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When Lainey Wilson played Australia for the first time in March, she made sure to meet the country’s animal ambassadors: She held a koala; she pet a kangaroo. But it wasn’t all furry fun. “I got crapped on by a bird twice,” Wilson says in her thick Louisiana drawl, shaking her head in bemused disbelief. […]
In retrospect, the signs were there. The vintage arcade games on proud display in his 2008 episode of MTV Cribs; the 2011 album inspired by steampunk aesthetics; the impulsive commission of a $400,000 meme in the form of a chain that said “BIG ASS CHAIN” (which is currently on loan to the American Museum of Natural History for a forthcoming exhibit on hip-hop jewelry). But it isn’t until I step into the basement of T-Pain’s suburban Atlanta home — a neon-lit bunker with both a theater-size main gaming station and a separate arcade room with soundproof doors (“for screaming and sh-t”) and distinct areas for Atari, PlayStation, Tekken, Sega and SNES — that it fully sinks in. The man whose voice defined late-2000s party music is an unapologetic, card-carrying nerd.
“I’ve been trying to tell people for a decade!” the 39-year-old singer says with a booming laugh, pacing the game room in sweatpants and slippers. “Nobody wanted to listen.” Ten years ago, few would have known that the artist who seemed to write hits in his sleep was regularly hopping on Twitch to play Skyrim with like-minded gamers, or that he’d tricked out his Hit Factory studio in Miami with a full stage for nightly Guitar Hero sessions. (“Any time an artist would come by the studio, I don’t give a f–k what you’re talking about — grab this guitar and meet me in the booth,” he says, pantomiming Pantera-esque riffs.)
Back then, flying his geek flag in plain sight wasn’t compatible with being the voice behind the buoyant, world-conquering records that have soundtracked nearly two decades of bottle service nightclubs, pro sports broadcasts and White House correspondents’ dinners — at least not according to the powers that be. “I never got to show that side of myself because management deemed it uncool. So instead of playing video games, we’d go to the Dolphins game,” T-Pain remembers, his perennially jolly voice tinged with only a hint of regret. “But I thought that the sh-t I wanted to do was the coolest sh-t in the world.”
Andrew Hetherington
For listeners of a certain age, T-Pain’s music triggers Proustian memories of school dances, fake IDs and first sips of Boone’s Farm, the soundtrack to the nights that Facebook photo albums were made of. Back then, the Florida teen born Faheem Najm to a family of Bahamian Muslims had a stage name short for “Tallahassee Pain” and ambitions as a rapper that shifted when he heard the uncanny vocal effect applied to a remix of Jennifer Lopez’s “If You Had My Love.” In 2004, the 19-year-old inked a deal with Akon’s Konvict Muzik label, having caught the singer’s ear with a cover of his song “Locked Up” edited to be about having a busted car.
Tooling around on boosted equipment, he used vocal processing software to make himself sound like a choir of horny angels on his first hit, “I’m Sprung,” or an android on a bender on his next smash single, “I’m N Luv (Wit a Stripper),” both of which he wrote and produced as well as sang — and which both cracked the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 in 2005. Before long, his digitally uplifted melodies, sweet and slightly melancholy, had become the de facto sound of the charts. Between 2007 and 2008, T-Pain landed 13 top 10 Hot 100 hits, including three No. 1s (Flo Rida’s “Low,” Chris Brown’s “Kiss Kiss” and his own “Buy U a Drank”); for two weeks in 2007, he appeared on four top 10 singles at once. A dozen platinum and gold plaques hang throughout his basement, alongside an errant Grammy Award (best rap song for “Good Life” with Kanye West), a few plush toys designed in his likeness and a couple of White Claw empties.
But by the 2010s, the humanoid effect he’d pioneered had grown ubiquitous, oversaturating pop music to the point that its originator became a punchline. (“Y’all n—s singing too much, get back to rap, you T-Paining too much!” Jay-Z famously crowed on 2009’s “D.O.A. [Death of Autotune].”) Meanwhile, T-Pain’s own voice faded into the background. His fourth album, 2011’s Revolver, hardly moved the needle; its follow-up, 2017’s Oblivion, traded his signature melodies for middle-of-the-road trap he attributed to the demands of his then-label, RCA Records. He’s frank about the profound depression that colored the years in between; in the 2021 Netflix docuseries This Is Pop, he says it began on a flight to the 2013 BET Awards, when Usher called him over to accuse him of ruining music for “real singers.” (“We’ve spoken since and we’re good,” Usher told Billboard in 2021.)
