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Sometimes, album titles show a great deal of thought. The 1975’s I Like It When You Sleep, For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It is a title of great complexity and beauty. The full title of Fiona Apple’s 1999 album When the Pawn… is an eight-line poem that contains a whopping 444 […]
At the beginning of 2021 — a year before she introduced herself to the world as Ice Spice, with her signature cinnamon curly afro — Isis Gaston wrapped her hair into two braids and tucked them underneath a silk scarf. Wearing a black lounge set, she smiled for the camera while a sample of Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” faded into the background and the hook of “Buss It,” rapper Erica Banks’ breakout 2020 single, started. The clip cut, and Gaston, now clad in a teal cut-out dress, dropped it low and twerked with her long, light brown locks cascading over her frame.
The viral video was just one of millions from the “Buss It” TikTok challenge, which helped Banks earn her first Billboard Hot 100 entry, a Travis Scott remix and a partnership with Warner Records in conjunction with her own label, 1501 Certified Entertainment. But for the then-21-year-old Gaston, who was just mustering the courage to record her own music, the TikTok trend and the way it boosted Banks’ career seemed like something she could achieve, too.
“It was so funny — I was already working on my first song ever that I was recording. I had already wrote little raps and sh-t before that, [but] it took me a lot to get to recording. I was halfway done with it when I did the ‘Buss It’ challenge. When I saw it going so viral, I was like, ‘Damn, imagine that was my song I was twerking to,’ ” she recalls today with a chuckle. “The next month, I put out my first song and took it from there.”
In March 2021, Ice Spice dropped her sharp-tongued debut single, “Bully Freestyle,” which was produced by RIOTUSA, whom she had met through a mutual friend while attending the State University of New York (SUNY) at Purchase. For the next year-and-a-half, Ice refined her craft — and in August 2022, she independently released “Munch (Feelin’ U)” and finally experienced the success she had always envisioned.
“Munch” — or, as Ice defined it, “somebody that’s really obsessed with you that’s just fiending to eat it” — immediately entered the pop culture lexicon. After delivering the deliciously cynical line “You thought I was feeling you,” Ice spends the song shooting down voracious admirers and envious haters alike with cutthroat bars that bounce off RIOTUSA’s menacing production. In the official music video, she smizes before flashing cameras, twerking once again — but this time while wearing a pale green tube top, denim booty shorts and neon orange nails that complement her now-famous ’fro. TikTok users devoured “Munch” (which has since accumulated 2.4 billion views on its hashtag); Drake played it on his SiriusXM channel, Sound 42; and the song quickly became the New York drill anthem of the summer. Audiences crowned Ice “the People’s Princess.”
“I saw all of my supporters being like, ‘She’s the People’s Princess! She’s Princess Diana!’ ” Ice remembers. “At first, I was confused. I was like, ‘Um, Princess Diana? Out of everybody?’ But [then] I was like, ‘F–k it, she’s iconic.’ ” And judging by the way Ice, now 23, commands the luxurious high-rise apartment at 432 Park Ave. — one of the tallest residential buildings in the world, where our conversation is happening — she’s now well aware of her sovereignty. She struts the hallway in cotton candy-toned regalia: a baby blue velvet cropped hoodie, MRDR BRVDO jeans with pink distressed patches and cloud-dyed Air Force 1s. Her omnipresent $100,000 chain featuring a diamond-encrusted cartoon rendering of her face hangs around her neck, and she frequently checks herself out in a metallic pink Balenciaga Le Cagole rhinestone-embossed purse with a heart-shaped mirror.
Alaïa bodysuit, Stuart Weitzman shoes, Le Vian jewelry.
Christian Cody
Last fall, about a month after the release of “Munch,” Ice signed a label deal with 10K Projects and Capitol Records. At the beginning of 2023, she treated her fans (collectively called the Spice Cabinet, individually known as Munchkins) to her debut EP, Like..?, a six-song set named for her signature interjection, which further flashed her lyrical vocabulary and expanded her drill sound. The project debuted in the top 10 of Billboard’s Top Rap Albums chart and the top 40 of the Billboard 200, while its Lil Tjay-assisted “Gangsta Boo” debuted at No. 82 on the Hot 100, marking Ice’s debut entry on the chart. When she joined forces with fellow online sensation PinkPantheress on “Boy’s a liar Pt. 2” in February, the track vaulted both artists to No. 3 on the Hot 100.
Like her memorable one-liners, Ice’s hits keep coming: In April, her idol, Nicki Minaj, hopped on the remix of Like..? track “Princess Diana,” which debuted at No. 4 on the Hot 100 and became the first No. 1 on Hot Rap Songs by two co-billed women in its 34-year history.
“The first time I met her, I knew she was special. I got that tingling feeling [I get] every time when you meet that [kind of] artist,” says Michelle Jubelirer, CEO/chair of Capitol Music Group. “I knew she was a global superstar in the making.”
But despite projecting confidence, Ice is still adjusting to the spotlight. And if she was once a bit shocked by the Princess Diana comparisons, she has lately come to understand the late icon’s plight a little better, as she’s increasingly faced her own share of alarming encounters with onlookers. When she performed at a New York Fashion Week afterparty in February, fans swarmed her by the DJ booth, prompting security to escort her offstage midperformance. Ice even had to push people off herself.
“I’m not going to lie: I was scared in that moment. I was kind of worried because we was a little outnumbered that night,” she confesses. But her tone swiftly shifts to gratitude: “But looking back, I was like, ‘This is really a blessing being able to just see how excited people are to see me perform.’ ”
Balancing exposure and privacy is tough for any rising artist and their team. Her manager, James Rosemond Jr., remembers hip-hop super-agent Cara Lewis (who now counts Ice as a client alongside the likes of Travis Scott and Eminem) and promoters blowing up his phone after the performance about what had happened, even though it never posed a threat to him, given the security measures they had in place.
“It’s been eight months since ‘Munch,’ and as anybody can see, it went from zero to 100 — real quick,” he says in April, nodding to the Drake song. He met Ice in March 2022 through his client Diablo, a DJ-producer who was working with her for the first time at New York recording studio Blast Off Productions. “Me and her manifested each other — I was looking for a female act, and she was looking for a manager,” he says. Rosemond, 30, now manages Ice, RIOTUSA and Diablo under Mastermind Artists, the management and label company that he started in 2019. But the last year has taught him that management isn’t just about discovering and developing great artists — it’s also about protecting them. And at this transitional stage in Ice’s career, where she falls somewhere between rising rap star and culture-shifting sensation, Rosemond is having “real conversations” with her about what’s happening while giving her the space to say no.
Jubelirer and 10K co-presidents Zach Friedman and Tony Talamo are betting on Ice to become the next “global superstar,” a term all three use independently. But as they root for her to take off — “It’s a rocket, and we’re just holding on,” Friedman says — she’s still finding her footing. “It’s been less than a year of me being famous, so it is definitely an adjustment,” she admits. As she aims to live up to the lofty title that industry patrons and fans have anointed her with while still protecting her peace and privacy, Ice is trying to enjoy the lightning-fast ride while steeling herself for all that comes with it.
Isis Gaston was born one of one.
Entering the world on Jan. 1, 2000, she was practically predestined to rule her generation. Growing up in the Bronx, she admits with a sigh, she found her birthday “annoying, [because] everybody else is just celebrating New Year’s, but it’s my birthday.” But long before she assumed any title, she knew how to set an example. Ice’s four younger siblings looked up to her, and in turn, she looked up to her father — an underground rapper.
“While I was growing up, I wasn’t like, ‘My father’s a rapper, so I’m going to be one, too,’ ” she says; still, “seeing somebody go to the studio and always hearing hip-hop music,” like New York heavyweights Jay-Z, 50 Cent and Wu-Tang Clan, planted the seeds for her career. And while she didn’t manifest becoming a rapper, “I did manifest being successful,” she says matter-of-factly. Ice credits her mother, along with Rhonda Byrne’s book The Secret, for teaching her about manifestation and the law of attraction when she was just 10 years old.
