience in Vegas,’ ” Oldaker recalls. “I know very well how to build an artist in the scene where I’ve built everything else. I knew if I could connect the dots, we’d have a winner.”
Now, after the pandemic deflated his team’s plans for international expansion, Illenium is poised for the kind of global ubiquity Oldaker has long believed he could achieve — that is, if that’s even what he wants. “I go back-and-forth on if I’d rather be a famous world star DJ,” Miller says bluntly, “or just like, kind of be chillin’.”
When Oldaker first met him, Miller was sober — and also deep in the bass scene. He handed out show flyers as an intern for local promoter Global Dance, wrote for electronic music blogs, frequented Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison and Aspen’s Belly Up Tavern and fell in love with the music and community he had found. He’d returned to rehab following his overdose and, afterward, started teaching himself music: playing piano, watching YouTube tutorials on music theory and making “like, ‘Wonderwall’ remixes and random crap, just to figure it out.”
Soon, the music blog dubstep.net voted one of his tracks the No. 1 song of the moment. “I was like, ‘Let’s f–king go,’ ” he recalls. He’d also started performing around Denver and in 2015 signed with Oldaker (then at Madison House Presents), who sent Illenium (his name references Star Wars’ Millenium Falcon) on the road as a support act for artists like Big Gigantic and Minnesota. After a show at the 500-capacity George’s Majestic Lounge in Fayetteville, Ark., attendees bought out the venue for a second night so Illenium could play again. “And that sold out,” Oldaker says. “These were small-market shows by someone no one had ever heard of who was getting 250 bucks to open for another artist, and all of a sudden he’s blowing out some room in Arkansas.”
Miller and his team — which by this time included manager Ha Hau (also the founder of Global Dance) and touring manager Sean Flynn, whom he’d met in recovery — started putting up headline shows at smaller clubs. They decided he needed a signature “thing” and that it would be, Oldaker says, “putting so much production into these rooms that people walked out like, ‘I don’t know what I just saw.’ ”
For a 2015 set at Denver’s 650-capacity Bluebird Theater, Miller spent $10,000 on a custom metal phoenix, a symbol of his rise from addiction that has also appeared on his album covers and on the Illenium jerseys that are the de facto fan uniform at his shows. “On most of my tours, I’ve gone as far as I could with production by breaking even, or just slightly above,” he says. Flynn declines to give an exact price tag for Trilogy’s production, but says the shows are “really expensive.” They weren’t sure if they’d even turn a profit with the SoFi sets, but then “the second show crushed,” Miller says. “So we were chillin’.”
Daniel Prakopcyk
Streams, ticket sales and festival billings grew steadily as his profile rose, and his second album, 2017’s Awake, reached No. 106 on the Billboard 200. But Miller felt a disconnect. Fans didn’t know about the personal experiences making his songs so emotionally intense, a chasm that felt especially wide when they told him his music had helped them through hard times, like dealing with addiction.
“I’ve been wanting to share something super personal with you for a while,” Miller wrote in a letter posted to X (then Twitter) in August 2018, revealing his struggles with opiates and his overdose. “I was trapped in it, had no passion, no direction and truly hated myself… I’m just sharing my story and relating because music saved my life too.” The news came in tandem with the release of “Take You Down,” a huge, hypnotic song he wrote about his mother. “I couldn’t see that when I went to hell,” vocalist Tim James sings, “I was taking you with me.”
“Watching that relationship get torn by the sh-t you keep doing — at first, it’s like, ‘Why are you on me so much, I’m not even that bad,’ ” Miller reflects now. “Then it goes into ‘OK, I can’t stop’ and then it goes into, like, “F–k everyone. I can’t live without it.’ And then you’re just breaking down.”
Making this information public initially made him nervous “because I didn’t want to come off preachy. I love rave culture and people enjoying themselves and don’t want to be the person that’s like” — he shifts to a nerdy tone — “ ‘You guys are really f–king your lives up.’ ” But six years later, he thinks his fans appreciate knowing, “given all the music that has come out of it and that I did all of this sober.”
LEMAIRE jacket and Louis Vuitton shirt, pants and shoes.
Daniel Prakopcyk
In a realm not known for temperance, Miller says that Kaskade — one of the few sober dance artists — has been a role model who has shown him “you can do this and not be a party animal, because it’s hard. You see how insane people go and wonder if you’ll be accepted if you’re not partaking.”
But Miller is also uniquely suited to talk to fans about drugs. Last year, he partnered with L.A.-based nonprofit End Overdose, which distributes free naloxone and fentanyl test strips, provides training on how to respond to overdoses and is a partner of major dance music promoter Insomniac Events. He raised $50,000 for the organization through a fan donation matching campaign, became a certified End Overdose trainer, gave tutorials on administering naloxone on Instagram Live, provided trainings at stops on his last tour and gave contest winners an in-person demonstration at the Denver Trilogy show. Over 2,000 doses of naloxone have been distributed across these events; last September, one was used to resuscitate someone at a concert (not Illenium’s) in Kansas City, Mo. “We’ve literally saved lives together,” End Overdose communications officer Mike Giegerich says. “It’s beyond meaningful.”
