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“I’ll never do New York. America is not ready.”
That’s what Steffen Charles, the owner of German techno festival Time Warp, told New York City dance event producer Rob Toma more than a decade ago, with Charles thinking the U.S. market wouldn’t quite understand the brand of dark, pummeling techno that’s been Time Warp’s signature since the festival launched in 1994.
But eventually, Charles had a change of heart, and Time Warp launched in NYC in 2014, bringing the pummeling, relentlessly heavy genre to a country then riding the wave of kandi-colored EDM boom.
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Nine years later, techno is one of the dominant sounds in the U.S. and Time Warp and Teksupport are celebrating a now-long partnership, with the sixth U.S. edition of the festival taking place Nov. 17-18 at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and drawing thousands of fans.
This show marked the third international edition of Time Warp in 2023, with the Brooklyn Yard event following Time Warp Brazil and Time Warp Chile. The original German edition of the festival happened last month as well, and next year, Time Warp will celebrate 30 years of existence at its home in Mannheim, Germany.
Known for showcasing legends and rising stars, the Brooklyn Yard edition featured a lineup including Dennis Cruz, Pawsa, Reiner Zonneveld and many more. Whether you were there and want to relive it, or didn’t make it and want a piece of the action, here we have nearly 10 hours of exclusive music from the event, with sets from rising star Sara Landy, longstanding legends Pan-Pot, Nina Kraviz and Adiel and a special b2b set from Vintage Culture and Joseph Capriati.
Sara Landry
Pan-Pot
Joseph Capriati b2b Vintage Culture
Nina Kraviz
Adiel
All year we covered the deals, the launches, the layoffs, the lineups and everything else related to the wide world of dance. We also tracked the numbers that provide an understanding of how well the scene is doing (with the dance industry growing by a not insubstantial 34% over the last year.) Meanwhile, we looked […]
In February, Fred again.., Skrillex and Four Tet turned New York’s Madison Square Garden into a sweaty rave, performing a body-rattling five-hour show that had sold out in two minutes and, in some ways, set the tone for dance music in 2023. The demand proved the trio to be a perfect replacement for Frank Ocean as Coachella’s Sunday night headliner on its second weekend. And by October, Fred again.. had sold 42,300 tickets and grossed $2.9 million across a three-night residency in New York, according to Billboard Boxscore, later playing an eight-night run in Los Angeles.
“We been practising for monthssss to try n make this show a level up and to like really push ourselves to make it as musical and dynamic and LIVE as possible,” Fred again.. posted on Instagram.
Fred again.., now nominated for a best new artist Grammy, became a bigger star in 2023, but he was far from the only one cashing in on the post-pandemic return to live events. In June, future bass star Illenium played Denver’s Mile High Stadium, selling 47,300 tickets and grossing $3.9 million. Meanwhile, Beyoncé toured the globe on her dance album, Renaissance, selling 2.8 million tickets worldwide. And live electronic maestros ODESZA led the festival circuit, headlining Bonnaroo, Governors Ball and Outside Lands.
“There have been all these moments where I realized that electronic music from a live standpoint is in an incredibly healthy place,” says Lee Anderson, executive vp/managing executive at Wasserman, who represents electronic acts including Skrillex, Zedd and Disclosure. “It might be bigger than it has ever been, including the EDM boom.”
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This surge has origins in the pandemic, when dancefloors were vacant. Prior to 2020, dance shows had declined “from the late 2010s from a ticket-buying standpoint and on the live side,” Anderson says. This was the same era in which house music was replacing EDM as the mainstream dance genre of choice in the United States.
But as artists turned to livestreaming during lockdown, dance music became particularly accessible, given the ease of streaming DJ sets. The sound proliferated on Twitch and other platforms at the same time that a new generation of fans were coming of age — and when live events returned, they wanted to dance. “You had a whole new generation of kids that were like, ‘Oh, my God. What is this? I want to get out of the house and go,’ ” says Anderson.
