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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.
Rejoice, Forest Fam. Electric Forest announced the lineup for its 2024 event on Tuesday (Dec. 5).
Again melding electronic, jam music with rock, hip-hop, indie and more, the four-day festival will be headlined by Pretty Lights, whose sold-out, 27-date comeback tour wrapped this past weekend, along with tech house phenom John Summit, Subtronics, Excision and resident headliners The String Cheese Incident.
Also getting top billing are techno star Charlotte de Witte, Ludacris, Dom Dolla and Summit performing as Everything Always, Nelly Furtado, The Disco Biscuits, Knock2, Black Tiger Sex Machine, Ben Bohmer, Clozee and LSDream performing as Psyren and many more. More artists will be added to the lineup in the coming months.
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“What I care more about is that attendees walk past a stage where they don’t know the act, but they stop because it’s cool music,” Electric Forest founder Jeremy Stein told Billboard in 2019. “[A diverse lineup] also creates a lot of doors for people from different walks of life to come to the festival. You’ll come because you’re a fan of ten artists on the lineup, and you’ll leave a fan of a lot more.”
The festival returns to Rothbury, Mich., June 20-23, 2024. Festival tickets go on sale Friday (Dec. 8).
Produced by AEG Presents and Insomniac Events, the festival takes place in the tiny town of Rothbury, Mich., (population: roughly 440) on a woodsy 400-acre expanse of land located 10 miles east of Lake Michigan. The event has been taking place at this site since 2008.
See the full lineup below:
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Insomniac’s annual Halloween bash Escape brought the spooky vibes to the dancefloor Oct. 27-28. Taking place at Southern California’s NOS Events Center, festival headliners included Above & Beyond, Afrojack, DJ Snake, Kaskade, Malaa, Rezz, Slander, Tchami, Three 6 Mafia and Zedd, with artists playing across five stages, and tens of thousands of fans turning out in […]
This week in dance music: We broke down the top 25 tracks played at ADE 2023 and caught up with Tiga about the 25 year anniversary of his Turbo Recordings label.
And, as always, here are the best new dance tracks of the week.
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Daft Punk, Random Access Memories (Drumless Edition)
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The Label: Columbia Records
The Spiel: A half year’s worth of 10-year anniversary celebrations for Daft Punk’s 2013 Grammy winning masterpiece Random Access Memories culminates today in what is arguably this anniversary’s greatest achievement — a new version of the album stripped of all percussion.
What sounds like a potential gimmick instead gives new life to the LP by allowing greater focus on everything that was always happening, but which one can now hear better without all the drums. Elements that maybe weren’t thoroughly noticed or appreciated on the original — Panda Bear’s gorgeous, glowing acapella on “Doin It Right,” Nile Rodgers’ rhythm guitar on “Lose Yourself To Dance,” the pulsing bass on “Get Lucky” — all get space to breathe and shine on the Drumless Edition, with the project achieving standalone status in the duo’s lauded catalog, rather than just being a footnote to it.
The Blessed Madonna with JOY (Anonymous) & Danielle Ponder, “Carry Me Higher“
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The Label: Warner Music
The Spiel: At its essence, house music is and always has been church music, with the latest from The Blessed Madonna, U.K. duo JOY (Anonymous) and singer Danielle Ponder delivering a big dose of spirit with the tremendous “Carry Me Higher.” A simmering, slow build multi-movement production is the base for Ponder’s power-lunged vocals, which insist “carry me higher!” — a task this one achieves in that ecstatic manner the best music dance music is capable of achieving.
The Artist Says: “The day we made this in New York it felt like we cracked a code and we’ve often talked about it in those terms since then,” The Blessed Madonna wrote on Instagram. “It felt like a musical breakthrough then and it still does. It’s finally time for us to give you the code.”
Calvin Harris & Eliza Rose, “Body Moving”
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The Label: Ministry of Sound
The Spiel: Calvin Harris and the ever-ascendent Eliza Rose deliver a quick hit of sunshine as the days get darker, with their “Body Moving’ collab — clocking in at two minutes and 34 seconds — amalgamating punchy brass, cooking percussion and Rose’s sinewy, shimmery voice for one last blast of summer as the holiday season gets started.
The Artist Says: “My goal was to create a track that captures the essence of summer while also igniting the dance floors,” says Rose. “The vibe with Calvin has been fabulous. He couldn’t be more down-to-earth. It’s been an honor to work with one of the best producers in the world! It’s something I never thought would be possible. We have created something that I believe has really combined our two identities into something unique and also reflective of our own personal work.”
Shygirl feat. Cosha, “thicc”
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The Label: Because Music
The Spiel: The latest from Shygirl is the stuff peaktime dancefloor bliss is made from, with layers and layers of staccato synths building to an ecstatic climax that’s balanced with pared down moments of kickdrum and vocals from Shygirl and Irish singer Cosha that give the track a sublimely feminine feel.
The Artist Says: “[This was] originally a song we’d made around the same time as some of the album tracks but I decided to hold this one back. I’ve enjoyed teasing this one at festivals and shows while still in demo mode for over a year already with the idea of somehow infusing the energy of the crowd into this final version of the song – ‘thicc’ is fun and carefree and definitely a tease – all the classic traits of club shy infused into one track.”
Vintage Culture, Tube & Berger, Kyle Pearce, “Come Come”
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The Label: Virgin Music
The Spiel: Brazil’s Vintage Culture links with German duo Tube & Berger and vocalist Kyle Pearce for the looming progressive house cut “Come Come,” which demonstrates how the genre, when done right, achieves a balance between human emotion, epic size and machinistic appeal.