The comment hit close to home. T-Pain had been struggling with alcoholism, mismanaged finances and an overall loss of creative confidence. “I didn’t want to do ‘Freeze,’ I didn’t want to do ‘Buy U a Drank,’ I didn’t want to do most of the songs that are my biggest hits. Because, you know, I’m an artiste,” he confesses in the basement with a chuckle and a deep sigh. “Back then, when I got done with a song, I was always thinking, ‘People are going to like this,’ and not, ‘I like this.’”
Over the past decade, Pain (as he’s known by his family and friends) has seemed hellbent on proving his artistic worth once and for all. In 2014, he arrived at his NPR Tiny Desk concert unaware of the brief, then sang gorgeous unplugged renditions of past hits on a video that now has 27 million views. He removed his furry monster suit to reveal himself to a stunned judges’ panel when he won Fox’s The Masked Singer in 2019, having anonymously out-sung Donny Osmond and Gladys Knight. And last year, he released a project he’d been piecing together since 2017, a covers album (On Top of the Covers) with source material ranging from Frank Sinatra to Black Sabbath, delivered with a full band and his soulful voice, au naturel. “I think it’s weird to even ask if I can sing anymore, or to even associate me with Auto-Tune in 2024,” he says matter-of-factly. “All the proof is there, and it has been there for a long time.”
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T-Pain says he’d dreamed of recording a curveball like On Top of the Covers while his label and management team compelled him to chase the sound of artists half his age. (After 2017’s Oblivion, his last record for RCA, he signed to Cinematic Music Group, a subsidiary of Universal Music Group whose catalog was sold last year to Interscope Geffen A&M for an undisclosed amount, Billboard reported at the time.) After years of butting up against industry bureaucracy, he decided to go it alone, assembling a tiny team alongside his former project manager Nicolette Carothers to establish Nappy Boy Entertainment as an independent label in January 2020 (Carothers is currently the label’s head of operations). Besides T-Pain himself, it’s home to a small roster of rappers including Young Ca$h, with whom he released a joint eponymous album as The Bluez Brothaz, in March (and with whom he recently threw the Miss Biggest Booty Pageant in Atlanta, which is exactly what it sounds like). That umbrella has since expanded to reflect T-Pain’s truest passions, including Nappy Boy Automotive and Nappy Boy Gaming, both of which sell merchandise and host in-real-life and virtual events — from massive drift-racing competitions to a monthlong music competition on Twitch, which led to the signing of rapper NandoSTL.
Now, the hobbies he was once told to hide to maintain a veneer of cool are branches of his job, which means he’s basically always working. But for the first time in 20 years, he’s doing it his way — which generally means at home in sweatpants with a gaming console in hand. He gave up trying to come off as cool and has never felt cooler. Lit by the glow of five huge gaming monitors, he says with a shrug: “If you stop trying to impress everybody and make everybody think you’re perfect, what can they hate on?”
The day before we meet in early April, T-Pain posts a clip from a recent stream on Twitch, where he regularly broadcasts to a virtual crowd of gamers, fans, haters and random stragglers as he works on new music, plays video games or shoots the sh-t in occasional marathon sessions. (In recent weeks, they’ve ranged from five minutes long to 12 hours.) Previewing a new song, he noticed a string of comments from the same persistent heckler: “straight garbage,” “autotune to mask lack of skill” and so on. “My wife is one of my [moderators], and usually when people start talking sh-t, they get banned immediately,” T-Pain explains. “Then I started seeing the ban appeals: ‘I’m sorry, man. I was going through something that night, I was drinking heavy…’” He decided that rather than block out the hate, he’d figure out where it was coming from.
“I like all my sh-t, but I do know it’s ass to somebody,” T-Pain explained to the commenter on the stream in his usual jovial tone. “You think classically trained violinists are listening to ‘Buy U a Drank’? I don’t think so! But the thing we need to figure out is to stop trying to make everybody else have our opinion.” He went on to correct a few misconceptions (“People don’t realize, Auto-Tune or not, you still got to write a good song!”), analyze his own typecasting as “the Auto-Tune guy” and shrewdly break down club music’s escapist appeal. Before long, the random commenter apologized for his harsh words. “You ain’t got to apologize, bro,” Pain good-naturedly replied. “You just had an uninformed opinion.”
