Defected Records
Anotr were worried. The Dutch dance duo had gained a following with a fleet, flinty style — “that minimal tech-house sound, a little edgy, a little gritty,” says Abel Balder, a singer who has collaborated with the pair. But in the summer of 2022, Anotr were readying new music that veered in another direction: Bubbly and openhearted, with scraps of live guitar and hand-played bass lines.
“The first few months of having the music out, we didn’t put it on Beatport,” says Oguzhan Guney, one half of the duo. “And we didn’t send it out to people because we were afraid of getting judged. We were super concerned about it.”
The attempt at stealth wasn’t entirely successful: The songs, which eventually appeared on the album The Reset, were still judged — just not the way Anotr expected. They were braced for rejection; instead, “everybody started asking us to play the new stuff” during club gigs, says Jesse van der Heijden, Guney’s partner in the group. One track, “Relax My Eyes,” became a streaming hit, with more than 225 million plays on Spotify alone. As van der Heijden puts it happily, “it’s good to be proved wrong.”
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The genial duo stripped away even more of the armor on its latest album, On a Trip, released at the end of January. While there are still songs aimed at clubs, the album sees a duo known for making dance music sometimes abandon the form altogether: “We started making music that wasn’t necessarily four on the floor,” van der Heijden says.
Once again, listeners seem happy to follow Anotr on its adventures: “How You Feel,” a giddy, sensual nu-disco single, is nearing 50 million streams on Spotify. Balder has a theory about the duo’s success: “A lot of people who go to these more edgy club nights, deep down inside, want a hug,” he says. “Maybe they didn’t know they were looking for that. And then Anotr came, and they’re like, ‘You know what? The joy and the lightness, this is what you guys need.’”
Anotr debuted on Defected Records, a dance music institution, in 2015. For years it produced stern, unflagging rhythmic workouts, sometimes moistening the dry beats with fragments of vocal samples. During the pandemic, however, the two became conscious of a gulf between the songs they were playing at home and the tracks they were producing. “We were listening to jazz, funk, soul,” Guney remembers. “[We thought], why not try to bring those two cultures together?”
Anotr is not the first artist from the dance world to move from a programmed, sample-heavy approach to one that is heavier on live instrumentation. Daft Punk built its towering reputation as shrewd samplers before famously discarding that approach in favor of human players on Random Access Memories. Crazy P also started as a pair of sample-happy producers but later morphed: “We effectively wanted to be like a disco band,” co-founder Jim Baron told Billboard.
The inflection point for Anotr was a 2022 song titled “Vertigo.” The track was created with Balder, who had been doing sessions with the duo for years. They always got along well personally, but often landed far apart musically; Balder’s attempts to add “borderline-cheesy melodies” were always politely rebuffed. Until that year, when the duo was reenergized by its ambition to bring more funk, soul, and jazz into its productions.
The pair recorded a racing rhythm track punctured by keening electric guitar; feeling a little reckless, Balder offered to sing on the track, even though he had never cut vocals before. By way of explanation, he remembers that “it was around 3 a.m., and we were on the couch getting high.”
Anotr has enjoyed a number of creative breakthroughs in this state. “Relax My Eyes” was made over the course of a couple days during which the two took “long walks, smoked a lot of weed, and took mushrooms.” (Such psychedelic mushrooms feature prominently in the press release announcing the album, almost as if they were a high-profile executive producer.) Van der Heijden believes the duo has “never been as high” as they were when recording “24 (Turn It Up)(+6).” “We took a lot of shrooms, smoked a lot of weed, and the instrumental already felt really right,” he remembers.
In February 2022, when Anotr debuted “Vertigo” during a boat party off the coast of Uruguay, Balder didn’t expect much. But the audience on the boat “exploded — people kept coming up to all of us saying, ‘Wow, that track is amazing.’”
“Vertigo” came out on The Reset, and several tracks from On a Trip giddily improve upon that template. “How You Feel” channels impassioned Euro-disco, with guitars that flicker like candlelight and come-hither vocals from Leven Kali. That one proved to be so effective ANOTR basically remade it as “Currency,” a deft bilingual collaboration with Cimafunk and Pame. “24 (Turn It Up)(+6)” evokes David Morales’ singles from 20 years ago like “Here I Am.”