Meanwhile, Miller has rather cleverly figured out a healthy (and productive) way to satisfy his own addictive impulses. “To have five hours to shape the night and do it all?” he says of the Trilogy shows. “That’s like, my psycho drug addictness. That sounds very fulfilling and, like, a sweet high for me.”
The five-hour Trilogy shows have also given Miller time to explore the direction he’ll pursue next. After his rock- and metal-focused 2023-self-titled album, which featured artists like Travis Barker and Avril Lavigne, the Trilogy sets inspired him to return to his electronic roots, and he’s working on “a lot” of new music. Collaborations with Tiësto (a Colorado neighbor Miller calls “the f–king man”), REZZ, Seven Lions, Mike Shinoda and others he’s not yet ready to name are forthcoming — not as an album, but as singles to be released throughout 2024.
Outside of scattered festival dates, he’s not touring this year, but Oldaker says, “World domination is where I think we go from here.” Flynn says the team “had a lot of steam” in Europe and Asia before the pandemic, and it’s now positioned to rebuild that momentum. American-style bass music has historically “had a hard time getting good traction” in Europe, Oldaker says, but he fervently believes Illenium could be the one to break it.
Miller’s own feelings are more mixed. He points out that his seven-date European tour last summer hit 2,000- to 3,000-capacity rooms and turned out “fire” crowds in cities like Brussels and Barcelona. He also acknowledges that the more minimal, less headbang-y European scene is “just so different,” Miller continues, “and I never bought into it. I’m not a partier. I like being home, and I don’t play that game of ‘meet this promoter so you can play their festival or club.’ I’m so not that person, and I think that has hurt me a bit in Europe.”
Still, he’d love to bring the full show abroad. He has growing fan bases in Asia (he did his first headlining show in India in February) and Australia, and his team is also eyeing expansion into Africa and Central and South America.
Meanwhile, North American demand hasn’t abated for the artist Oldaker calls “the underground monster you’ve never heard of who all of a sudden blows your mind.” Several stadiums have reached out about hosting a Trilogy show, and fans can see Illenium through September at his residency at the 2,100-capacity Zouk in Las Vegas, a club the team chose for its production capabilities. Having played Vegas since his days as an opener, Miller has learned “the game” of these shows: “taking yourself less seriously, just having fun and not trying to have a musical therapy session in a f–king Vegas club.”
Daniel Prakopcyk
While there are many goals still to reach — a crossover hit (his official remix of Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero” toed the line), major mainstream festival headlining slots, movie scores and, Oldaker says, “expanding what he’s doing so people understand he isn’t just a bass producer and can do all these other things” — the imminent strategy is simple: keep building “core events,” Oldaker says, like Trilogy and Illenium’s Ember Shores destination festival in Mexico, which held its second edition in December. “Yes, we want to headline all the major festivals, but we have a great thing going with Trilogy where we can create these incredible experiences for fans to come be a part of,” Oldaker explains. “We’ll continue building it and hope these bigger festivals see the value we’re creating.”
“There is no ceiling to cap the success that he is capable of,” adds Tom Corson, co-chairman/COO of Warner Records, which released Illenium. “Nick is a career artist who can be as big as he wants to be both within dance music and outside of the genre.”
While now in a period of relative downtime, the guy whose lexicon heavily favors “chillin’ ” doesn’t, actually, want to be entirely chill. His Colorado rhythm is to drink coffee, run the dogs, tend to Illenium business — a straightforward model of “merch and music and shows,” he says — then hit his home studio. He’s also remodeling a Denver warehouse into a recording space for himself and other artists, some of whom will likely appear on the label he’s putting together. When he’s really not working, he golfs, snowmobiles or hangs with his parents, sisters, nieces and nephews who, Oldaker says, “are always around him.”
“They’re so happy, full of joy,” Miller says of his family’s take on his achievements. “We have a beautiful life now.”
That family isn’t just his direct relations anymore, but the tens of thousands of screaming fans who love him — not only as an artist, but as a survivor: the kid in the hospital bed who was about to get up and make it all happen.
This story originally appeared in the March 9, 2024, issue of Billboard.
It’s the tattoos that really make Christian Nodal stick out like a sore thumb. With his inked-up body — and face — he looks more like a rapper or rock star than the exploding regional Mexican artist he is.
“I didn’t want to be anyone’s shadow,” Nodal declares. “I felt that the genre was stigmatized under all these stereotypes, and I wanted to break all of that because I was unsatisfied to see that our genre wasn’t going far enough.”
Since launching his career in 2017, Nodal, now 25, has made a name for himself (sometimes with sharp elbows) as a maverick in a genre long bound by tradition. From the time he started at age 18, he has revolutionized regional Mexican music by pioneering mariacheño, a subgenre fusing mariachi’s strings and horns with the norteño accordion.