T-Pain has spent nearly two decades attempting to apply logic to comments like these. “They don’t want their narrative to change, especially if it fits in with everybody else’s: ‘Yeah, we all hate T-Pain. He’s bad at music,’” he says with a wry laugh. “If you’re a metal guy or a country guy, then of course all you’re going to know is the Auto-Tune, the narrative that has been pushed on you. But I’m here to talk through it with you, not to say, ‘F–k you, keep that opinion over there.’ Criticism is always good — but you’re not going to make me dislike my sh-t!” His level-headed breakdown is interrupted by a dramatic entrance from Stewie, the family’s Persian cat, who looks like a haughty, fluffy cloud and proceeds to cough up a series of noisy hairballs (and who is, yes, named for the Family Guy character).
Andrew Hetherington
When it comes to metal and country fans, T-Pain speaks from experience. Though the version of “War Pigs” that closes On Top of the Covers received Ozzy Osbourne’s stamp of approval (“Best cover of ‘War Pigs’ ever”), metalheads loudly disagreed. As for Pain’s soulful take on the country standard “Tennessee Whiskey” popularized by Chris Stapleton: “A country music page on Instagram posted my version, and there was only one comment: ‘Nope,’” he says, cracking up. It was harder to laugh at the reception of his previous attempts at country crossover. He recalls a red-carpet interview shortly after his “Good Life” Grammy win in 2008. “They asked me who I wanted to work with, and I said Carrie Underwood,” he says. “The country fans were like, ‘She don’t work with j—oos. She has too much class for somebody like you. Why would she ever…’ And I was giving her props!”
The topic will ring true for anyone who has listened to Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, but for T-Pain, the conversation isn’t new. “I actually lived in Nashville for a while, ghostwriting for country artists from 2014 to ’16. Everybody kept trying to figure out why Luke Bryan was saying ‘T-Pain’ in all his songs for a second,” he says with a laugh. Elsewhere among his clients: “Rhett Akins, Dallas Davidson… What’s the super racist one? Most of them?” he says with a cackle. “Toby Keith, I was writing stuff for him. Georgia Florida? Florida Georgia? Whichever way that goes.”
But after seeing his share of hateful feedback from gate-keeping country fans, he opted to keep his work private. “Beyoncé is strong enough to keep it going. It’s easier for her to stay in it than me,” he admits. “I’m not up at that level, so I can’t punch through that kind of stuff. So I kept doing it, but I just stopped taking credit.” Maybe those tides are finally turning: Running into Jelly Roll at the iHeartRadio Music Awards in April, the singer fawned over Pain’s “Tennessee Whiskey” cover, declaring, “Country music’s in love with you right now!” (And on April 26, the two released a cover of Keith’s “Should’ve Been a Cowboy” and performed it at Stagecoach together.)
T-Pain tends to refer to his work with a modesty that borders on self-deprecation, brushing off his biggest hits as inside jokes (he wrote “I’m N Luv [Wit a Stripper]” to make fun of a friend’s first strip club experience) or painful memories (the “Good Life” studio sessions dragged on for weeks). His fame still seems to puzzle him. “People will come up to me in the mall and I’m like, ‘My dude, we’re in Hot Topic right now,’” he says with a laugh. “I’m getting ear gauges just like you are, from the same case — actually, can you move? I can’t f–king see my earring.” Being a musician is nowhere near as cool as people make it out to be, he stresses: “Tons of people do way cooler sh-t than I do, and I know that because I look up to them.”
Andrew Hetherington
For the most part, the people T-Pain looks up to have nothing to do with the music industry. It was on a 2016 trip to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, that Pain discovered drifting, a style of precision driving seen in the Fast and the Furious franchise, which he describes as “being in control of an out-of-control car.” He was already an auto fanatic, at one point owning 46 vehicles (in part because his former managers knew that buying him a new one was the surest way to convince him to record a song). His former managers deterred his obsession with drifting, unsure how it could be profitable. Nevertheless, he began attending local Atlanta events, quietly ingratiating himself in the scene.
Hertrech “Hert” Eugene Jr. has been co-owner and president of Pain’s auto company, Nappy Boy Automotive, since it launched last year. The Orlando, Fla., native, who Road & Track magazine named the car world’s most important influencer in 2022, remembers his first impression of the singer as remarkably down-to-earth. “Pain wanted to check out what we call the burn yard, where we drift cars around and do burnouts,” he says, referring to a spin move that creates smoke and noise. “It was definitely weird to meet T-Pain, someone who I dressed as for Halloween in 2009 — fast-forward 10 years and he knows who I am.” Showing me a video from the first Nappy Boy-hosted drift event at Atlanta’s Caffeine & Octane raceway, Pain fans out over the various drivers, then points to himself behind the wheel of a souped-up pink race car as it drifts beside its competitors in a kind of chaotic ballet.