Miu Miu top and skirt, Stuart Weitzman shoes, Le Vian and Jennifer Fisher jewelry.
Christian Cody
It wasn’t until 2019, when fellow New Yorker Pop Smoke popped off, that Ice grew interested in drill music, the hip-hop subgenre characterized by nihilistic and realistic lyrics about the inescapable prevalence of violence in major cities, punctuated with gunplay-like production loaded with rattling hi-hats and ad-libs like “Brrrrrrrap!” and “Grrrrr!”
Drill originated on Chicago’s South Side in the early 2010s, defined by dark, slow tempos (borrowed from Atlanta trap music) and popularized by Chief Keef and Lil Durk, among others. Soon, the style traveled across the pond — and intermingled with grime, garage and road rap, molding U.K. drill. In Brooklyn, Bobby Shmurda and Rowdy Rebel started borrowing from Chicago drill’s sinister storytelling and injecting New York’s boisterous energy. They rapidly became hometown heroes: Both rappers scored label deals with Epic Records, and Shmurda’s smash “Hot N—a” landed in the top 10 of the Hot 100. Yet their promising come-ups — and New York drill’s emergence — stalled in December 2014, when Shmurda, Rebel and affiliates in the GS9 hip-hop collective were arrested on conspiracy to murder, weapons possession and reckless endangerment charges.
But within five years, the Brooklyn drill scene had a new figurehead: The 20-year-old Smoke, who lent his gruff yet suave voice to ominous 808 drum loops, courtesy of U.K. drill pioneer 808MeloBeats, for hits like “Welcome to the Party” and “Dior” that became street anthems. “I feel like Pop Smoke brought this new life back to it, and I was just obsessed,” Ice says of the rapper, who was murdered in February 2020. “He brought a lot of light into New York and definitely paved the way for a lot of current drill rappers.”
When Ice enrolled at SUNY Purchase, she pursued friendships with producers who could help her make her own mark in the drill scene. “I had a couple producer friends on campus that never would f–king send me a beat. And I’m like, ‘Hello?’ Nobody wanted to send me beats but RIOT,” she says of the producer — the son of WQHT (Hot 97) New York DJ/radio personality DJ Enuff — who became her go-to collaborator.
“Ice and RIOT are like Shaq and Kobe. You just don’t break it up. You let them do their thing, and they’re going to cook every night,” says 10K’s Talamo.
Alaïa playsuit, Stuart Weitzman shoes, Tiffany & Co. jewelry.
Christian Cody
The duo started off by sampling 2010s EDM hits like Zedd and Foxes’ “Clarity” and Martin Garrix and Bebe Rexha’s “In the Name of Love” to soften drill’s rough edges and contrast Ice’s low-pitched, laid-back voice with pitched-up, bubblegum pop melodies and flashes of tenderness in the lyrics.
“Back in 2021, there was a big wave of sample drill where they were sampling a whole bunch of popular tracks. But I like finding things that either I had a connection to or are abstract samples,” RIOT explains. “So with ‘No Clarity,’ I was going through old EDM tracks, and when I came across it, it was real nostalgic for me because I loved that song when I was 12. I’m like, ‘Yo, we have to do this one!’ I made the beat, and Ice loved it.”
They didn’t clear the sample for the song, released in November 2021, but Zedd let it fly — and even invited Ice to perform it with him at Miami’s Ultra Music Festival in March. “Funny thing about that performance is right before I went onstage, his laptop wasn’t working. And he said that that hadn’t happened to him in 10 years, so I was like, ‘It’s because I’m here,’ ” she recalls. “It ended up working out fine. I went out there and did ‘In Ha Mood’ and ‘No Clarity’ real quick, but the crowd was definitely a different crowd that I’ve never performed for.”
Zedd’s stage setup at Ultra, with smoke cannons firing right at the artist, also felt foreign to her. But as she has quickly graduated to large stages, one aspect of performance has been unexpectedly familiar: The athleticism required to run around them brings Ice back to her volleyball days in high school and college. “That’s what be motivating me to go into the gym. I’ve been working out lately, and I’m going to have that breath control down pat, feel me?” she says.
Christian Cody
While Ice adapts to bigger stages, Rosemond is adapting to higher-stakes management operations — and drawing from old inspirations. Those include one of his college textbooks, All You Need To Know About the Music Business by Donald S. Passman, or as Rosemond calls it, “the bible of the music business.” After dropping out of Bay State College in Boston, he flew to Los Angeles to meet with Passman, a family friend, to get advice that helped him start his previous management company, RoyalDream Projects, in 2012. And like Ice, he also learned a lot from his father, James “Jimmy Henchman” Rosemond, the famed hip-hop mogul who formerly managed The Game, Gucci Mane and many more.
“I was privy to a lot of his deal-making, and me being a sponge allowed me to soak up what contracts looked like and how to approach labels,” Rosemond says. Before labels began approaching Ice, he advised her, “ ‘Let’s do it ourselves first.’ Deals came to her — production deals, 360 deals — but they were deals that I knew could be better, and in order to get a better deal, you have to go out and do it yourself.”
While Ice’s team independently released her first two major singles, “Munch” and “Bikini Bottom,” Rosemond tapped Create Music Group for distribution, after the company partnered with WorldStar HipHop in 2021 to launch a full-service music distribution hub called WorldStar Distro. “I knew Create Music had sister companies — WorldStar, Genius, Datpiff. So my thing was, ‘Here’s this record. Here’s the vision,’ ” he explains. From there, Rosemond made sure those branches executed the vision: WorldStar HipHop premiered Ice’s music videos on its YouTube channel, while Genius had her perform “Munch” on its Open Mic series. “We was able to be very strategic with it — and it worked.”
Christian Cody
To help him and Ice navigate the ensuing label bidding war and emerge with the friendliest possible terms, including owning her masters and publishing, Rosemond hired his high school acquaintance Leon Morabia, an attorney from the newly merged powerhouse firm Mark Music and Media Law, P.C., which represents established acts from Billie Eilish to Guns N’ Roses. So when he and Ice arrived at a dinner meeting with 10K and Capitol at Nobu Malibu last summer, “We wasn’t freestyling it. We had that vision walking in,” he says.
“We were not going to leave that dinner until we knew that she would be an artist that we would be building together and working together until the day she stops performing,” says Jubelirer.
After Morabia made sure the most important terms were in her favor, Ice inked her deal with 10K and Capitol, which immediately began assisting in the promotion of singles to radio and clearing samples, like Diddy’s “I Need a Girl (Pt. 2)” on “Gangsta Boo,” released in January. But Ice had secured assurances that her creative autonomy would remain intact. “No one on the label side touches the music. There is no traditional A&R with her. No one’s picking beats, no one’s saying, ‘Do this, do that,’ ” Friedman says. “It’s all her. We’re on her schedule.”
Ice is currently prepping the deluxe version of Like..? for this summer; while that project keeps her in the discourse, she can complete and release her debut album at her own pace. But Ice and RIOTUSA are manifesting even bigger things ahead.
“I just want more accolades. I just want to put out more music,” she says, while RIOTUSA adds, “I want to have multiple No. 1s on the Hot 100 chart. I want to have Grammys. I just want to have timeless music.” He followed Ice’s lead by writing down his goals in a journal every day. “At first, I was a little skeptical, feel me? But I started writing, and literally every single thing we started writing just started coming true. I’m on my fourth book now.”