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“I didn’t want to disrespect anyone, much less the mentality of some of these [regional Mexican] legends who think the genre should sound and look a very specific way,” he explains. “But that wasn’t me. I didn’t feel part of it. I wanted to make it my own.”
Christian Nodal plays Billboard Presents THE STAGE at SXSW on March 15. Get your tickets here.
When we meet in mid-December at Lienzo Zermeño — where charreadas, or Mexican rodeos, take place in the middle of Jalisco’s bustling city of Guadalajara — Nodal beams with pride as he recounts the arc he has followed to become one of Latin music’s biggest stars in a few short years. He may look like a malote (bad guy) — he jokes about the role he would probably get cast for in a movie because of his tattoos — but he’s far from it, offering friendly hellos to the ranch’s workers and flashing a shy smile to the bystanders who recognize him but are too timid to introduce themselves.
Nodal’s entry into the regional Mexican world was a bit less genteel. When he started his career, the music’s leaders were purists who leaned heavily on the traditional sound that had worked for them — and for the genre that has been around for more than a century. That left little room for experimentation, and some in the industry initially balked at Nodal’s unorthodox approach. “I think the first year they saw me as the new kid, but by my second year, I don’t think they liked that I was still around. I saw a face of the regional Mexican that was quite raw, real and ugly,” Nodal says. “I was disappointed and thought, ‘OK, we probably won’t be creating a bond, much less collaborating. Fine. I’m going this way and [making] regional music bigger.’ ”
To that end, Nodal has collaborated with artists well beyond regional Mexican, including Romeo Santos, Kany García, David Bisbal, Sebastián Yatra and Maná — but without sacrificing his mariacheño style. (His few collaborations with regional acts include Alejandro Fernández, Banda MS and Ángela Aguilar.) He has also sought out new songwriting voices, including the Grammy Award-nominated Edgar Barrera, who co-wrote some of Nodal’s biggest hits.
That willingness to challenge genre norms propelled the mariacheño singer — whose urban cowboy aesthetic incorporates leather vests, diamond necklaces, statement earrings and heavy rings on his fingers — to a remarkable year both professionally and personally in 2023. In December, he wrapped his Foraji2 Tour, a 31-date arena run produced by Cárdenas Marketing Network that kicked off in August and followed his 22-date 2022 Forajido tour. He won his sixth Latin Grammy Award (best ranchero/mariachi album) for Forajido EP2, and he scored his 15th No. 1 on the Regional Mexican Airplay chart — a record for a solo artist since the list launched in 1994 — with that set’s “Un Cumbión Dolido.” And he became a father when he and his partner, Argentine rapper-singer Cazzu, welcomed a baby girl in September.
“I remember those times when I would come down from the stage and feel alone,” says Nodal, who now lives in Argentina with Cazzu and their daughter. “Now I come down to a stroller with my baby in it, and it all seems perfect. She has already been on tour with us, and I thought it would be hard, but she’s a rock star,” he says, getting choked up. “When she was born, I was feeling exhausted. I don’t know how I managed to change diapers, but she gives me energy, motivation and strength.”
Dolce & Gabbana shirt, Chrome Hearts vest, belt and jewelry, and Braggao and John Varvatos jewelry.
Lisette Poole
A lot has changed — not just in his personal life, but in the broader Latin music landscape — since Nodal released his first single, the achingly beautiful “Adiós Amor,” in 2017. Powered by wailing trumpets, a stirring accordion and Nodal’s strikingly mature and evocative baritone, the song quickly established him as one of the great vocalists in the genre. It earned him his first Regional Mexican Airplay No. 1 and spent seven weeks atop the chart. “When working with Christian, these two things are always present: He’s like an artist from another planet when making music, and [he sings] it in a spectacular way,” says Afo Verde, chairman/CEO of Sony Music Latin-Iberia, which signed Nodal in early 2022.
Now, thanks to the doors Nodal has opened in just a few short years and the sound he pioneered, regional Mexican is dominating the Latin charts, and a new crop of artists — who sing corridos tumbados, tumbados románticos, sad sierreño, or whatever the latest iteration of the genre is, and are keen to collaborate — has taken the lead, helping globalize the music that, while a backbone of Latin, was long considered meant for a niche audience. But none of those performers have dominated quite like Nodal — and he has done it on his own terms.
“Everything can coexist,” he says. “I enjoy fusing sounds, but I don’t run toward something just because it’s working [for others]. I’m very careful not to deviate from my purpose. I still need to feel proud of what I do.”
Born in Sonora, a northern Mexican state that borders Arizona, and later raised in Guadalajara and Ensenada, Baja California, Nodal grew up in a musical household, listening to pop, rock, rap, bachata and more. But he also developed a great respect for regional Mexican — it “practically fed us,” he says — from an early age. He loved to watch his grandfather play the trumpet: “I think before I wanted to be a singer, my goal was to be a trumpeter like Arturo Sandoval.” His father and manager, Jaime González, who has also played the instrument since childhood, is an industry veteran who managed late sierreño singer Ariel Camacho, a major inspiration to Nodal. Today, González’s record label/management company JG Music includes Nodal, Los Plebes del Rancho de Ariel Camacho and Los Elementos de Culiacán. González met Nodal’s mother, Cristy Nodal, while they were in the same musical group, in which she sang lead.