His entry into the gaming world was similarly unassuming. Though his former management had warned him not to publicize it, Pain had been active on Twitch since 2014, playing on- and off-stream with friends he’d made on the platform who were mostly chill about the fact that he was, well, T-Pain. One such friend was Mike Brew, who, after years of gaming together, began offering Pain advice about building out his channel into a professional organization; in 2021, that became Nappy Boy Gaming, with Brew as co-founder and president.
“Outside of music and music videos, my exposure to him was all on Twitch,” Brew says. “There was never a moment, seeing him on stream, where I was like, ‘Oh, God. This guy’s so full of himself.’ There are tons of artists that have come to Twitch since that are just terrible to watch because they’re so full of themselves. Meanwhile, Pain’s cracking jokes about himself, making relevant jokes about the streaming industry — he knows what he’s doing, and he’s shockingly humble about it.”
Pain and Brew had no connections to the gaming industry or to developers, so establishing the company felt like a scrappy startup, building custom servers and throwing DIY events, gradually earning the respect of the streaming community. “He’s recognized as an actual streamer,” Brew notes. “Not just as a musician trying to find a new revenue stream.” Even so, Matt Galle, one of Pain’s representatives at CAA, believes the singer’s side ventures have bolstered his tours. “When people were stuck inside during COVID, T-Pain was livestreaming daily,” he says. “People got to know him really well as a personality and human being and realized this is someone they believe in.”
Pain’s wisecracking charisma is part of his success on Twitch, but there’s also a decided “nerd recognize nerd” factor. These days he fields regular calls from rapper friends asking him how to get started on the platform. “Nope, I’m not telling you,” he says with a shrug. “I’m not trying to gate-keep, but I know you’re trying to get on there because you think I’m making a ton of money. I am! But still, it’s not like that. You should’ve got on that b-tch a decade ago then.” For all the rappers he names who use Twitch organically (Post Malone, Lupe Fiasco, Tee Grizzley), there are far more who see it as a come-up, though he stresses that the real nerds can sniff out the bullsh-t. “People have all these different ideas of how to make it cool, but it’s not about being cool,” he says. “It’s about gathering with like-minded people, being yourself and not having to conform to anything. The cool sh-t is, you don’t have to be cool.”
At the peak of his late-2000s hit-making, Pain believed that being his nerdy self would constitute career suicide. He still remembers reading blog posts in 2007 about Plies (who’d blown up the same year with the T-Pain duet “Shawty”) that mocked the rapper for having gone to college. “‘Nah, he ain’t no gangster, he went to college,’” Pain says, imitating the comments. “What’s that have to do with anything? You can be a killer and also know social studies.” The incident, he says, compelled him to dumb down the way he spoke; he began to drink more heavily and to spend money on the things that other rappers flaunted, desperate to fit the mold of late-2000s hip-hop stardom. He cackles remembering how the way he dressed would make onlookers think he was robbing his wife, Amber, who he married in 2003. Then he grows serious. “Eventually I found out that in doing that — being somebody that I wasn’t — anybody outside of the rap community just straight up thought I was stupid,” he admits. “It felt bad as sh-t. I didn’t want to be the stupid rapper that everybody thought I was going to be. I wanted to be better for my wife. I wanted to articulate myself. I had to change: to be who I really was and not who everybody wanted me to be.”
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Pain’s nerdier passions have now found their way into his songs: For his latest solo single, the anthemic (and un-Auto-Tuned) “Dreaming,” he spent a month learning the 3D graphics software Blender in his spare time to animate the video, complete with exploding volcanoes, a Grand Theft Auto-style street scene and an impressively faithful rendering of himself. The breakneck recording pace of his hit-making prime has significantly slowed since going independent — but that’s because he prefers it that way. “You know the saying, ‘Find something you love and get paid for it’? I think whoever said that didn’t tell everybody, ‘Also, make sure you’re the boss,’” he says, clearly elated at his newfound ability to say no, or to simply do it his way. “That person also left out the part ‘Make sure it’s not your only income.’ Because if it is, you’re going to hate that thing that you loved in the end.”
These days, he uses his “entertainer side” to fund his hobbies, taking a few hours of work (a concert, a club appearance) and turning it into two weeks of fun. He still feels some residual burnout from two grueling decades in the industry, and to those who attribute his latest side projects to having fallen off musically, he has an unbothered reply: “Why stress myself out about doing all these red carpets,” he wonders, “when I could be playing video games in my drawers at home?”
It’s a cloudless 90-degree April day in the Coachella Valley, and T-Pain is dancing like no one is watching. In fact, a few hundred influencers are.