When asked about their dream collaboration, both Ice and RIOTUSA are at a loss for words because they’ve already checked it off with Minaj. Ice credits Rosemond for ultimately making her dream come true. “I’m listening to her. Who’s her idol? Nicki, Nicki, Nicki, Nicki, Nicki. My thing is, how do I get her Nicki? And it’s being persistent,” he says. “It took months to get Nicki on board, and it happened.” (In tandem with the remix’s release, Minaj announced on her Queen Radio show that she established a partnership with Ice under Minaj’s new label, Heavy On It, but Rosemond declined to comment on the matter; Minaj’s reps did not respond to a request for comment.)
The destined alliance between rap’s newly crowned princess and its long-reigning queen had been fulfilled, exciting the Spice Cabinet and the Barbz. At the end of the music video, Ice and Minaj exchange wide-eyed glances and grins à la Minaj and Beyoncé’s 2015 “Feeling Myself” video, which Rosemond says was unplanned but demonstrates their “chemistry. And that’s big with Ice. She wants to work with people who want to work with her, but she’s very selective. It has to make sense.”
PinkPantheress felt similarly about “Boy’s a liar” when her label, Warner Music UK, pressed her to release a remix. “People kept mentioning it to me for charting reasons, but I was not really interested,” she tells Billboard, adding that she was only open to the idea if it involved another up-and-coming female artist who piqued her interest.
“[Ice] was kind of perfect. I saw she was following me, so I casually asked her if she would be down to do a remix. And she was really up for it. It was just literally through the DMs,” Pink recalls, while Ice adds, “I knew our fans would really appreciate it because I saw them wanting us to collab for a little bit.” In a matter of days, Ice sent over her verse, and Pink’s engineer, Jonny Breakwell, added it to the track. The next week, the British singer-songwriter-producer jetted to New York to shoot the video, and she instantly connected with her Bronx-bred collaborator. “Being Gen Z ‘It’ girls of the internet era, I feel like we had a lot in common, even though we’re from two completely different places,” says Pink.
The professional camera crew captured the duo’s chemistry, but one fan’s surreptitiously filmed video started a “wildfire,” as Ice calls it, on TikTok one month before “Boy’s a liar Pt. 2” dropped. After she was caught off guard by the remix blasting throughout the neighborhood, the guerrilla filmer had spotted Ice and Pink filming in a nearby fire escape. She wasn’t the only local who observed the shoot. “There was a little group of boys down the block just screaming the whole time,” Ice recalls. “And then they was on the roof of the other building, watching us do the roof scenes, screaming. It was so funny.”
By now, Ice has learned that such distractions come with the territory — after all, as she raps in the song, “In the hood, I’m like Princess Diana” — and aren’t likely to let up any time soon. If she can laugh at them or make them work in her favor, she’ll eventually become the global superstar she intends to be. She’s already a face of two huge celebrity brands, Beyoncé’s Ivy Park and Kim Kardashian’s SKIMS. And she’s not shying away from the cameras any time soon: She’s also interested in acting. “But right now, I’m focused on music,” she says. “I’m still learning a lot, to be honest. But I’m so happy I’ve put in that time and that work — because it’s paying off.”
This story will appear in the May 13, 2023, issue of Billboard.
Clad in a backwards baseball cap and tie-dye hoodie that complement his chill demeanor, Illenium fills the frame of my computer screen.
“Now,” he says, “it’s like super-grind mode.”
Indeed, the producer has spent the last five months painstakingly designing his upcoming tour. The run is not only his biggest yet, but one that firmly places him in the elite echelon of electronic artists who can play arenas, stadiums and amphitheaters, venues that few acts in this genre ultimately reach.
Following the release of his self-titled fifth studio album this past Friday (April 28), on May 27 Illenium will set out on a 37-date tour with stops across North America, Europe, and Australia. The 27-show domestic leg, which cost nearly $9 million to produce and which will position Illenium on 60- to 80-foot-wide stages, is the largest of the three. The run will be supported by six semis and a stockpile of pyro.
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After the self-titled set, released via Warner Records, went off to a vinyl pressing plant upon Illenium finishing it last November, the DJ-producer began conceiving its live show, a process during which he transformed the album he’d just made for the live format. This audiovisual experience — complete with longstanding Illenium-centric imagery of phoenixes and ash trees — narratively positions ILLENIUM as the prequel to his four prior albums, while indulging his love for fantasy and world-building.
“The show creates the baseline world that my music lives in,” he says. “If you watch it five times, you’ll notice new things each time and will see how deep it is.”
After opening at the Gorge Amphitheater on May 27, the amphitheater-focused North American leg will make stops at 13 other open-air venues, including three stadiums. Not counting the two festivals included in the tour — Electric Forest in Michigan and Veld Music Festival in Ontario– nearly half of its domestic dates are at outdoor venues.
The decision to lean more heavily into amphitheaters and other open-air spaces comes down to their ability to accommodate Illenium’s large-scale production needs.
“Amphitheaters usually fit our big goals and dreams; we have a lot of custom pieces that require a large stage,” says Illenium’s manager Sean Flynn. “Whereas a lot of the time when we come up with some crazy production that fits some huge stage and we have to work around a smaller stage, amphitheaters already fit what we want to do.”
Synchronicity between a venue’s capabilities and the specs of this tour is paramount, particularly given its full-band format that echoes the live rock focused sound of the latest album. Like 2019’s ASCEND tour, the ILLENIUM live show will feature a full band, including a pianist, drummer, guitarist, and, for the first time, a string instrumentalist. (Illenium will also play guitar and some drum pads.) The space required by these musicians, along with supporting acts like hardcore band I Prevail, demanded venues that could hold all these elements.
“We’d rather sell 85% of a 20,000-person venue with every production need that we want,” Illenium says, “versus a sold-out 10,000-person venue with production restrictions.”
Although the ASCEND tour took Illenium across the country in 2019 and later sent him to Australia at the start of 2020, he and his team did not announce the tour’s domestic and international dates simultaneously. He says their choice to do so this time around feels “much more impactful.” Fans appear to agree: 27 days out from the first stop, the tour has sold roughly 160,000 tickets.
In October, the tour heads to Europe and come November, to Australia. Some of the stages in these European venues are “much smaller” than those in the United States and Australia — just one of the challenges of international travel. Touring with a full band is costly, and without the six semis, the team will take a more minimalistic approach to hardware. Still, Illenium pledges to bring the “sweaty crazy rock show vibes,” and Flynn is adamant that the international portion is “an investment in the future.”
“We’ve played some European shows before, and getting to the point where we can bring the band has always been in the back of our minds,” Flynn says. “It just feels like a natural progression — and if these shows are successful, it’s only going to help grow everything.”
The crown jewel of the tour, however, is Trilogy: Colorado, to be held on June 17 at Empower Field at Mile High in Illenium’s hometown of Denver. With a 76,125-capacity, the stadium — home of the Denver Broncos — dwarfs Las Vegas’ Allegiant Stadium, where the producer held his first Trilogy show on July 3, 2021 to a sold-out audience, becoming the first artist to play the venue in the process. (Although Allegiant Stadium can hold a maximum of 65,000 people, the size of Illenium’s production reduced the stadium’s capacity to 40,000). The event grossed $3.9 million and sold 33,000 tickets, according to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore.
On March 30, Illenium announced that Trilogy: Colorado has already outsold its predecessor. “It’s gonna be the biggest show I’ve ever played,” he says, in a tone more even-keeled than one might expect given the magnitude of the statement. (At the ILLENIUM release party on April 28, the producer also confirmed that a third Trilogy show is in the works and will come to Los Angeles’ SoFi Stadium in 2024.)
Illenium is used to setting and shattering his own records. In recent years, he’s arisen as one of dance music’s most prominent, active and successful acts, playing — and selling out — some of the country’s largest stadiums and arenas, including Madison Square Garden in September of 2019. While interest in dance music in the United States is healthy, only a few of its acts — Kaskade, Kx5, Swedish House Mafia, Skrillex with Fred again.. & Four Tet and ODESZA among them — sell out arenas and stadiums, and in some cases only for one-off shows. Illenium became one of these acts through a strategic focus on scaling the size of his events year over year.