The pent-up demand drove ticket sales at dance shows across the United States, and by 2022, Anderson says, “I was talking to people at Live Nation and AEG like, ‘The electronic stuff is selling really well.’ We looked at the data and realized this genre was heating back up.”
Contributing to the rise was the general expansion of the U.S. dance market. While there used to be roughly a dozen cities in which techno artists could play, Anderson says there are now 30. Beyond major markets like Miami, New York and Los Angeles, there are now thriving U.S. hubs for bass, commercial dance, trap, house and other styles in cities including Denver and Phoenix. (Anderson says that artists’ social engagement is the best indicator of where they’ll be able to sell tickets.) Meanwhile, festivals that were formerly booking three or four dance acts are now booking four times that many.
While the current dominance of house music has delivered greater levels of live success to veteran artists — Anderson cites Chicago legend Green Velvet as a prime example, saying he is “probably bigger than he has ever been” — fresh acts are also rising. After playing their first major shows earlier this year, San Diego bass producers ISOxo and Knock2 performed four sold-out shows at The Shrine in L.A. in November.
“Between the two of them, the highest-streamed song has about 13 million plays,” Anderson says. “These are not huge numbers, but they sold out 20,000 tickets in L.A. as fast as the cart could process transactions — and we had enough people in the queue that if the venue was available, we could have done another four [nights].”
Such residencies and one-offs are also indicative of the newly preferred style of touring for dance acts, with teams often putting on a small number of shows that feel special — and which fans are more likely to travel for — rather than grinding it out on the road. Illenium’s stadium show demonstrated the viability of this model (the act will play two more at SoFi Stadium in L.A. in February 2024), as did a set by FISHER and Chris Lake in October, when they shut down a stretch of Hollywood Boulevard and drew 12,000 fans. (Anderson calls the show “one of the biggest stories in dance music this year.”) Pretty Lights’ comeback tour featured a series of short residencies, with 27 shows across nine venues. And on Dec. 16, John Summit will headline the 22,000-capacity BMO Stadium in L.A. — a type of show that Kx5 proved viable last December, when it played for 46,000 people at the L.A. Coliseum.
“When you had the [EDM bubble] era of, ‘Can it ever be that big again?,’ did you see electronic artists selling out stadiums as headline acts?” Anderson asks. “Because that’s happening today, and you’re going to see that continue happening. And that has never happened before. That’s new.”
This story originally appeared in the Dec. 9, 2023, issue of Billboard.
The season of celebration and the season of giving are upon us, and the holiday dance-music party L.A. Gives Back is once again providing attendees with the opportunity to do both.
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Returning after a two year hiatus, the sixth iteration of the dance-focused fundraiser is happening on Dec. 20 at Catch One in Los Angeles. The lineup, as always, will be kept secret until the night of the party, but organizers promise “a confirmed mega headliner.” Past years have featured sets from Tokimonsta, Boys Noize, A-Trak, Louis the Child and Flying Lotus.
Some of L.A.’s best party promoters are curating the bash, with Brownies and Lemonade, Shrek Rave, HEAV3N, Electric Feels, Club 90s, Hack the Planet and Restless Nights all involved. Tickets start at $25 and are available now.
The party will be led by IHEARTCOMIX, with funds going toward organizations that work to assist the city’s unhoused population. Initially running from 2016 to 2020, the party was founded by IHEARTCOMIX in response to the city’s growing homeless crisis. In its first five years, L.A. Gives Back raised more than $200,000 for the nonprofits Downtown Women’s Center, My Friend’s Place and MásForMore. This year, the event will benefit these three organizations.
“It’s so cool that so many of L.A.’s top music curators and creative talent can come together and produce an event that draws attention to this huge crisis in our community,” said IHEARTCOMIX founder Franki Chan in a statement. “We hope that the event can showcase the wide diversity and collaborative nature that makes L.A. so special while raising the funds so desperately needed to address the issue.