Dressed in their finest Y2K-flavored mesh and leather, the crowd is gathered to witness the singer twirl like a ballerina, hip-thrust like a Magic Mike extra and pop-lock like he has been taking notes from an old Darrin’s Dance Grooves DVD. Pain’s the sole headliner of the invite-only Celsius Cosmic Desert party, next door to the festival grounds on the first Friday of Coachella weekend, where Megan Fox, Halle Bailey and Barry Keoghan pose for pictures clutching dewy energy drink cans. Though the crowd for his 45-minute set skews more Gen Z than millennial, they appear to know every word to anthems like 2007’s “Bartender” or the 2008 Lil Wayne collaboration “Got Money.”
His double strand of Nappy Boy logo chains looks heavy, and his sneakers, it turns out, are one size too small. Still, the performance — his first of three he’ll do in the next 36 hours, both in and outside of the festival proper — is something of a milestone for an artist precisely 14 years older than the average attendee. “This is my first time even around Coachella,” he declares to the crowd, mopping his brow with a towel between songs. “I don’t know if that’s cool as f–k or sad as a motherf–ker!”
Andrew Hetherington
I’d been disabused of any expectations of backstage bacchanalia on the hourlong ride from Pain’s Palm Springs hotel to the windblown festival grounds, during which the singer sat quietly beside Amber, drinking Nesquik, relaxing to the sounds of smooth jazz and extolling the virtues of the new Call of Duty: Warzone mobile game with his bodyguard. It’s Amber’s birthday at midnight; later he’ll take her out for sushi along with the rest of the team, and tomorrow they’ll make a pit stop to grab ice cream before his set at the Revolve Festival in Palm Springs, which he’s headlining alongside Ludacris and a few more 2000s throwbacks (Sean Paul, Ying Yang Twins, Nina Sky). These days, that’s about as wild as it gets for Pain.
As the weekend’s prevailing Y2K aesthetic underlines, it’s a good time to be an icon of the 2000s charts. The period between 2007 and 2008 is generally considered the height of T-Pain’s career, the era when his voice was inescapable. But when he thinks about that time, “I remember forcing happiness,” he told me earlier in his basement. “I remember being drunk a lot. I remember going out to clubs in order to be happy because it wasn’t the studio, it wasn’t work.” He zeroes in on the moment when he found out that his second album, 2007’s Epiphany, had gone platinum. He was on tour at the time, making beats on the bus when someone brought the plaque in. “It was my first platinum album,” he recalls. “And I was like, ‘Let me finish this beat real quick.’ I didn’t really celebrate anything. Everybody else went out to celebrate for me.”
Pain’s current stage show — his Mansion in Wiscansin summer tour begins in May, after which he’ll join Pitbull’s Party After Dark tour in the fall — isn’t built around his latest release, On Top of the Covers, because the songs require at least a week of vocal rest between performances. But just before last Christmas, he partnered with YouTube to premiere an hourlong set of covers — some from the record, some unreleased — filmed live with a full band. Draped in a zebra-print bathrobe, Pain delivers what might be the best performance of his two-decade career, nailing heartfelt renditions of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy,” Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” and Frank Sinatra’s “That’s Life,” the song that ignited his interest in recording the covers album in the first place. Listen closely to the lyrics and you can probably imagine why: “I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king/I’ve been up and down and over and out, and I know one thing/Each time I find myself flat on my face/I pick myself up and get back in the race.”
He directed the show top to bottom, from the arrangements to the lighting cues to the instructions for the band and backup singers. Pain banters a bit between songs, countering his bombshell performance with his usual self-effacing wisecracks. (“Tequila hit me a little harder than I thought it was going to. Should’ve ate and took a sh-t before this,” he quips after crushing “War Pigs.”) Eventually, he gets sincere.
“When you get into the music industry, you have this vision of arenas, big f–king crowds,” he tells the audience. “But over the years I’ve realized that we don’t get to connect with people, like, ever. We don’t really get to see in that mass crowd. The real connection is being able to see people. To me, this is superstardom.” He goes on to describe what drew him to musicianship as a kid. “One: When I started rapping in school, I started acquiring friends. People wanted to be around me for some reason. I wasn’t good, so I don’t know where the f–k that came from,” he jokes. “Two: The first song I learned to play on keyboard was ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing.’ That was my dad’s favorite song. I learned it in secret, and when I played it for him, his eyes lit up. I was like, ‘I want to do this all the time now.’”