“We’ve been musicians all our lives,” González says. “From a very young age we instilled music in all our children, but more as a hobby or tool to help them with their emotions. Not so much as a business, because we have been doing this for a long time and it is not easy.” But Nodal wanted to sing, so his mother, a longtime mariachi singer, taught him. “They were committed,” González remembers. “At first, I didn’t want to get on board because I didn’t have the time and I didn’t want this complicated career for him because he’s very sensitive. But when I would come back from tours with Ariel, Christian and his mom had several songs already written, and I said, ‘OK, fine. I’ll produce an album for you.’ ”
AMIRI shirt, Alessandro Vasini jeans, Chrome Hearts, and Braggao and John Varvatos jewelry.
Lisette Poole
That first unofficial album included a cover of “Adiós Amor,” a song previously recorded by Los Dareyes de la Sierra. His mother wanted him to record it in mariachi style, but “I really thought of mariachi as music for older men,” Nodal says. He honored her wish, but at Nodal’s request, his father added the norteño accordion — to represent his “esencia sonorense” (Sonora essence) — along with banda-style trumpets and subtle violins.
“People responded really well to it on social media,” González remembers. “It’s as if the world had been waiting for Nodal.”
When “Adiós Amor” went viral, Nodal’s team comprised Cristy, then his de facto manager, and González, who was his producer. “I remember I would see cars pass by [in Ensenada] blasting the cover I had uploaded to Facebook,” he says, laughing. But then he noticed a problem: No one knew he was the one singing the song. “I think people expected it to be an older man, and it was funny when I would be at clubs in Guadalajara and they’d play my song and I would be like, ‘Hey, that’s me,’ ” he says. “They could identify the song but not the face, and I wanted that to change. It was something that kept me up at night.”
Nodal needed support — and it came by way of Universal Music Latino/Fonovisa, which signed him in 2017 after “Adiós Amor” caught the labels’ attention. By that August, he had released his official debut album, Me Dejé Llevar, which peaked at No. 2 on Billboard’s Top Latin Albums list, his highest ranking on that chart. But after releasing two more studio albums between 2019 and 2021 under Universal, a feud with the label turned public when Nodal took to Instagram Live to reveal he would not be renewing his contract; shortly after, in early 2022, Nodal signed with Sony Music Latin in a partnership with Sony Music Mexico. “When you’re young and you don’t know about these things, you do what you have to do to achieve your dreams,” says Nodal, who won’t share much more about the conflict. “If nothing goes wrong in your life, then you don’t learn.”
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When Nodal met for the first time with Verde and his Sony colleagues Alex Gallardo (president of Sony Music U.S. Latin) and Roberto López (president of Sony Music Mexico), he made his expectations clear. “I told them that I want to have the freedom to work with any artist from any label, that I want freedom to decide when I’m going to release my albums and that I want to own my albums after a certain amount of time,” he recalls. “Afo, Alex and Roberto are people that I love very much, and they have shown me the good side of the industry. They are putting their life, their faith, their effort into the growth of an artist.”
“What helped us to build trust with Christian and a great team was that from the beginning we had great chemistry,” Gallardo says. “We knew how to listen to his needs and concerns, and we worked to provide him with as much support as possible and put at his disposal a team that would work for him and help him achieve his goals.”
For Sony, Nodal was a valuable roster addition — an “ambassador of Mexican music to the world … responsible for spreading the love for Mexican music to new generations in many countries,” as López puts it. He was also already an established star. His 2022 Forajido tour grossed $14.5 million and sold 147,000 tickets from 22 shows, according to Billboard Boxscore, and in 2023, he grossed $21.6 million and sold 259,000 tickets. Under Sony’s supervision, his star has only continued to rise. Nodal’s albums have earned a combined 2.2 million equivalent album units, according to Luminate, and he has 3.2 billion on-demand official streams in the United States. He has also placed 20 entries on Hot Latin Songs; five of them hit the top 10, including the No. 3 debut and peak of “Botella Tras Botella,” with Mexican rapper Gera MX in 2021. The pair’s norteño-tinged, hip-hop-infused track became the first regional Mexican song to enter the Billboard Hot 100 in the chart’s then 63-year history. (Today, more than 30 songs have reached the chart.)
“Christian was more ready for this moment than I was,” Gera MX says. “When we saw the song was blowing up, we called each other constantly. I asked him if this was normal, and he told me, ‘Guey, esto es único. [Dude, this is unique.]’ It had never happened before, much less with a mix of urban and regional. It was like riding the highest roller coaster of my life with one of my best friends.” They recorded the song at one of their carne asadas (cookouts) during the pandemic, when both were living in the same residential community in Guadalajara; Nodal would bike over to Gera MX’s house. “When we first met, I was surprised at how much he knew about rap,” Gera MX says. “He is an artist in constant evolution.”