“For IHEARTCOMIX, this is our holiday party,” Chan continued. “I feel strongly that Los Angeles is the best city in the world for music and creative energy. Over the almost 20 years that IHC has been around, we’ve seen this town change so much for the better. It’s not just the talent that is incredible, but the sense of community that makes it special and has drawn so many people here. However, the unplanned consequence of that growth has been the rise of the homeless population in L.A., and now in the aftermath of COVID-19, it’s even worse. It’s our responsibility to address this problem and fix it. As we grow, we must bring everyone up with us. Hopefully this event shows our city that we can stand as one to create positive change.”
A survey of L.A.’s homeless population earlier this year estimates that there are roughly 75,000 people in L.A. County living in shelters, tents, cars, fans, RVs or makeshift shelters.
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On May 3, 2021, Rob Toma got the call he’d been waiting for. A staffer from the office of New York City’s then mayor Bill de Blasio was getting in touch to inform Toma that live events would be allowed to resume the next month, as the pandemic waned. Toma hung up, and for the next two weeks, barely slept.
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Instead he booked shows, putting 13 events on the calendar for when venues reopened to full capacity. Lineups included The Martinez Brothers, Michael Bibi, Sven Vath and Loco Dice playing in a cavernous (and also packed), Brooklyn warehouse — the venue format that’s defined Toma’s company, Teksupport, since he started throwing parties under the name back in 2010.
“Since [after the pandemic], we’ve been gaining a lot of real momentum,” Toma says, “and we really kind of just [kept] turning it up.” This year, Toma and his 20-person, Brooklyn-based team have put on 164 shows at venues including 99 Scott, Brooklyn Army Terminal, Brooklyn Navy Yard and various warehouses. In the four days surrounding New Year’s Eve, the company will produce six events. Talking to Billboard over Zoom, Toma is tired — “it’s come to a point now where it’s very, very intense … I just don’t sleep, actually” — but focused.
“10,000 is the new 5,000 and 5,000 is the new 2,000,” he says. “We’re doing like, 25,000 to 30,000 people a month now.”
Toma was born in Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst neighborhood, the son of Egyptian immigrants. His first job was at his grandparents’ bagel shop. He was then a busboy at a catering hall run by his uncle. When the hall hosted a teen night, the lightbulb turned on. “‘What the hell is this?’” he recalls thinking. “Like, I could do this.”
He was right. Toma started hosting dry events for teens at the hall, then graduated to New York’s club scene, working his way through venues like the Chelsea mega-club Crobar. In 2010, he took his first trip to Ibiza (“I was like, ‘What the hell is this?’”) then traveled to Germany, where he had his mind blown at Time Warp, the fabled house and techno festival.
Energized by Time Warp’s musical offerings — “In America, it’s usually like nine EDM stages and a dubstep stage, this had all great artists” — he got in touch with the festival’s owner, Steffen Charles, to see about bringing the event across the Atlantic. As Toma recalls, Charles’ response was icy: “I’ll never do New York. America is not ready.”
It took a few years, but Toma convinced him otherwise, and in 2014 Time Warp made it’s U.S. debut in Brooklyn. The show was a logistical nightmare. Toma lost his license for the Brooklyn Armory days before the festival, having to relocate to another venue, The Shed. The event lost $400,000. Toma considered it a success.
“It was just kind of a dream,” he says. “I looked at it as, ‘This is not a loss, this is an investment.’”
The event helped Teksupport distinguish itself as the company that European brands could trust to introduce their shows to U.S. audiences. Toma and crew could draw the right crowd, book the right artists, pull the right permits and, particularly as an independent operator, provide an experience with “heart and soul,” and a staff that would do anything to pull off a party. (He recalls convincing a friend to let him use the warehouse of the friend’s family business, Utz Potato Chips, for a show, hauling seven tractor trailers worth of chips out, then back in when the event was over.)