The performance felt like the capstone to the past 10 years spent demonstrating his worth to an audience who’d largely dismissed him as a joke. Back in his underground sanctuary in Atlanta, he says he finally knows he has proved enough. “Looking back, I realized I didn’t have to prove anything,” he says, reclining in a gaming chair after an hour of restless pacing. “But I was so hungry for validation. I was so thirsty for people to like me.”
He’d been searching for that feeling of acceptance all his life, since his days as a self-described “smelly kid” who longed to sit with the cool kids when they were banging on the tables and rapping. “I just wanted people to like me. And I felt like, if you guys just knew how much I know music — if you looked past the Auto-Tune and you just heard me sing — I bet you’d like me.” But he doesn’t feel that way anymore. “It’s five people in this house that I need to like me: my wife, my kids, myself. That’s all I need. That’s all I ever needed. So, you know, suck a butt.”
Myke Towers was just a child when he saw the future. On his way to school in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, he had his first real-life glimpse of Tego Calderón, the Black rapper who at the time was one of the island’s — and Latin music’s — biggest stars.
“I was a little kid with a backpack, and he was in a huge Cadillac,” Towers recalls. “When you see that in real life, you don’t forget. Tego saw just another kid. But for me — on my way to school — that was a Kodak moment. You get it? It was, ‘Wow, if Tego did it, how can I do it my way?’ ”
That chance encounter set in motion the way Towers saw himself: as a Puerto Rican act whose core is rap but who also sings reggaetón; who collaborates prolifically but releases mostly solo albums; who is notoriously private but identifies strongly as a Black artist. And now, following the huge success of his 2023 hit “Lala,” and with the backing of Warner Music, as a Latin urban artist who is willing to experiment to gain global success.
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On April 25, Towers released “Adivino,” the focus track from his upcoming album, La Pantera Negra, due out likely at the end of May. Featuring Bad Bunny, “Adivino” is dance banger with a subtle reggaetón beat built over padded synths; it’s ear candy with pop leanings, as “Lala” was, but it’s also romantic and wistful and unexpected in its downtempo breaks.
It’s an auspicious kickoff for La Pantera Negra (The Black Panther) — an album Towers says goes back “to what I like to do musically, and to what people liked about my essence from the beginning, when they got to know me and said, ‘This kid has the goods.’ ”
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Its single notwithstanding, La Pantera Negra is mostly a solo effort, and “a priority for the entire company,” says Warner Music Latin America president Alejandro Duque, who has plans to support the album beyond traditional Latin music markets and into places like Europe, where Towers is touring this summer.
“Latin music’s influence and global impact are undeniable. But Myke’s versatile flow and magnetic presence go beyond the confines of any single language or culture,” adds Max Lousada, CEO of recorded music for Warner Music Group, who was heavily involved in signing Towers to a global distribution deal with Warner Music Latina and Warner Records in 2021. “He effortlessly experiments with new sounds and pushes the boundaries of artistic expression. We’re proud to support Myke’s journey as he continues to make his mark with original music that is exciting fans around the world.”
La Pantera Negra is the follow-up to 2023’s La Vida Es Una, which in turn spawned global hit “Lala,” a chill, downtempo dance track with a reggaetón beat that was a departure from Towers’ more urban fare. Given the extraordinary success of “Lala” — it hit No. 1 on the Billboard Global Excl. U.S. chart — Towers’ 1.8 billion on demand streams in the United States alone, according to Luminate, and his more than 44 million Spotify listeners (making him No. 61 on the platform), expectations are high for the set.
But Towers is looking straight ahead.
“Obviously, I know there’s [a lot going on], but I try to make it just another day at the office,” he says. “Because that’s how I did these songs. Another day at the office. I’m not looking for the hit, nor losing my focus. I always try to stay on the same wavelength.”
Myke Towers photographed April 11, 2024 at House Of Hits Recording Studio in Miami.
Natalia Aguilera
Towers is chatting and playing new music inside a black SUV that’s driving slowly through Miami’s Design District on a Thursday night. It’s 10 p.m., shops are shuttered, and there are few people out. But Towers, notoriously private, wanted a private space, and this is it. Still, there’s a cluster of people inside: his driver and trainer in the front seat, his publicist and security in the back, and Towers and myself in the middle.
Like so many Puerto Rican urban artists, Towers — who tonight is dressed in a light blue track suit — likes traveling in packs. But unlike many, he can truly compartmentalize and command those around him. Later, he will tell me that when he’s working in the studio, “Everyone has to behave like we’re on a spaceship; focused on the project at hand, no distractions.”
Which explains why tonight it’s quiet inside the SUV as he pulls out a good bottle of Caymus Cabernet (“I heard you like wine,” he says) from his backpack, pours it into small plastic wine glasses he shares with his publicist and I before playing a few tracks from La Pantera Negra.