“Everything we’ve done throughout Nick’s career has always come down to asking, ‘How do we push things forward?’” Flynn says. “When booking a tour, we’ve always looked to the next highest capacity venue in the area and tried to secure that for the next tour. Or if that didn’t make sense, we’d try to do two nights at the same venue… We’ve always just tried to take whatever that next step was in major markets.”
Fans are of course at the heart of this success. Illenium’s music forges deep bonds with listeners, who have “grown with Nick from when we first started,” says Flynn. The debut Illenium album dropped in 2016, and although he has yet to score a top 40 crossover hit on the Hot 100 (his sole entry to date, “Takeaway” with The Chainsmokers and Lennon Stella, peaked at No. 69), his dance stardom is well-illustrated on Dance/Electronic Songs, where he’s earned seven top 10 hits. Forty-eight of his songs have graced the chart, including ILLENIUM’s lead single, “Luv Me a Little.”
In recent years, his success has also extended well beyond the charts. In 2022, he won his first Billboard Music Award when Fallen Embers triumphed in the top dance/electronic album category, an award handed out on the live telecast. In 2021, the same LP scored him his first Grammy nomination for best dance/electronic album. Fans have come along for the ride, with many catching flights to Cancún to attend his festival, Ember Shores. Following its 2021 launch, the event sold out in less than two hours. Its 2022 installment also sold out, and this year’s iteration this December is on track to do the same.
These wins are why Illenium, who calls himself “super-sensitive to crap online” and says he’s previously deleted his social media apps, became “a little more nervous” in the weeks leading up to the release of his eponymous LP. Although rock elements are not new to his music, ILLENIUM marks his heaviest embrace of them yet. With “symphonic Hans Zimmer-esque stuff” and features from Blink-182’s Travis Barker and All Time Low, the album diverges from the synth drop dominance of his previous LPs. In a December 2022 Reddit comment that felt like a disclaimer, Illenium called the LP his “favorite” — but acknowledged, “it’s definitely not gonna be everyone’s favorite.”
“Even though the majority of my fans definitely support whatever I’m going to try, I’m susceptible to the trolls,” he says. “Everyone has emotions and is a human … it’s easy to second guess myself, even though [the album] is already done.”
He says he’s transformed the album for the tour, and that while “it’s still gonna be extremely live and rock, I’ve made a lot of changes to the live show so it’s still familiar to fans.”
“It’s not just full-on metal freaking craziness,” he continues. “It’s this middle ground that I think people are gonna be really surprised by and stoked about. I think it’s gonna sound better than any of the other live shows [I’ve done].”
Now 32, Illenium has both the self-possession of an artist who knows how the game works and the openness of one who’s new to it. With a sharp sense of self and what music he finds “fulfilling” to make along with clarity of what he wants out of his career — “an impact that is original and unique” — it seems that stifling his creative interests for fear of what people might say would sting more than any negative comment could.
He says he’s gained insight and clarity over the last few years, but remains a “very impatient” person who struggles to “take a second and just chill,” making the delineation between his personal and professional often opaque.
“I’m a recovering drug addict,” he says, “and I’m very one-track-minded, like addicted-mode-on for the show. Whatever it is, [I focus on] doing it and maxing out as hard as I possibly can on it. I haven’t really grown out of that.”
Illenium, who previously struggled with opiate addiction and got clean in 2012 after overdosing on heroin, is partnering with the non-profit End Overdose on the tour to train attendees on how to administer naloxone — used to reverse opiate overdoses — and recognize signs of an overdose.
At this stage in his life and career, he’s also newly thinking about his legacy. Making albums that are essentially copies of each other strikes him as “soulless,” and ILLENIUM — a project that he calls “the core sound of who I am” — has roots in his middle school days, when alt rock, metalcore and pop-punk first forged his own bond with music. Though much has changed for him since, his love for these genres has not. By engaging with these early influences on ILLENIUM, he’s arguably the most himself that he’s ever been on an album.
“Whenever you first listen to something and it has a deep impact on you, I think that stays with you, and I think that’s what happened to me with this type of music,” he says. “It’s just a very deep emotional connection.”
Rising singer-songwriter Paris Paloma remembers exactly when she realized she had something special with “Labour.” It was the last day in a week-long studio session with producer Justin Glasco in Los Angeles, and she was preparing to record vocals for the climactic bridge to the stormy alt-folk anthem, with fellow women backup singers Natalie Duque, Nolyn Ducich and Annabel Lee. “That was a moment where I was like, ‘This is coming together as a song now,’ ” she recalls. “Because us women, just all shouting in a room — I was like, ‘This is what it’s about.’ ”
“Labour” has inspired no shortage of women doing exactly that since its March release. The single initially became a sensation on TikTok for Paloma’s mighty vocals and powerful message about having to do all the emotional heavy lifting in a relationship — and to a lesser extent, for her strikingly British pronunciation of the word “capillaries” (cuh-pill-uh-rees). (“I stand by the British pronunciation of it!” she insists. “I don’t think the American one sounds nice, I’m sorry.”) It has quickly become the 23-year-old U.K. singer-songwriter’s breakout hit, debuting at No. 9 on Billboard’s Hot Alternative Songs chart (dated April 8) and No. 13 on the all-genre Digital Song Sales listing — while in her home country, it entered at No. 29 on the Official Songs Chart.
Hailing from Ashbourne, Derbyshire in England, Paloma began writing music when she was 14, and started recording and releasing her own work in 2020. At the beginning of the pandemic, she attracted the attention of High Plateau Productions owner/CEO David Fernandez when he was invited to virtually attend a songwriter session. “Paris was the first to sing and literally, as soon as she opened her mouth, I pinged her on Instagram,” he recalls. “I was like, ‘Hey, look, I’m the weird dude in the room… let’s take a phone call.’ ”
Bora Aksu dress and coat.
Nicole Nodland
Fernandez officially came on as her manager in March 2021. “It was basically just me and her,” he remembers of their early days together. “With my limited knowledge of mixing and mastering, [we were] both learning Logic at the exact same time.” While Paloma’s voice is what immediately drew Fernandez in, he soon became even more enamored with her songwriting: “Just the content that she writes about, and the meaningfulness of her lyrics — it touches me as a music listener.”
Paloma scored a minor breakthrough in 2022 with her biblically framed relationship analysis “The Fruits,” attracting the attention of Nettwerk Records, who she signed with that fall. Her first time recording in a proper studio was last September for “Labour” — a song she’d originally written as two separate works, before realizing they shared a theme. “They’re [about] the same thing — putting too much labor into a relationship where you’re not having it returned,” she explains. “And how common of an experience that is for women, because of the way that we’ve been programmed to view heterosexual relationship dynamics. And it’s so normalized.”
Bora Aksu dress.
Nicole Nodland
Upon hearing the song’s demo for the first time, Fernandez insisted that it would need reinforcements beyond the two of them and a laptop: “I just knew if I could get her in with Justin [Glasco] and add [his] sprinkle of fairy dust on top of the thing — I had a really, really good feeling.” Even before they put it to tape, though, the song was already starting to garner interest, thanks to an early clip Paloma posted to TikTok in August, teasing lyrics for the song that she’d just penned.
“I often do videos whilst I’m songwriting, and I did that the first evening when I wrote the lyrics for what ended up being the bridge,” she says. “It was just a video of me in my room singing these words that I’d written like, 20 minutes before… but it gave me a little indicator that was like, ‘OK, I think this is something that I want to be heard, and I think people want to hear it.’ ”
Those early signs proved right on the money when the full song was released through Nettwerk in March, drawing not only millions of streams but countless responses on TikTok from fans who found the themes to be resonant — and not just from women. “I’ve got several messages from men who’ve realized [from the song] that they should be doing better in relationships,” Paloma says. “That’s amazing. Because I keep getting asked, ‘What can we do to solve this?’ And it’s not up to women: That’s the whole point. It’s up to men to listen and to take action.”