Lisette Poole
González had been more skeptical of the collaboration. “He was like, ‘No, how are you going to do that? People are going to get angry,’ ” Nodal recalls. “And I told him, ‘Listen to me: This is what we’re going to start seeing in the genre.’ ”
Nodal followed his hunch — after all, it wasn’t the first time he and his father had disagreed. “If I’ve been doing this for six or seven years, it probably took us five to create a healthy relationship between us,” Nodal says. “I would go one way, and he would go another way. I didn’t want to do what he wanted me to do. I wanted to be me. It took many years to fully understand and respect each other, and it had nothing to do with our father-son relationship. Now we are completely aligned when it comes to the business of my career.”
In October, Nodal asked friends back in Guadalajara to get him three string instruments: a tololoche, a docerola and a requinto. “It got in my head that I wanted to do a corrido tumbado,” Nodal says in early February. “I fell in love with the genre. The good thing is that my neighbors in Guadalajara didn’t complain, because the tololoche is a very noisy instrument and my apartment is not very big.” After hearing the demo, Nodal thought Peso Pluma would be a great addition. So, over FaceTime, he asked the corridos singer to meet up — which they did at one of Peso’s Anaheim, Calif., concerts in December, where they agreed to collaborate. “Hassan [Peso’s real name] has a respect for me and my career, and we had great conversations.” Nodal says. “The chemistry was there.”
The resulting team-up, “La Intención,” is both a sign of the times — younger regional Mexican artists now understand that working together only strengthens the genre — and of what has given Nodal’s own career longevity. His adaptability has not only allowed him to move among styles (like pop, cumbia and urban) with ease, but also to transcend generations and remain a constant in an ever-expanding genre that in the years since his career began has become a global movement. “When I started this career I felt a big responsibility, and I still feel it today,” he says. “Not everyone agreed with everything I did early on, but now I feel that my career is projected onto the musical criteria of young artists who dare to do things differently without being afraid.”
At 25 years old, he may be the relative elder statesman of the new (and very young) generation of regional Mexican artists, but Nodal is just as fired up as when he started. “A lot of the dreams I had, I already accomplished, but I’m enjoying whatever comes. I don’t worry about the person I have to be in the genre; the most beautiful thing is to flow with what is happening because the genre will always be there. I’ll just keep releasing music from my heart [and] enjoy the process and what my fans have given me.”
Lisette Poole
Nodal is on a monthslong break through May, which, for him, feels like uncharted territory: He hasn’t taken any real time off since his career started seven years ago. “COVID didn’t count as a vacation, right?” he jokes. “I don’t know myself in vacation mode,” he adds with a nervous chuckle, as if coming to the realization as he says it out loud.
Today, “vacation mode” Nodal sounds blissful yet invigorated. Later this year, he says he’ll release Pa’l Cora, the album of his dreams, which will include a recording session in France with his mariacheño band in tow. The making of it, along with planning and embarking on a tour with stops in countries like the United Kingdom and Switzerland — a major milestone for an artist in a genre that typically doesn’t book European shows outside of Spain — will be captured in a behind-the-scenes documentary.
These shows, and this album, were for a long time simply dreams for Nodal. “I was constantly pressured to keep moving,” he says. Now, from his home base in Argentina, he’s able to lead a more balanced life, one in which peace and moments of inspiration aren’t mutually exclusive. “I don’t think my life has changed because of where I live but because of how I am living my life,” he reflects, sounding wise beyond his 25 years. “I think this time away from being up and down, connecting with what I love has made me realize how lucky I am. I am at my best stage in every way, in all aspects. There is a light in my life that no one can take away.”
This story originally appeared in the March 9, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Good! Lovin’! Feel so! Numb!”
It had been seven years since PartyNextDoor had performed in The 6. But one Thursday night last May, approximately 2,500 fans at History — the Toronto venue Drake, Party’s OVO label boss, opened in partnership with Live Nation in 2021 — welcomed him home to the city, feverishly chanting the lyrics to his beloved hits like “Wus Good/Curious.”
SiriusXM Canada had tapped the singer, songwriter and producer to headline the free, sold-out PartyNextDoor & Friends concert to celebrate its new 24/7 hip-hop and R&B channel, Mixtape: North, which highlights homegrown Canadian talent. And what better way to fete the country’s brightest stars than by transforming History into a full-fledged OVO Fest? Nearly all of the influential label’s roster took the stage, and even Drake himself made a surprise appearance to perform his and Party’s mid-2010s collaborations “Recognize” and “Come and See Me.”
“I don’t mean to put you on the spot or anything. I know you hate this the most,” Drake said, chuckling, his arm wrapped around his introverted labelmate. “I’m so grateful for you. I would not be the artist I am if it wasn’t for you.” Then, turning to the audience: “This is really my favorite artist in the world.”