In 2016, Ibiza born techno party CircoLoco made it’s U.S. debut in partnership with Teksupport. In 2022, the company presented techno legend Ricardo Villalobos’ first solo New York City show. Last month, the company brought Eric Prydz’s HOLO show to New York City for the first time since 2019. This past weekend, Teksupport hosted the first U.S. events from Dutch dance producer DGTL in New York City and Los Angeles. (Toma is a partner in Stranger Than, which puts on parties in L.A.) The company also books a litany of international producers who less-commonly play the city’s EDM-focused festivals and clubs. (Toma is also a partner of the Manhattan club Nebula, and the invite only Hearsay.)
With its efforts, Teksupport has both catalyzed and capitalized on house and techno’s surge in popularity in the U.S. in the wake of EDM. These so-called “underground” genres are now, by dance scene standard, anything but, with parties from Burning Man to Art Basel focused on the sounds. As they’ve bled into the world of fashion and video games, Teksupport has forged a presence in those realms as well. Toma says one of the most surreal moments of his career was being in a motion capture suit while filming his cameo for Grand Theft Auto V. (Teksupport works closely with GTA creator Rockstar Games, which has a partnership with CircoLoco that has resulted in appearances, radio stations and soundtrack contributions by producers including The Blessed Madonna and Moodymann.)
Despite the cultural cachet, Toma says Teksupport is still a family business, made up of many staffers who’ve been around since day one — along with his actual sister, brother and cousin. He and his business partner Mike Vitacco have been best friends since high school, with Toma handling promotion, marketing and bookings, while Vitacco handles licensing and operations. Given the company’s growth over 2023 in particular, Toma is planning to expand the company by bringing in new employees from locations around the world who are steeped in their respective scenes and fans of Teksupport. (He says this is preferable to “recycling people from other producers’ businesses in the space.”)
“You’re only as good as your last show,” he says. “So you’ve got to figure out how to keep it going. That’s my M.O.”
He’s also got another big event on the horizon. On January 3, after Teksupport’s back-to-back (to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back) New Year’s Eve shows, Toma and his two kids — daughter Celine is six and son Rob is 9 — are flying to the Caribbean for a two week vacation. Toma has a plan for how to finally relax.
“I’m just literally not bringing my phone,” he says.
Geffen Records has a new dance label, Disorder. The label is being launched Thursday (Dec. 7) by Geffen in partnership with longstanding electronic music executive David Dollimore. Based in London, Disorder will sign DJs, producers, artists, brands and labels.
Dollimore has a long history as a dance music tastemaker, working at London’s lauded Ministry of Sound (where he started as an intern) for 15 years and helping develop the careers of artists including Eric Prydz, Duke Dumont, Axwell, Benny Benassi, MK and Avicii. When Ministry of Sound was acquired by Sony Music UK in 2016, Dollimore became president of RCA Label Group, which clocked dance hits from artists including CamelPhat, London Grammar and Jade Thirlwall during his tenure.
“Disorder will be an incubator for the future of dance music and redefine the landscape as we see it,” Dollimore said in a statement. “This label will be a portal to the underground club world, distilling future trends for mass consumption. We will be leading a generation forging alternative routes to the top, outside the confines of dated traditional structures. The Disorder artist will resonate in fashion, culture, lifestyle and entertainment, across multiple platforms, forming a newgen of future visionaries within the field.”
The first project from Disorder is WHP Records, an imprint created in collaboration with The Warehouse Project, the tastemaking Manchester-based dance events brand that’s been putting on shows in and beyond the city since 2006. Founded by Richard McGinnis and Sam Kandel, The Warehouse Project sells more than 300,000 tickets every winter season. WHP Records is intended to transmit the sounds of its events to the world.
“Having spent the last two decades dedicated to finding and breaking talent, we can’t believe it has taken us this long to make this jump but David was the one person we wanted do it with,” McGinnis and Kandel said in a joint statement. “Being able to work with artists in a whole new way, providing tangible support in the live space alongside equitable partnerships, with David and Tom who share our passion for this culture is an exciting new chapter for us.”