Aside from Towers’ collaboration with Bunny, their first since “Puesto Pa’ Guerrial” in 2020, there’s a collab with Peso Pluma, “who I really like how he understands reggaetón,” Towers says. “Obviously it’s a Mexican representation, but reggaetón style, which he does well.”
Other new names in the mix include Benny Blanco, who produced one of the strongest tracks on the set, a remix of a classic 1990s American pop/folk track that speaks to Towers’ respect for the past; every one of his albums includes a look back.
But overwhelmingly, La Pantera Negra is a return to Towers’ origins, literally, musically and figuratively.
“There was a legendary person in my neighborhood [Quintana, in Río Piedras] who had several panthers as pets. One escaped and it was a mess. So I said, ‘I’m from here. I’m the black panther of Quintana,’ ” Towers recalls.
But it’s also impossible to ignore the symbolism of the “Black Panther” moniker and all it conveys, which is why Towers waited to use the name at a time when he truly embodied it.
“It’s something I’ve been called before, but I had to believe it. When you’re the protagonist of something, you don’t really see what’s going on until others do. That happened to me.”
La Pantera Negra, the album, kicks off with the eponymous track that describes where Towers is now and how he feels: powerful. “I feel we’re in a good moment, we have staying power. I can give people something they’re not used to, but it also helps me because when I go back to my essence, you feel the contrast.”
And after “Lala,” which was a musical departure for Towers, “La Pantera Negra goes back to my essence.”
Myke Towers photographed April 11, 2024 at House Of Hits Recording Studio in Miami.
Natalia Aguilera
But what exactly is Towers’ essence? Musically, it’s clear. He navigates between reggaetón and rap — although he clearly prefers the latter — with clear influences from Puerto Rican hip-hop pioneers like Daddy Yankee and Calderón as well as commercially successful rappers like Jay-Z and Drake, with his albums alternately focusing more on one style than the other.
From a personal standpoint, Towers is more enigmatic. Tall and lanky — his muscles defined thanks to a yearlong new workout regime — he comes across as reserved and polite, using a self-effacing brilliant smile as a shield, but still conveying the assuredness of someone who has done a lot of self-reflection.
Unlike many of his counterparts — who post constantly on Instagram and TikTok about their personal lives, prowess and riches (the plane, the watch, the car) — Towers is famously private. His Instagram account, where he has 12.1 million followers, is devoid of personal content, save for the occasional workout photo, and he rarely and reluctantly speaks about childhood sweetheart Ashley Gonzalez, the mother of his son, Shawn Lucas. Now 4 years old, Shawn (named after Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter), who Towers holds as a baby on the cover of his 2020 album, Easy Money Baby, made a rare appearance onstage at his father’s show at Miami’s Kaseya Center last fall. Beyond that, questions in that area are politely deflected.
“Just say he’s growing quickly,” Towers finally musters, looking away with that smile. “That’s separate from what I do,” he adds. “That’s my life. I have my social media because it’s a tool. But otherwise, I want people to listen to my music and just imagine what I’m like.”
Michael Anthony Torres Monge is now 30 years old, no longer the baby-faced rapper who dazzled in 2018 and 2019 with a seemingly never-ending string of hits featuring a rotating cast of collaborators that was a who’s who of reggaetón.
It was all a prelude to his second album, Easy Money Baby — which included only solo tracks save for a single collaboration with Farruko. Released on Puerto Rican indie Whiteworld Music, it debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Latin Albums chart in February 2020 and established a blueprint for Towers’ future output: His singles would be collabs from all sides of the music spectrum — they’ve ranged from Becky G and Sebastián Yatra to Jay Wheeler and Quevedo — but his albums would largely be solo efforts.
Exactly a year later, Towers and Whiteworld signed their global distribution deal with Warner Records and Warner Latina that was brokered between Warner’s Latin department along with Lousada and Warner Records co-chairmen Aaron Bay-Schuck and Tom Corson, with the latter calling it at the time “one of our most important signings of the past year.”
Today, the Warner pact, a distribution deal with full services, has been extended, but Towers’ masters still belong to him and his original co-managers, Orlando “Jova” Cepeda and José “Tito” Reyes, co-owners of Whiteworld. The two signed Towers in 2018, buying his contract from another independent label.
“He was like an ugly duckling, vastly underestimated; quiet, humble, the opposite of the genre. But we saw the originality in him. His voice was different from anybody else’s,” Cepeda told Billboard at the time. He adds today: “I told him he was a star.”