Bora Aksu dress and veil.
Nicole Nodland
Through the success of “Labour” and Paloma’s other songs, she has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok. But Fernandez is insistent that neither he nor Paloma want her to be seen as a “TikTok artist” — which is part of the reason they declined to release sped-up or slowed-down versions of “Labour,” instead opting to record a totally reimagined, more orchestral version of the song with production duo Myriot that’s dropping soon. “It’s just not falling into that trap of, ‘Let’s copy what everyone is doing right now,’ ” Fernandez says. “Let’s try to forge our own way. And if it works, it works, and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t.”
Paloma is now getting ready to play some live shows at 300-500-cap spaces in London and upcoming festival dates at Summerfest and Bonnaroo. She’s also beginning to think about a debut album, which Fernandez says fans can most likely expect in July or August. By then, it will have been about a year since she wrote “Labour.”
“It’s already been a lot of time in between,” she says. “In that time, I’ve written a lot newer music, which — not to say that it’s better, but you always think that your most recent stuff is the best, because it’s the most accurate reflection of where your creativity is. I’ve got so much work I want to get out.”
Paris Paloma (left) and David Fernandez photographed on April 18, 2023 in London.
Nicole Nodland
A version of this story will appear in the May 13, 2023, issue of Billboard.
This story is part of Billboard‘s K-Pop Issue.
When J.Y. Park and Monte Lipman announced their forthcoming competition series A2K — standing for America to Korea — in July 2022, the respective founders of JYP Entertainment and Republic Records vowed to jointly produce “the first American artist made out of the K-pop system.” It was something of a full-circle moment for Park, who has eyed South Korean-to-American crossover success since JYP’s Wonder Girls became the first K-pop act to enter the Billboard Hot 100 in 2009. American artists are now clamoring for Park and other top Korean labels to notice them — and help them achieve their big break — in what has become a global race to launch a first-of-its-kind K-pop act.
While K-pop is short for “Korean pop,” genre fusion has always been one of its pillars and a big part of what has helped it reach new audiences — as has cultivating groups with members from countries outside of South Korea. Today, it’s common for trainees to come not only from China, Japan and Thailand but also countries like Australia, New Zealand, Canada and, now, the United States.
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“The whole strategy often started with having a member able to speak the language for the targeted market,” says John Yang, a U.S.-based entertainment executive who has spent 15 years in the Korean music business. “The K-pop industry realized the power of having members of that nation propelling more of the engagement among the fans and a much quicker local expansion.”
Now, with the genre’s growing popularity in major markets, K-pop stars are defined not by nationality, but by industry standards: years of rigorous training, contracts signed under a Korean agency, visual hallmarks (glossy videos, coordinated choreography) and release strategies involving multiple album drops each year.
“K-pop means ‘Korean popular music,’ ” Yang says. “I see this less as where it’s made, but more of who made it and how it’s produced. I may compare this with the restaurant business: It’s not the location defining it as ‘American,’ ‘Italian’ or ‘Korean,’ and also not about the ethnicity or race of its CEO, managers or even customers that defines cuisine, but more of cuisine consisting of the ingredients, recipes and techniques developed across that respective country.”
Despite the growing number of countries represented in K-pop, nearly all the artists are from Asia or of Asian descent. But the expanding definition of who can be a K-pop star is now seeing Korea’s industry leaders incorporating America’s diverse young talent into their system, regardless of race or ethnicity.
Initially, HYBE was the front-runner in this global gamble. A month before Big Hit Entertainment rebranded as HYBE in March 2021, chairman and then-CEO Bang Si-hyuk, alongside Universal Music Group chairman/CEO Lucian Grainge, revealed a strategic partnership that included assembling a “global” K-pop boy group in the United States under a new joint-venture label between Big Hit and Geffen Records. The plans to air worldwide auditions in 2022 with a “major U.S. media partner” changed a bit: HYBE and Geffen subsequently announced five American cities holding auditions for a “global girl group” in March and April 2022 before expanding the auditions to Japan, Australia, the United Kingdom and South Korea for December 2022-January 2023.
In that time, A2K launched its own American Idol-style auditions, bringing Park to Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Dallas and Los Angeles to select contestants to attend an L.A. “boot camp” reminiscent of The X Factor’s, with semifinalists then flying to JYP Entertainment’s Seoul headquarters for what A2K described as “intensive training” with music, dance and business executives. Winners will be part of a supergroup under JYP and Republic Records for all music releases — just like TWICE, Stray Kids and ITZY, which have earned seven top 10 albums on the Billboard 200, including two No. 1s by Stray Kids, since the companies partnered in 2020. TWICE, Stray Kids and JYP’s Japan-based girl group NiziU were all created on similar competition shows and officially debuted three to six months after their respective finales.
While JYP and HYBE worked directly with label partners, SM Entertainment connected directly with MGM Worldwide Television Group for its global venture. SM announced a partnership in May 2021 with MGM and its then-chairman, Mark Burnett, for a competition series forming NCT-Hollywood, a U.S. offshoot of SM’s boy band collective NCT, which has splinter groups across Korea, China and Japan. At the time, an insider told Billboard the show had been in development even before the pandemic — but Burnett’s late-2022 exit from MGM, Lee Soo-man’s controversial ousting from SM earlier this year and an announcement from SM’s new CEOs that the NCT system would halt expansion after a Tokyo-based team launches in 2023 raise questions about the project. (SM declined to comment for this story, as did Republic Records and Geffen Records — a reluctance likely born out of the high degree of competition and similar timelines to launch that they’re operating on.)
While no major U.S. label has made an earnest attempt, American and British “K-pop” groups have been launched before. Dubbed “the world’s most controversial ‘Korean’ band” by the BBC, EXP EDITION began in 2014 as Columbia University student Bora Kim’s master’s thesis that explored the meaning of K-pop music. Kim held auditions to form a band of six non-Korean men who would undergo a truncated version of the years of rigorous training K-pop hopefuls commit to in Seoul with voice coaching, dance rehearsals, language lessons and media training. Supporters donated $30,000 through Kickstarter and, with the help of a private investor, Kim and four of the six EXP EDITION members moved to Korea.
EXP EDITION booked prime K-entertainment TV slots like Mnet’s M Countdown and KBS2’s Immortal Songs, but experts criticized its inability to achieve captivating, onstage perfection — and the group’s 2018 debut EP, First Edition, was its sole release.
KAACHI, created by Frontrow Records and branded as the first London-based K-pop group, faced similar criticism. Unlike EXP EDITION, KAACHI did have one Korean member. Its 2021 music video “Get Up” was sponsored by a Seoul theme park, and the group performed publicly alongside top K-pop stars at the time. Still, the group disbanded in less than two years.
But crucially, today’s ventures to create global K-pop groups have the backing of some of the most powerful companies — Korean and American — in the music business. Whether or not the artists these initiatives yield break through on the Billboard charts, Yang sees future group launches as the ultimate indicator of a healthy, locally grown K-pop presence in America — much in the same way SM, JYP, HYBE and their counterparts have done for decades now in Asia.
“The most obvious indicators of the success of these projects would be Billboard charting, which will only result with the support of their fans without doubt,” he says. “However, the longevity of these partnerships and the birthing of more groups consistently will be the significant historical marker.”
This story originally appeared in the April 22, 2023, issue of Billboard.
This story is part of Billboard‘s K-Pop Issue.