“Together,” added Dollimore, “[Geffen Records president] Tom March, Rich, Sam and the impressive team at The Warehouse Project and I, have the network, the platform and the global infrastructure with Universal to make this one of the most successful partnerships in dance music.”
March has his own storied history with electronic music, having started his career in dance music PR and working with artists including Avicci, Alesso, The Chemical Brothers, Tiesto, Deadmau5, Jax Jones, DJ Snake, Zedd, Meduza, Swedish House Mafia and Becky Hill.
“At Geffen we are always looking to partner with our industry’s most successful and innovative entrepreneurs,” March said in a statement. “I couldn’t be more excited to partner with David as he heads back to what I consider him to be the best in the world at — signing and A&R-ing dance music. Between us, we have worked with many of the great names in the last twenty years of electronic music. I am so happy to be joining forces with him now.”
Since launching in 2018, Seismic Dance Event has put Austin on the map for electronic music. Produced by independently owned, Austin-based RealMusic Events, the fest has helped bring house and techno to a city often known as the “live music capital of the world.”
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Happening again this past Nov. 10-12, Seismic expanded that reputation with a lineup that featured headliners Chris Lake, deadmau5 and Kaskade, along with a stacked undercard that featured Anfisa Letyago, Loco Dice, Frankie Wah, VNSSA, Walker & Royce and many more playing across the festival’s two stages. Seismic typically draws roughly 5,000 attendees per day, with the November show selling out.
Seismic has already announced that their spring edition will take place May 10-11, 2024, with another fall show taking place Nov. 15-17, 2024. But before all that, here, we’ve got an exclusive six hours of Seismic Dance Event 6.0 sets from Boys Noize, Mau P, Azzecca and Wax Motif.
Boys Noize
The German legend delivers 90 minutes of music that include his recent VTSS collab “Steady Pace,” his Skrillex collab “Fine Day Anthem,” along with blink-and-you’ll-miss-them samples of Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack” and Gloria Estefan’s “Conga,” along with — of course — a lot of good old-fashioned hard-hitting techno.
Mau P
The Dutch wunderkind makes good on his white-hot name with a 90-minute set that takes its time warming up before diving into old-school dance tracks like Breach’s classic “Jack,” hip-hop moments from Run-DMC and Outkast, and of course, inevitably, his own hits including “Your Mind Is Dirty,” the Kevin de Vries collab “Metro” and “Drugs From Amsterdam,” which gets an extended treatment.
Azzecca
Opening with Spencer Brown’s always excellent “Windows 95 On Acid,” the Chicago producer blazes through tracks by artists including Disfreq, Nicky Romero, Shouse, DJ Dan, Morgan Page and her own “Tell That Boy,” “Ego Death” and “Other Side.”
Wax Motif
The Australian-born, Los Angeles-based fave offers a hypnotic, deliciously dark set featuring his recent Zhu collab “Better Recognize,” his Malaa collab “Otherside” and other heaters by Body Ocean, AC Slater, Chris Lorenzo and Fly With Us, and more.
After announcing that he’d been diagnosed with a rare form of brain cancer in June, on Tuesday (Dec. 5), Michael Bibi offered a much happier update.
“CANCER FREE!” he wrote on Instagram. “After 6 months of fighting I leave hospital officially in remission with no cancer in my body.
“To every person that sent me the support, energy & strength to fight I thank you from the bottom of my heart & to the staff [at the Royal Marsden hospital in London] for literally saving my life I will forever be in your debt,” Bibi’s post continued. “Thank you so much.. I’m still very tired, I’m on a lot of meds, my body hurts & my hairs all gone….but I’m excited to get home, process, heal & prepare for the future with you all.”
The post is accompanied by photos of Bibi walking out of the hospital with his hands raised, flashing peace signs, images of him with hospital staff, and a short video of him ringing a bell inside the hospital, a hospital tradition for patients finishing treatment. The Royal Marsden specializes in cancer treatment.