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PartyNextDoor plays Billboard Presents THE STAGE at SXSW on March 14. Get your tickets here.
Over the last decade, Party, 30, established himself as an alternative R&B auteur who seduced listeners — and shaped his genre — with hazy, hypnotic Auto-Tuned vocal melodies, nocturnal trap production and carnal yet cognitive lyricism about what pleasures (and problems) the wee hours sometimes bring. And while that often added up to a late-night, hedonistic vibe, his authentic, limber patois and dancehall-infused rhythms also gave his music an irresistible Caribbean flavor.
Meanwhile, he established himself as one of pop music’s most sought-out hit-makers, working in various roles behind the scenes with artists including Kanye West, Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Post Malone and Rihanna, the lattermost of whom he has made two Billboard Hot 100 top 10 hits with: the nine-week No. 1 “Work,” featuring Drake (which he co-wrote and sang backup on), and DJ Khaled’s seven-week No. 2 “Wild Thoughts” (which he co-wrote and produced), featuring Bryson Tiller. Some fans and critics have argued that his leaked reference tracks for those songs — where Party himself sings them — sound better than their final star-powered versions.
“He has written some of the biggest songs of our time,” says his longtime manager and Range Media managing partner, Tyler Henry. “He has contributed to [work by] some of the greatest artists. He’s an artist himself. He’s truly one of one.” Henry first met Party in 2013 when he was the assistant road and tour manager for Drake, who had picked his latest OVO signee to support his Would You Like a Tour? trek. Henry started managing him the following year, and Party remains a key part of the manager’s roster, along with WondaGurl, HARV, Loshendrix and more.
Gucci shirt and Jacque Marie Mage eyewear.
Erica Hernández
Yet even with his impressive résumé, Party hasn’t achieved the level of stardom many R&B fans expected him to when he helped record some of the defining pop hits of the 2010s, excelling behind the scenes but failing to fully step out from Drake’s shadow. When asked about the pressure of being signed by such a colossal artist and ensuring his body of work can stand on its own, Party trails off. Despite previously expressing superstar ambitions, it seems like he has had to recalibrate his career goals.
“I’m just keeping the main ting the main ting,” Party says. “The only thing that’s important, that has changed my life, is dropping music. I’m not worried about the fame.” Speaking today in Los Angeles, wearing a simple, textured black hoodie, matching sweats and white Nike Air Force 1s, he certainly doesn’t seem like an attention-seeker. But he does sport one flashy accessory: a silver pendant chain with a cartoon rendering of a girl sticking her tongue out — a gift from Drake celebrating their “Members Only” collaboration from his latest Billboard 200-topping album, For All the Dogs. “Drake has the same one,” Party says proudly.
The rap titan’s co-sign increased awareness (and with that, scrutiny) of Party. But his frequent absences from the public eye — he has only put out three solo albums, in 2014, 2016 and 2020 — have also made it hard for fans to stay engaged with his releases or know what he’s up to. If he’s put in front of a laptop, Party says, “I’ll make a full album.” If it’s that easy, then why does he disappear for years in between each one? “I get into relationships and then music becomes second,” he admits matter-of-factly. “I think I’m going to take a break from relationships, a long break, and just get back to making music.” Of course, those same relationships often ensure Party has plenty of songwriting material to work with when he makes his way back to the studio.
“After you and a girl break up, does she know she’ll eventually become the subject of a PartyNextDoor song?” I ask.
“I think everyone knows that,” he responds smugly.
Erica Hernández
Relationships, frivolous or serious, are the common thread throughout Party’s music. He says he approaches his songs from a “me and her” perspective, creating the intimacy that’s also required for the prime PartyNextDoor listening experience. His solitary music resonated especially during the pandemic, and in October 2020, Party and his team appealed to lonely fans finding comfort in catalog music by dropping PartyPack, a set of seven fan-favorite deep cuts that hadn’t previously been available on digital service providers. Sometimes fans have unearthed his old songs themselves: Thanks to a dance challenge, the sped-up version of “Her Way” from his 2014 debut album, PartyNextDoor Two, blew up on TikTok in 2023, becoming the year’s most popular TikTok song in Canada and third-most popular in the United States.
And while he has continued to find new fans with the success of his older music — Party’s song catalog increased from 645.8 million on-demand U.S. streams (including user-generated content) in 2022 to 1.1 billion streams in 2023, according to Luminate — most successful artists can’t sit back, relax and rely on their fans to run up their catalog. Outside of the PartyNextDoor & Friends Toronto show, Party has only performed at a handful of festivals (like Las Vegas’ Lovers & Friends) and college shows since the pandemic’s live-music pause ended. But, as Henry explains it, those were just the prelude to Party’s next act. “We like to do a few each year to make sure we’re fresh and in front of people’s minds,” he says. “It keeps us sharp for when a moment like this album comes.”