In March, HYBE founder/chairman Bang Si-hyuk issued a dire warning: “K-pop,” he concluded, “is in crisis.” HYBE is the music company behind BTS, the group that spearheaded K-pop’s dramatic international growth in recent years, but Bang sounded alarmed about the genre’s health. K-pop’s momentum was faltering, he said, claiming fewer tracks from the genre charted on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2022 than in 2021. The following month, BTS’ Jimin released his solo debut album, and the single “Like Crazy” arrived at No. 1 on the Hot 100. Still, his comments dovetailed with general industry anxiety about the dearth of new acts breaking into the mainstream and the challenge of maintaining growth in a ferociously competitive landscape, where around 100,000 new songs hit streaming services daily.
Within K-pop, some executives are concerned about the extent to which the genre can continue to produce massive international hits without BTS’ firepower while the group is on hiatus. “Although I wouldn’t go so far as calling it a ‘crisis,’ I do share [Bang’s] underlying sense of urgency that the Korean music industry is very much at an important crossroads,” says Bernie Cho, president of DFSB Kollective, a Seoul-based artist and label services agency.
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K-pop’s ascent to global prominence was, Cho says, “inextricably linked [with] and heavily reliant on the singular artistic visions” of executives at a few key companies — notably SM Entertainment, YG Entertainment and JYP Entertainment. “It has become an open source of debate these days, from boardrooms to chat rooms, that steadfastly sticking to this single-lane approach may no longer be the right direction” if the industry hopes to “futureproof” K-pop.
Executives who work in and around the genre are quick to pinpoint one big reason for the recent lack of K-pop in the upper reaches of the Hot 100: In June 2022, BTS — which has topped the chart four times on its own and twice more as a collaborator with Western artists — announced its potentially yearslong hiatus. “Their vacancy is definitely going to put a bit of a hole in the market,” says Eddie Nam, CEO of EN Management (Eric Nam, Epik High).
But there’s disagreement on whether hit singles in the United States are the best gauge of the genre’s health in the first place. On the Billboard 200, K-pop albums continue to hit No. 1 thanks to robust physical sales of CD variants; last year, K-pop groups topped the chart four times — Stray Kids twice and BTS and BLACKPINK once each — setting a new high-water mark for K-pop. “Most K-pop groups are built on a strong fan base, and their loyalty and support for their artists is much more organized than in the past,” says YG Entertainment USA’s former president Joojong Joe. “These fandoms know that Billboard chart positioning is important to their artists, and they organize album purchases and promotion within their fandom in the first week of an album’s release in order to get it to the top of the charts.”
But recently, K-pop acts haven’t scaled the same heights on the Hot 100. The biggest recent non-BTS K-pop hit was BLACKPINK’s “Pink Venom” last year, which peaked at No. 22. In the United States, the genre’s singles often perform phenomenally on the downloads chart — mirroring their dominance in physical sales — but less well on the streaming and radio rankings. “Like Crazy,” for example, sold 254,000 downloads, easily topping Digital Song Sales, but clocked in at No. 35 on the Streaming Songs chart. BTS’ previous No. 1, the Coldplay collaboration “My Universe,” also topped Digital Song Sales in its first week but landed at No. 21 on Streaming Songs.
Getting airplay in the United States remains K-pop’s biggest challenge: BTS has spent 17 cumulative weeks atop the Hot 100 but hasn’t made it past No. 5 on Billboard’s Pop Airplay chart, and BLACKPINK hasn’t even cracked the top 20 on Pop Airplay. The airplay audience for “Like Crazy” is the lowest for a Hot 100 No. 1 this decade. “I don’t think we’ve seen Korean music take over U.S. radio in any way,” Nam says. This remains true even as most of the biggest K-pop acts now work with American major labels, which have long-standing radio promo teams.
As Joe points out, K-pop artists aren’t necessarily so different from others outside the United States when it comes to that airplay disadvantage. “You’re in the country for promotion for only a short amount of time,” he explains. “You have to prioritize — you have a late-night show on TV; you have a concert; you have a photo shoot. It takes a lot of time to build relationships at radio, and it has not been easy for Korean artists to do that in the short amount of time they have here.”
In addition, many K-pop singles are only partially in English, which may make them a tougher sell at radio — a medium not known for taking risks. (Bad Bunny is one of the biggest artists in the world, but he has never made it past No. 19 at pop radio as a lead artist.) Three of BTS’ biggest hits were entirely in English; two others were collaborations with prominent Western acts singing in English.
Others, like Michael Martin, senior vp of programming for Audacy, the second-largest radio company in the United States, dismiss the idea that language might be limiting K-pop’s airplay. Representatives for two other prominent radio conglomerates, iHeartRadio and Cumulus, declined to comment on K-pop airplay, though iHeart has been supporting rising acts like NewJeans, especially in cities on the West Coast, and had some of the few stations that played “Like Crazy” during its debut week.
However, there’s also an argument that in an increasingly global music marketplace, hits are no longer the most important indicator of a genre’s health — and that K-pop’s difficulty getting U.S. radio play ultimately doesn’t matter to its momentum. “I don’t think K-pop groups must have hit singles in the U.S. to succeed globally,” says Inkyu Kang, an associate professor at Penn State and the author of K-Pop: The International Rise of the Korean Music Industry. “K-pop had already been enjoyed by people around the world with diverse backgrounds before it reached the U.S.”
Those listeners continue to seek out music from the genre: K-pop groups accounted for four of the top 10 albums in the world last year, according to the most recent report from IFPI, up from two in 2020. Looking just at sales rather than overall consumption, K-pop acts have a whopping eight out of the top 10, up from four in 2020. “Last year, the K-pop industry had the highest album sales overseas in history,” though growth in album sales slowed significantly, says Stephanie Choi of SUNY Buffalo’s Asia Research Institute, who is working on a book on K-pop. Japan, China and the United States were the three biggest importers of K-pop albums.
“You have to look at the whole pie,” says Lucas Keller, who manages Jenna Andrews, co-writer of BTS’ runaway hit “Butter.” “K-pop has one of the most committed fan bases in the history of music. You have to look at the touring, the merchandise and the audience, not just the charts.”
“When I speak to folks in the industry,” Keller adds, “we all believe that Korean pop acts have a real seat at the table now — including a shot at Western success in a way that was more difficult in past years.”
This story originally appeared in the April 22, 2023, issue of Billboard.
In Billboard’s monthly emerging dance artist spotlight we get to know Yunè Pinku, the 20-year-old artist building fantastical realms with her otherworldly voice and textured sonics.
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The Project: Babylon IX EP, out April 28 on Platoon
The Origin: Born and raised in London, Malaysian-Irish artist Yunè Pinku worked a number of odd jobs before becoming a musician — including, as she told The Line of Best Fit, as a bartender, and as an intern both at Prada and at a crystal shop. Though she had learned to play piano, she seemingly found her comfort zone at her computer, where she began carving out ambient soundscapes with downloaded production software. Soon after, she started writing songs inspired by bedroom pop and what she described as “Bladee-weird Drain Gang stuff.”
During lockdown, Pinku channeled the energy she missed from dance music and going out into her experimentations. “Then I tried adding vocals on top of that, which were originally just gonna be placeholders,” she tells Billboard. By the time restrictions were lifted, she had made over 150 songs.
Despite not having any official releases to her name, Pinku earned a big co-sign from U.K. stalwart Joy Orbison (with whom she worked in music sessions), who invited her to contribute a guest mix to his Radio 1 residency in July 2021. Two months later, she featured on Logic1000’s single “What You Like,” followed by her solo debut “Laylo” in November.
To start 2022, she found another big supporter in The Blessed Madonna, who named Pinku one to watch on her BBC Radio 6 New Year’s Day broadcast. Last April, she released her debut EP, Bluff, which led to billboard support from major streaming services and one of its tracks, “DC Rot,” landing on the FIFA 23 video-game soundtrack. (“My inner hooligan’s gassed,” she wrote on Instagram).