At the same time, Guney says, “we wanted to do something more downtempo and more straight-from-the-heart, instead of only feel-good music.” “Care for You” and “Bad Trip” are both stuttering, loungey funk. “Don’t Understand” also gives a cold shoulder to the pounding beats that underpin most dance tracks, and “Can’t Let It Go” is a melancholy ballad. Mushrooms sometimes helped the duo write more candid lyrics: “You’re taking these psychedelics,” Guney explains, “and they basically enhance what you feel from the inside, so you can’t hide your emotions anymore.”
In January, Anotr were in a familiar place — nervous about putting out new music. “It’s a lot of fun trying new things until the moment where you actually know that you need to share it, and anxiety creeps up,” van der Heijden says. “But after we’ve released it, we can see people still f— with this.”
The duo has already embarked on a country-hopping tour that takes it from Australia to South America to the U.S. and then back to Europe, with upcoming U.S. dates including March shows at Brooklyn Storehouse in Chicago’s Radius. “Now,” van der Heijden adds, “we know we can actually do anything we want.”
After investing several hundred million dollars in labels and management companies, Firebird Music has entered into its first partnership with an artist — the U.K. rocker Yungblud — on a new company, YB Inc.
For Yungblud, this alliance offers an opportunity to expand his pursuits outside of recorded music, which already include Bludfest, a festival, and Beautifully Romanticized, Accidentally Traumatized, a fashion brand. “This is a new type of venture for both of us, which is very exciting,” the artist says via email. “Building and scaling a music festival, a 360 lifestyle business — including physical stores and a music venue — and starting a clothing brand all need resources.” And Firebird has a large war chest — Nat Zilkha, the company’s co-founder and executive chairman, told Billboard in 2023 that it has access to over $1 billion in equity.
For Firebird, teaming up with Yungblud furthers the company’s goal of “support[ing] any entrepreneur who has vision and aspirations, but needs capital, expertise, infrastructure and support,” according to Zilkha. “Through his recorded music and touring, merchandise, fashion line, brand deals and festival,” Zilkha adds, “Yungblud has built one of the largest and most successful businesses in the world.”
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Zilkha launched Firebird in 2022 with Nathan Hubbard, who previously served as CEO of Ticketmaster. Initially, the company focused on investing in labels (including Defected Records and Transgressive Records), management companies (including Red Light and Mick Management) and publishers (Tape Room, One Two Many Music), often acquiring majority stakes, according to Zilkha.
For Defected, a dance music label, “Firebird’s investment provides capital that allows us to scale — whether that be through A&R expansion, catalogue acquisitions, technological advancements, or other efforts,” says CEO Wez Saunders. “The partnership removes financial constraints that independent labels often face when competing with major label-backed entities.”
On top of that, Saunders continues, “Firebird is known for leveraging technology, analytics and audience engagement strategies. This allows Defected to enhance its data-driven approach to artist development and fan engagement — areas where major labels often hold a competitive advantage.” (“For any of these individual companies to spend the kind of money that we’re spending on our data analytics team would be cost prohibitive,” Zilkha said previously. “But we can spread that cost across all of the different companies.”)
Firebird has also wanted to work directly with acts. “There’s an opportunity to create a new kind of partner for artists, one that is fully aligned across everything they do,” Zilkha told Billboard in 2023. The music industry “is stuck in silos” — most labels take a cut of an artist’s streaming and sales income, for example, but not their touring income. That means the record company has little incentive to help build an act’s touring operation, which “under-optimizes the investment behind an artist,” according to Zilkha.
By partnering with stars across all their various revenue streams, Firebird is theoretically freed up to take a different approach to career building. “It might be that we lose money on the distribution or recorded music, but that’s okay, because we’re partnering with the artist in a lot of other places where she or he may be reaching their fans,” Zilkha explained.
Yungblud is signed to Interscope Capitol Labels Group, but he will funnel his earnings into YB Inc, which he owns jointly with Firebird, according to Bloomberg. This strategy “allows me to manage the risk, but enables my projects to breathe and grow,” Yungblud says. “My managers and I can focus on getting the proposition and execution just right, while keeping our fundamental values in place, and without rushing or skipping important steps.”
Zilkha hopes to strike more similar partnerships soon. “As Firebird continues to scale and bring on more artists,” he says, “the diversity across artists will be paired with that added benefit of also being diversified across revenue streams.”
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