That album is his upcoming fourth full-length, PartyNextDoor 4 — P4 for short. And while there’s no release date set, Party promises it’s his most focused project yet. “This is the hardest I’ve ever worked on an album. This is the proudest I’ve felt,” he says. “I’m excited to grind even more for the next [one]. I’m in love with how hard you should work for it.”
Growing up in the “moody” Toronto suburb of Mississauga, the artist born Jahron Anthony Brathwaite imagined himself as Ahmal, the student who sings “Oh Happy Day” in 1993’s Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit. Following in the footsteps of his Jamaican mother, Party joined his church’s choir and eventually moved up to a more advanced singing group within the church. “I had a solo coming up, and I was so nervous. I was going to get my sh-t off just like that Sister Act movie. I was going to get my moment. But they just cut it,” he says with a shrug.
Instead of dwelling on the defeat, he dove deeper into his newfound passion. He soon became fascinated with boy bands like Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC. But “once I understood who I am in the world as a Black man, I started really getting into Black music,” he says, citing Jodeci and 112 as inspirations. “I think Slim from 112 is part of the reason why I pitched up my music, because he sounded so young when he was getting older.”
Party questioned if being a “dread-headed” Jamaican guy from the Toronto suburbs meant he could be a “real” R&B singer. “Real R&B is pretty. It’s six-pack, it’s shaven head, low fade,” he says. But at 16 he tried his luck, dropping out of school and moving to Los Angeles, after posting his first songs to MySpace under the name “Jahron B.” They included cheeky, upbeat tracks like “Monica Follow Me Back” — which he made to persuade a girl named Monica to follow him back on Twitter (he succeeded) — as well as somber, piano-driven ballads like “Daughters,” describing how a drug-fueled hookup led to an accidental pregnancy.
Around that time, veteran A&R executive Shalik Berry showed “Daughters” to Warner Chappell Music’s Ryan Press, then-senior director of A&R (and now president of North America), who was immediately blown away by the intense storytelling. “After I heard that one song, I was like, ‘I have to sign this kid,’ ” says Press, who did so in 2012.
Louis Vuitton hat and shirt and Jason of Beverly Hills ring.
Erica Hernández
In 2016, Press helped Party establish his own joint venture with Warner Chappell called JA Publishing Group, which still operates and currently houses G. Ry, Prep Bijan, Phwesh and Alex Lustig (the lattermost also has a partnership with OVO president Mr. Morgan’s publishing company, M3 Ent). “ ‘Hey, man, if you’re stepping into this side of the business, you’re dealing with people’s livelihoods,’ ” Press recalls telling the young musician. “ ‘We got to handle business properly. You got to have the same passion for them that I have for you.’ ” Party took the advice to heart. “He wanted to create an ecosystem that other great talent could thrive and be successful under,” Henry adds, noting that Party even made sure one of his signees worked on a big record before assisting him in securing “a pretty large six-figure” publishing deal. But as much as Party loved helping other creatives get their shine, he was still waiting for his turn.
Getting his singing career off the ground had been a struggle. As a preteen, he tried out for the Canadian music competition series The Next Star but was cut. He remembers gushing during one of the taped interviews for the show about how he wanted “to sing like Aubrey Graham.” The person recording him “was an actor on Degrassi. And he laughed at me. He’s like, ‘Drake, the one who makes music in my dressing room?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I think he’s the best ever.’ ”
Years later, Party would take his stage name from the FL Studio software audio filter titled “partynextdoor” — which reminded him of OVO co-founder Noah “40” Shebib’s dark, brooding production. When he first heard the effect, Party recalls, “I was just like, ‘This is me. I’m going to make all my music sound like this.’ ”
Once Party started taking meetings with labels, fellow Jamaican Canadian producer and frequent Drake collaborator Boi-1da caught wind of it and ran the artist’s name up the OVO flagpole. When Drake and 40 eventually invited Party to the studio, “we just meshed,” he says. Party became the first recording artist signed to OVO in 2013, and the label opted for a low-key yet fitting announcement: His track “Make a Mil” was posted on the OVO blog, the digital hotbed for new talent that ultimately transformed into the boutique label it is today.
Erica Hernández
Throughout OVO’s history, some have questioned the way the label supports its artists not named Drake; Drake and the OVO team declined to even be interviewed for this story. In 2016, a Noisey headline asked, “Is OVO Sound A Hip-Hop Label Or Drake’s Personal Hit Factory?” And upon joining OVO, Party did support his label boss immediately: He provided background vocals for “Own It” and “Come Thru” on Drake’s 2013 album, Nothing Was the Same, and produced and co-wrote “Legend,” “Preach” and “Wednesday Night Interlude” on 2015’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, featuring on the latter two songs. Two months before Nothing Was the Same, Party dropped his self-titled debut EP, which earned rave reviews and yielded the Miguel-sampling classic “Break From Toronto.” The following year, PartyNextDoor Two cracked the top 20 of the Billboard 200. However, in the subsequent years, Party’s output grew less frequent and his allure dwindled.