The Sound: Pinku has called her work “music for introverted ravers.” It juxtaposes electronic productions — an ever-evolving blend of U.K. garage, breakbeats, house, trance and more — with pop-structured songwriting to create a sound that’s animated enough for bedroom raving, yet mellow enough for introspective night drives.
But beneath the dance-y beats, a shadowy undercurrent runs through Pinku’s lyrics. Bluff, for instance, reflects the anxiety and angst of spending lockdown in isolation before re-learning how to navigate the outside world. Newer song “Night Light” takes the perspective of an AI searching for its maker.
“I would say I’ve got a default setting in my brain that’s quite existential,” she says. “A small thing could send me off into a doom scenario where I’ll be like, what’s the meaning of life, who are we? So I think it’s sort of these traces that come through.”
Part of Pinku’s strength is her use of textures, no doubt a remnant of her early soundscape sketches. Subtle sonics such as glittering synth constellations, the whirs of a machine powering up and softened glitches make her songs seem like they transcend the aural into the physical world.
“I’ve always really liked anything that sounds a bit twinkly or sparkly,” she says. “Textures are to me like 50% of a song, ‘cause you could have like a really good beat, but the textures and extra effects are how you make it interesting and more emotional.” Pinku even often treats her own otherworldly vocals as an instrument to blend and manipulate. But as she’s grown confident in her voice, she’s more open to bringing it closer to the forefront.
The Record: As Pinku was writing her new EP, she envisioned it taking place in a metaverse or cyber-realm — “So I thought, like, the idea of Babylon,” she says, “or like, the hanging gardens and cloud nine, where it’s these fantastical realms of existence.”
Pinku’s own fantastical realm took time to mold. Before Bluff, music had simply been a hobby. Post-release, she realized just how many eyes were on her. “There was like a five-month period where I literally couldn’t come up with any music, ‘cause I was like, ‘Oh god, they’re all gonna hate the music,’” she recalls. Then, during a breakthrough studio session in which she says she felt like she was “dying of hay fever,” she made two tracks in one day. One of those was recent single “Fai Fighter,” a bright, bouncy track which opens with an unhinged scream and features Pinku’s voice slicing through the air with its piercing whoops.
Whereas Bluff dons a shield of bravado and toughness, Pinku describes Babylon IX as being “gentler” and “more vulnerable on the lyrical side”: “This one is more about a delve into parts of desperation or being honest with yourself about yourself.” Her newest single, “Sports,” laments the idea of someone putting their screens before their IRL relationships over barraging drums and thunderous synths, while on opening track “Trinity,” she softly muses, “I never wanna be this lonely.” Additional tracks “Heartbeat” and “Blush Cut” bring out the EP’s dreamier, more delicate side with their crystalline production. It’s intimate yet vast, sad but sweet.
“Me and my friend were talking about it the other day,” Pinku says, “and we were saying [the EP sounds as] if a DJ was trying to summon a spirit on a mountain or something.”
Managed By: Emma Reid & Ferdy Hall, Outlier Artists
Management Strategy: “Our main aim managing Yunè has always been to make sure that this whole process remains not only fun and creative for her, but grows at a rate that she’s comfortable with,” say Reid and Hall. “This means saying ‘no’ to things is just as important as saying ‘yes.’ Growing her team independently via artist services company Platoon has allowed us the space and time to consider each step forward. Focusing on her long term ambitions rather than being preoccupied with short term trends that can often box in an artist’s growth rather than encourage it. This plays into our measurement for success, as long as we take a step forward with every move, then our plan and strategy is working.
“Her biggest strength as an artist,” they continue, “is the quantity of quality music she’s able to make fast and her ability to envision the world that should sit around her releases. All we need to do is lean into that and put the pieces around her to make sure it’s all coming to life.”
First Song That Made Her Love Dance Music: Pinku was not a dance music fan growing up, thinking it to be only the trance her mother played around the house, but lockdown led to a change of heart. When she left her Spotify running in the background, the algorithm’s resultant “clubby drums” breached her subconscious. Pinku specifically remembers hearing songs from New York-based artist Eartheater’s 2019 album Trinity during those run-ons:
“They’re like trappy, kind of electronic, weird, blend stuff,” she says. “It’s cool ‘cause it’s quite experimental. It’s a mix of multiple genres and it kind of made me think, club music and electronic are like a whole [spectrum], and not just this or that.”
Advice Every New Dance Artist Needs to Hear: “Don’t be afraid to experiment or get quite weird with it. It’s electronic: you have so much space and there’s no rules with it, really.”
Why She Makes Music: “I think it’s just something I just do regardless of if anyone was listening to it. To me, it’s like getting things out of your soul in a way, which sounds very deep, but it’s like a diary for me. You free yourself a bit when you put it into a song.”
Up Next: In Pinku’s words: “A lot of shows.” She embarks on the next leg of her U.K./European tour next month, and in June she’ll venture this side of the pond for her first U.S. live shows at Brooklyn’s Elsewhere (June 15) and Los Angeles’ El Cid (June 22). SoCal fans can catch her again at HARD Summer (Aug. 5).
The rest of 2023 isn’t all planes and stages, though. Pinku’s also thinking about her eventual debut album. “I always enjoy the early stage of putting a project together ‘cause you’re just throwing out ideas of what you want it to be,” she says. “So I’m still kind of in the early stage where I’m just making tracks here and there and seeing if there’s any sound overall that’s coming out clearly and then just tweaking away at them.”
Matthew Schonfeld and RaShaad Strong used to play a simple game to pass the time while working at Manhattan’s Only NY boutique.
“We started going on SoundCloud to find the artist with the least followers [who had] the song that was more fire than the next one,” Schonfeld says. The pair would alternate playing “SoundCloud rabbit hole” finds from now-established acts. While Strong usually had the best picks, Schonfeld unwillingly admits, both music lovers emerged as winners.
In 2016, the duo began their music discovery podcast Not97 — its name, of course, a “tongue-in-cheek” reference to renowned New York hip-hop FM station Hot97. “We love Hot97,” Schonfeld says. “It does its thing for [big] artists, and we’re going to do what we do for [emerging] artists.”
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Five years later, Not97 was picked up by Human Re Sources and The Orchard after seven seasons, and recently landed at No. 2 on the Apple Music Podcasts Chart. Along with their newest co-host Athena Yasaman, the trio of music lovers — who double as professional managers, curators and fashion industry creators — search the depths of the internet to find the best under-underground artists and pass the aux back and forth, highlighting their favorite finds across genres.
“What I liked most about Not97 is how it felt similar to our mission as a company of being disruptive,” says Human Re Sources CEO and EVP of creative development at Sony Music, Jay Erving. “They have a very high taste level and batting average in terms of picking artists that are ultimately going to have success.”
Each episode also features guests who bring two of their own music picks — including fashion designers, curators, DJs, A&Rs, music journalists, artists, music executives and directors. This season’s guests will include artists Jordan Ward, Fana Hues and Alex Vaughn.
“[Not97] has given artists an outlet that’s less abrasive,” explains co-founder Strong. “We’re one of the few platforms that if you come on to the show, we’re not even going to ask you many questions about your actual artistry. It’s a safe space.”
Instead, the artists spend their time uplifting other artists smaller than them that they admire, leaning into a community-based approach that is uncommon in the world of music interviews.
Founded in 2016, Not97 carved out its own uncharted space amidst an influx of music podcast start-ups, including Drink Champs and The Joe Budden Podcast (formerly known as I’ll Name This Podcast Later), among others. While wildly popular podcasts from known veteran music personalities like N.O.R.E., Joe Budden and Angie Martinez have thrived with superstar guests, co-founders Schonfeld and Strong made a name for themselves by leaning into the exact opposite.
“I got bored of blogs — I didn’t feel like I was finding new music there,” Schonfeld explains. “I was trying to figure out how I could effect some sort of change within music discovery for young artists. The podcast is kind of built as a means to an end for that.”