The post garnered celebratory comments from many in the electronic music community, including Diplo, who wrote “hero,” John Summit, who wrote “LEGEND,” and Martin Garrix, who wrote “you’re a huge inspiration, so happy & proud of you!!! best f—ing news of 2023.”
In June, Bibi announced that he’d been diagnosed with CNS Lymphona, a rare form of cancer. The U.K. artist, on a hot streak following the pandemic, was forced to cancel all his shows while receiving treatment. His first performance after entering treatment was this past September, when he played a surprise set at DC-10 in Ibiza as part of the closing party for his Solid Grooves label.
The remission announcement follows a bone marrow/stem cell transplant Bibi received last month. In a post from Nov. 1, Bibi wrote that, “After many months of fighting, today I start the last phase of my treatment by having a bone marrow/stem cell transplant. If all goes well this will be the final yet toughest part of my journey. It will hit me hard & could take months of recovery but the end goal is being 100% cancer free… I pray everyday that all goes smoothly & I will be out of hospital with you all again soon. Wish me luck & see you on the other side.”
Jean Michel-Jarre will have a tres merry Christmas and also offer some joy to the world, with the French electronic pioneer set to perform from Versailles on Dec. 25.
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Presented by UNESCO and the French Ministry of Culture, the performance will happen from the Château de Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors, a UNESCO world heritage site, to celebrate the location’s 400th anniversary.
Called VERSAILLES 400, the show will happen in front of a live performance in the Hall of Mirrors, and also in virtual reality. Jarre will play while wearing a mixed reality headset, with the metaverse version of the show happening in a digital Hall of Mirrors. The virtual audience can connect through VR or on tablets and smartphones.
The show is designed as a tribute to French innovation that brings together current artforms and the art of the 17th century. Tickets for the live performance at Versailles start at 60€, or $65.
The show will be filmed at the Château de Versailles and broadcast on French and international television channels, along with Jarre’s YouTube channel and in VR on the French VRROOM platform, all on Dec. 25, Christmas Day.
“Versailles 400 is a hybrid concert and visual creation broadcast live from one of the world’s most beautiful locations, as well as in virtual reality in the metaverse,” Jarre said in a press release. “I hope the event will help promote our creative savoir faire and bring the world of French immersive creation to the forefront of collective culture.”
The 75-year-old genre legend is not a stranger to playing in exotic locations. In 1981, he was the first Western musician to perform in China, landmark shows captured for the double album The Concerts In China. He was invited again, which he accepted in 2004, whereupon he played the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, concerts which beamed live on national television. Other shows have incorporated skyscrapers and city landmarks.
In 2020, President Emmanuel Macron awarded him the Commander of the Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest order of merit. Earlier, he released the album Amazonia, a musical tribute to the Amazon rain forest, its inhabitants and the threats they face, and the companion to an exhibition by legendary photographer Sebastião Salgado. Jarre’s most recent album, Oxymore, was released in 2022.
In 1978, Kate Bush became the first solo woman to reach No. 1 in the U.K. with a song she wrote, produced and performed entirely by herself with “Wuthering Heights.” Forty-five years later, in October, dance–pop artist Kenya Grace joined her as the second to pull off the feat with the quietly devastating “Strangers,” her major-label debut single.
“There wasn’t too much pressure on that song, to be honest,” Grace says. “I didn’t really have some mad goal in mind — I just wrote it one random night.”
For Grace, 25, that kind of writing experience is the result of skills she’s been honing her entire life: she began creating and performing songs for friends and family at age four, inspired by Norah Jones tracks that her mother would play around the house. By 16, the South Africa-born, Southampton-raised singer was frequenting drum’n’bass parties, baptizing herself in the energy of the U.K. dance music scene that would soon characterize the sound of her own music. “When I start writing something at 120 BPM, I’m like, ‘No, it’s way too slow,’” she quips.