In a 2015 PartyNextDoor Fader cover story — built around the musician’s first-ever interview — OVO co-founder and Drake manager Oliver El-Khatib said that part of OVO’s ethos was restricting access to its artists and letting the music speak for itself. But while that air of mystery maintains OVO’s cool reputation, banking on Drake’s star power to draw in new fans can keep the rest of his labelmates in his orbit at the expense of their own career growth.
While Party’s artist career hung in the balance, his songwriting vocation took off. Press says he was always in Party’s ear about possibly working with Rihanna because of their shared Caribbean heritage. When the star — who at the time was also signed to Warner Chappell — hosted a writing camp for what would become her 2016 album, ANTI, at her Malibu, Calif., home in 2015, Press called up Party to come through. Despite being in a house full of other competing songwriters and producers, Party insisted that he spend time alone with her so he could make songs that fit her vibe.
“I remember her telling us she was drinking vodka and water at that time. I had never seen Party drink vodka until that night. I think he even smoked a cigarette because she had smoked,” Henry says of the night the two made “Work.” The song became ANTI’s biggest hit, with 1.6 billion official on-demand U.S. streams. “Seeing the way he spoke to her and the questions he asked and the way he fully submersed himself into her identity was what made the song special. And he does it with all the artists he works with. He doesn’t write these generic songs that we try to find a home for. He writes them very purposefully for that artist.”
While “Work” reigned atop the Hot 100 in March 2016, Party finally got his own breakthrough as an artist with the Drake-assisted “Come and See Me.” The song earned Party his debut Hot 100 entry as a lead artist, peaking at No. 55, and yielded his first Grammy Award nod, for best R&B song. (He was also up for album of the year for contributing to Drake’s Views.) “Come and See Me” has become the biggest streaming song from his catalog, with 854.2 million official on-demand U.S. streams.
Finally, it seemed Party the artist was stepping firmly out of Drake’s shadow — even though the rapper was featured on the track, it was unquestionably a spotlight for his signee. “Come and See Me” earned Party the recognition he craved. But solo fame turned out to be less gratifying than he’d thought it would be.
In 2017, the year before Kanye West released his eighth studio album, Ye, he invited Party to his Yeezy Studio in Calabasas, Calif., and gave him the freedom and space to create whatever he pleased — offering no indication as to what he might eventually do with it.
So Party was surprised when, as he listened to Ye along with millions of others upon its June 2018 release, he heard one of his Calabasas freestyles. The song, “Ghost Town,” had additional vocals from Kid Cudi and 070 Shake, but only credited Party as a featured artist. “I didn’t know what he was going to do with it. It’s different when I have no creative control. It is raw. ‘Someday,’ ” he sings in a similar fashion to his recorded vocals. He initially felt caught off guard, but became appreciative of West’s trust in his talent. “It wasn’t about working with PartyNextDoor. It was just about liking what I did creatively,” he says. “Ghost Town” reached No. 16 on the Hot 100 — Party’s highest-charting hit on the all-genre list.
The way West used Party’s sketch to make “Ghost Town” startled him because, when it comes to his own music, Party pays attention to every painstaking detail. “He’s the most meticulous and thorough person I’ve ever met,” Henry says. “He’ll spend six months mixing a song or fly to Toronto four times just to work with 40 to get it right.”
Erica Hernández
Party, however, admits he didn’t have that laser focus when making his last two studio albums, PartyNextDoor 3 and PartyMobile. “I was still handling that sh-t like demos,” he says, adding that he wasn’t “using everything I learned as a producer, as a writer, as an engineer.” Even though rough freestyles like 2014’s “Persian Rugs” — one of the loosies later included on PartyPack — proved he didn’t need polished records to develop a robust fan base, he vows to never “cheat” on the quality of his art again.
On P4’s forthcoming single, “Real Woman,” Party resharpens those creative tools, layering his vocals with bright, twinkling synths, trap hi-hats and a backing choir. But considering his last single, “Resentment,” debuted in the top 10 of Hot R&B Songs last July and fell off the chart after three weeks, it’s unclear how much momentum “Real Woman” will build for this album cycle.
Fortunately, he has plenty of performances in the coming months where he can perform the new material, including Rolling Loud California and, at the end of March, Souled Out, Australia’s first modern R&B and soul festival, which will be held across five cities. “I have so much anxiety before a show, but I always tell my manager, ‘This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.’ I always forget that until I step on the stage,” he says.
Reconnecting with his fans live — and making sure the music he performs is of the highest possible quality — is, in the end, what fuels him, even if playing the part of a traditional megastar isn’t a natural fit.
“I know Drake and people always tell me, ‘Bro, you have to come out more!’ I’m an introvert, I’m shy,” he says. He’s not active on social media either because he doesn’t “have the narcissism” to believe people are personally invested in what he’s posting. And anyway, he doesn’t want to distract from what’s important: “I’m focused on making classic music.”
This story originally appeared in the March 9, 2024, issue of Billboard.