Schonfeld’s strategy has remained the same over the years: going down those SoundCloud rabbit holes in the hopes of finding a diamond in the rough. And his strategy has worked: Not97 featured Baby Keem, King Princess, Giveon, Kenny Mason, Arlo Parks, Tierra Whack, Fousheé and plenty of other now-notable acts before their breakout moments.
“You can read 500 words about an artist and still not press play on the song,” he says. “So [we thought], ‘Let’s streamline it and create a way to listen to a podcast and to eight songs.’”
Not only does Not97 expose small artists to an audience of thousands, but the platform has also become a strong networking tool for small acts to secure otherwise inaccessible opportunities. Schonfeld says he and his collaborators spent the first year of Not97 building relationships with artists, reaching out to ask permission before playing their songs. Featuring recorded tracks soon turned to holding full performances, when the team began their Not a Showcase series in Los Angeles and New York, setting the stage for a few acts to perform live for a ticketed audience and creating opportunities for those acts to profit from their art.
Beyond opportunities directly tied to Not97, the podcast allows for the show’s guests to be exposed to music from acts with small audiences. Over the course of nine seasons, Not97 has had music industry guests including artists, sync licensing coordinators, label executives and music journalists, with some artists whose music was featured going on to secure booking agents and performances thanks to their inclusion on episodes.
“When we started this, we didn’t set out to be the biggest podcast — we were using the podcast medium as a means of sharing music,” Schonfeld says. “We were like, ‘This is the easiest way for us to play this music, have these conversations and get it out there.’ In the last, like, four or five years, everybody started a podcast — it’s just gone crazy. That being said, I do think that the music podcast world is still fairly untapped.”
But despite the boom of podcast listenership, some companies are cutting back. In March, NPR announced that it would be canceling four podcasts — Invisibilia, Louder Than a Riot, Everyone & Their Mom and Rough Translation — to close a $30 million budget gap. In an article from NPR announcing the cancellation and a layoff of 10 percent of their staff, the platform attributed the slashing of those podcasts to “advertisers’ growing reluctance to spend money, particularly on podcasting, in an uncertain economy.”
“The problem is a lot of these companies don’t necessarily know what they’re doing with this content,” Schonfeld says. “I don’t think NPR realizes how important what they have is. They’re going to be producing Louder Than a Riot for this whole season and I hope by the end of it, NPR rethinks their [decision].”
When asked if he worries for Not97, Schonfeld is confident. “Not97’s tagline is, ‘Not a podcast, not a radio show.’ That has put us in a space that’s one foot in, one foot out,” he says. “A lot of our success up until now has been on the music side of things. I think of Not97 as an overarching brand and the podcast being the nucleus of that.”
Schonfeld says that the collaboration with Human Re Sources and The Orchard will allow them to provide resources to artists that they otherwise wouldn’t have access to. “Having a global distribution platform behind us where I can pitch artists to internal teams that [handle] music distribution, marketing, digital marketing services,” he lists. “The Orchard really builds itself out to be a full support system for artists.”
“Both Spotify, Apple and others are really leaning into podcasts,” says Erving. “I think we’re gonna start to see them behind the paywall, which will lend itself to a lot more revenue in the space.”
When it comes to the future of Not97, co-founder Strong has big plans for expansion. “[We’re thinking about] potentially going to a larger platform to amplify what we already do in terms of video,” he says. “Matt has always wanted to do a label from when I met him, before we even did the podcast. So a label would be the next thing. That was the ultimate goal.”
This weekend an album made in the forced seclusion of lockdown sees the light of day — and the darkness of the dancefloor — as Amtrac hits the road for the 17-date run behind his Extra Time LP.
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Released in February via the Los Angeles-based producer’s own Openers label, the album is a warm voyage of synth and feeling, with the smart productions spanning moods from melancholy to longing to joy and catharsis with lush sophistication.
Audiences can partake in these many vibes starting tomorrow at Toronto club The Velvet Underground, with the tour then working its way across the U.S. through early June.
Ahead of this affair, one entirely out of reach during the making of the album behind it, the artist born Caleb Cornett offers the backstory on the album, his hobbies and sampling the legends of Motown.
1. Where are you in the world right now, and what’s the setting like?
Currently on a flight back from Miami Music Week; the setting is tranquil.
2. What is the first album or piece of music you bought for yourself, and what was the medium?
Pretty sure it was a cassette single of The Prodigy’s “Firestarter.” Also I remember the first CD I ever bought was the soundtrack for [1997 comic book adaptation] Spawn.
3. What did your parents do for a living when you were a kid, and what do or did they think of what you do for a living now?
My mom has always worked at a bookstore, and my dad works for the food distributor Sysco.
4. What’s the first non-gear thing you bought for yourself when you started making money as an artist?
I cant recall; it’s honestly almost always gear.
5. If you had to recommend one album for someone looking to get into dance/electronic music, what would you give them?
Tough question, how about two: Moderat’s [self-titled 2009] first album and Clark’s Body Riddle.
6. What’s the last song you listened to?
XTC, “Making Plans For Nigel.”
7. You wrote on Instagram that you made Extra Time to “cope with times of uncertainty.” How does this body of work help you cope in that way?
I made the majority of the record locked inside during lockdown; it was my outlet for what I was feeling. One of the few things that kept me sane, my way of coping.
8. Everybody’s so damn busy all the time. Are you able to find actual extra time in your life?
Luckily yes, I spend just as much time cooking as I do making music — that’s slowly but surely becoming more of a passion.
9. Tell me about getting the Four Tops sample on the album via “Nobody Else.” What did the inspiration strike to use it, and what was the clearing process like?
I’ve been sampling Motown records for a while now, usually just as place holders for inspiration. “Nobody Else” just felt right — I wanted to see if we could get the sample cleared. Luckily Motown was into the record and we made it all work. My tracks “Those Days” and “Hold On” also included some cleared Motown samples from Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye.
10. How did you celebrate finishing the LP?
I went out for some nice szechuan cuisine.
11. This album has the distinction of having a beer made in its honor. Fun. How did that happen?
My lifelong friends opened a brewery in my hometown in Morehead, Kentucky a few years back. I approached them with the idea and magic happened. It was such a blast. I have little to no knowledge when it comes to brewing beer, so it was a great learning experience as well; I loved helping with the whole process.
12. What’s the best city in the world for dance music currently? Why?
I would say Los Angeles is pretty great when it comes to diversity. I’ve seen all walks of electronic over the past few years here.
13. You’re about to embark on a major tour. Have you done anything special to get mentally and physically prepared for this run?
Mainly just trying to be a as healthy as I can prior, eating my greens and working up a sweat in the gym.
14. The most exciting thing happening in dance music currently is _____?
I would have to say the parties, especially the underground — It’s constantly evolving and theres always new crews popping up. Los Angeles has some great things going on with Lights Down Low, Rhonda, Cyclone & IYKYK to name a few.
15. The most annoying thing happening in dance music currently is _____?
Copycats. There are tons of producers out there trying to sound like someone else. You can see right though it; it’s just lazy to me. Don’t be afraid to take risks, venture into the unknown.
16. Do you have guilty pleasure music?
I probably play OMC’s “How Bizarre” too much.
17. The proudest moment of your career thus far?
Being able to put out music myself, setting up my own label.
18. What’s the best business decision you’ve ever made?
Also, starting my own label, 100%.
19. Who was your greatest mentor, and what was the best advice they gave you?
I would have to say my managers, they’ve been with me for over a decade now and started working with me when I hadn’t really released any music. They were the first people who saw a bigger picture with what I was doing, just the mere fact they believed in me changed my outlook, having a team has made the world of difference.
20. One piece of advice you’d give to your younger self?
Don’t let anyone else tell you what’s cool, decide for yourself. Also, you’re cool.