Myke Towers photographed April 11, 2024 at Soho Beach House in Miami.
Natalia Aguilera
Towers, born in Río Piedras, the cradle of reggaetón, fell in love with making music thanks to his grandmother, who owned a karaoke machine and was constantly practicing in her little home studio.
“I think that’s where I learned to write songs,” says Towers, who to this day writes most of his songs in notebooks that he never tosses out.
“The notebook is always with me, in my backpack. I also write on my phone, but anytime I want to develop something, I pick up my notebook. I have 10 years’ worth of notebooks in bags around the house. One of these days, I want people to study them and see what I did in real time and say, ‘Damn, that’s how he wrote this song.’”
The weight of history has always mattered to Towers, and although he doesn’t constantly reference his Black experience in his songs, he speaks of it often and is aware of the responsibility.
“People know I’m Black. Everyone says, “‘El negro llegó y rompió’ [“The Black kid came and hit it”],” he says. “We represent both the culture and the world at the same time. It’s not a division, but I have to represent my own.”
Disciplined in the recording studio and in public, Towers is prolific, consistent and a meticulous songwriter, all traits that have allowed him to stand out and remain relevant in the very crowded field of Puerto Rican urban acts that rose to prominence in the mid-2010s.
“The way this guy puts a song together is so next level,” says Blanco, who first met and worked with Towers this year. “You blink an eye, and he already has the full song written and recorded. It’s truly spectacular to watch.”
The connection with Blanco was made by Brandon Silverstein (who previously managed Anitta), who came in to co-manage Towers with Cepeda last year, specifically to help in the Anglo space.
Soon after Silverstein came in, “Lala” exploded.
By then, Towers had numerous hits on the Billboard charts; he has 51 career entries on Hot Latin Songs, with 10 top 10s, and 11 No. 1s on Latin Airplay, for example. With La Vida Es Una, he captured his third straight top 10 on the Top Latin Albums chart when the set debuted at No. 9 in April 2023. Then, unexpectedly, “Lala,” track No. 22 out of 23 on the album, began to rise.
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“‘Lala’ is that stroke of luck you don’t expect. I knew many artists have that moment in their careers, but it hadn’t come for me,” Towers says. In fact, “Lala” wasn’t even going to appear on the album. The track, which Towers originally began working on two years prior, had been made in bits and pieces, and at one point, wasn’t even slotted to be on the album.
“Finally, they convinced me to include it. I can’t say I realized how big it was. Many times, you get carried by your instinct, but in this case, my instinct didn’t speak to me.”
But everything else did.
While “Lala” was not the album’s focus track, almost immediately, “It began to trend,” Duque says, particularly on TikTok. “With a hit, reaction can vary, but with ‘Lala,’ every little thing we did got huge jumps. So, we went full throttle,” he says.
“Lala” climbed steadily, and by July, it hit No. 1 on the Billboard Global Excl. U.S. chart and No. 3 on the Billboard Global 200, both milestones for Towers.
Cepeda firmly believes that releasing “lots of music” is essential to Towers’ success: “Artists lose steam because they don’t release new music [for their fans],” he says, then quips, “If you don’t take care of your wife at home, someone else will.”
And so, before the year was out, Towers released a second studio album, LVEU: Vive la tuya…No La Mía, a sort of part two to La Vida Es Una that included another mega-hit, “La Falda,” which topped the Latin Airplay chart.
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Then, Towers reset. After playing his last concert of the year, he disconnected completely from his music and spent over a month between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic with his family and his “friends who are like family to me, who are next to me even if I’m not doing music, who don’t even want to take photos with me because I’m one of them,” he says. “That’s what keeps me grounded. And I’ve also learned to be alone, too, to connect with oneself and with your essence, and then come back. I have my breaks where I plant, and my breaks where I harvest.”
These are the periods Towers describes as “out of the music scene. When I take off my superhero cape.”
Now, he’s coming back as a superhero, almost literally.
“I even studied how panthers attack,” Towers says. “I had been toying with the panther concept for a while, but now we started the year like this and everything we do will be under that roof.”
Towers will be playing the festival circuit this summer in Europe but will start with his first sold-out date at Madrid’s Wiznik Center on May 21. By then, La Pantera Negra will be in full swing after the release of “Adivino.”
“We’ll be working every single separately, of course, but with the storyline of the album and black panther,” Duque says, noting that Towers is enormously popular in Spain, Italy and Portugal. “It’s a very broad album. Myke is not only an urban artist, and our goal is to grow his audience to the max.”
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!’”