She graduated from London’s Academy of Contemporary Music in 2019 — an institution she likens to a massive networking event — and spent the next few years building an audience on TikTok. Even from her initial videos, Grace displayed a deft understanding of how to present her music, including one clip in which she crafted a beat by using her music production controller to source sound waves from oranges.
The post caught the attention of Day One Music’s Nick Huggett and Nick Shymansky, who have signed and developed British music icons including Amy Winehouse and Adele. By November 2022, two months after she self-released the aptly titled “Oranges,” the two were managing Grace. “We’re seeing someone with a craft [who] knows how to sing and command an audience,” Shymansky says. “We’ve got someone that has earned their stripes and is ready to take on the world.”
They prioritized growing her fan base on an international level, and by July, the two helped her sign a deal with Major Recordings, an electronic dance music label launched by Warner Records. “We knew early on that more than half of her audience was in America; it’s not a coincidence the deal was signed there,” Shymansky says. “We had offers for shows in Los Angeles prior to ‘Strangers’ — that’s not typical for a British artist at such an early stage.”
Kenya Grace photographed on November 20, 2023 at SOUTH56 studio in London.
Bex Day
The partnership quickly paid huge dividends in “Strangers” — though a different song nearly took its spot. “I signed my deal about two weeks before I posted [a snippet of] ‘Strangers’ online,” Grace recalls. “The month before that, we were lining up a different song,” which ultimately became its follow-up single, “Only In My Mind.”
Nonetheless, when a teaser of “Strangers” connected with listeners on a musical and lyrical level, the label pivoted, with Grace still meticulously poring over the song’s final mix. “I was rewriting the lyrics to make it rhyme,” she says. “I’m always really funny and picky about vocal production. I spend the longest on the vocals.”
Sonically, the song is steeped in drum’n’bass and aligns with the current U.K. dance music revival in the U.S. led by artists like Fred Again.. and PinkPantheress. The song’s vulnerable lyrical bent (“And then one random night when everything changes/You won’t reply and we’ll go back to strangers”) plays to Gen Z’s penchant for unflinchingly honest pop songwriting.
Though Grace admits feeling pressure ahead of its release, “Strangers” officially arrived through Warner Records/Major Recordings on Sept. 1. By the end of the month, it became her first entry on the Hot 100 (since reaching a No. 52 high). The track has also climbed to No. 1 in the U.K.; reached the top 5 on the Billboard Global 200; and spent five weeks atop Hot Dance/Electronic Songs, marking the first time in the ranking’s decade-long history that a track solely written, produced and sung by a woman has reached the summit.
Says Huggett: “We had no expectations other than, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if this did better than the last release, which was really nowhere near there?’ That was the benchmark. Every time we put out some music, we want to improve on it incrementally.”
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While social media helped buoy “Strangers,” the resources of a traditional label drove the song at radio and helped place it on editorial playlists on digital service providers. The song has earned 773.7 million on-demand streams through Nov. 23, according to Luminate. “The label used this explosive moment to make sure there’s a proper campaign globally,” says Huggett. “We’ve been blown away with how brilliantly the label has worked the record with their understanding of the complexity of radio and traditional media.”
In October, Grace released the trance-driven “Only In My Mind,” and three weeks later, followed it with a “sad acoustic version” of “Strangers” as the song continues to chart. At the top of December, she detailed a biting take on modern love with “Paris” and, come 2024, she expects to release her “dark, moody [and] dance-inspired” debut album.
In the meantime, she’s on her first tour, with stops in London, New York and Los Angeles — though Shymansky has his sights set on even brighter lights: a Las Vegas residency 10 years from now. “There’s a long road to get there, but we think she has the goods to do that,” he says. “That’s gotta be the ambition.”
From left: Nick Huggett, Kenya Grace and Nicholas Shymansky photographed on November 20, 2023 at SOUTH56 studio in London.
Bex Day
A version of this story will appear in the Dec. 9, 2023, issue of Billboard.