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Jelly Roll will perform at Billboard‘s inaugural Billboard Country Live in Concert event in Nashville on June 6.
In January 1999, one month after he turned 14, Jason DeFord was baptized by full immersion at Whitsitt Chapel Baptist Church in Antioch, Tenn. By the end of that year, he was incarcerated for the first, but not the last, time. For the next decade, DeFord cycled in and out of juvenile and then adult correctional facilities for crimes ranging from aggravated robbery to drug dealing.
“I got baptized in here some 20 years ago and have since done nothing but go to prison, treat a bunch of people wrong, make a lot of mistakes in life, turn it around, [then] go on to be a f–king multimillionaire and help as many people as I possibly can,” says DeFord today, a hint of awe in his voice as he sits in a red upholstered pew at Whitsitt Chapel. The 38-year-old — now better known as the inspirational, tattoo-covered artist Jelly Roll — recently returned to the church for the first time in decades. “It’s the f–king wildest story ever to me — maybe because I’m the one f–king in the middle of it — but that sh-t’s crazy.”
Jelly (whose mother christened him with the nickname when he was little) has risen from the streets of Antioch to the upper reaches of Billboard’s rap, rock and now country charts, and even played the revered Grand Ole Opry. But he still struggles to reconcile that hopeless past with his prosperous present and seemingly limitless future. On the gut-wrenchingly raw Whitsitt Chapel, out June 2 on Bailee & Buddy/Stoney Creek Records/BMG, Jelly relives his search for refuge and redemption in a world where sinners outnumber saints and hell often feels closer than heaven. As he sings on “Save Me”: “I’m a lost cause/Baby don’t waste your time on me/I’m so damaged beyond repair/Life has shattered my hopes and dreams.”
“That’s what country is, anyway, right? Three chords and the solid truth,” says Jelly, paraphrasing legendary songwriter Howard Harlan’s oft-quoted description of a good country song.
Much of Jelly’s own truth is written in ink on his face. There’s a heart with a lock, a rose, three crosses and a tear drop. There’s his 7-year-old son Noah’s name. His hair has grown over his 15-year-old daughter Bailee’s name, but it’s there, too. On his left cheek, there’s an apple core, an homage to some of his die-hard fans who called themselves the Bad Apples. Emblazoned across his forehead, Jelly’s latest tattoo describes who he is now: “Music Man.”
Music was his way out — it just took him decades to get here. He wrote his first rap when he was 9 or 10, and by the time he was in eighth grade, he was passing out mixtapes of his music in the high school parking lot. “There was a place in Antioch that would let us cut demos for like 30 bucks an hour,” he says. “We had a dude who had a rolling keyboard and he’d make beats.”
Nahmias jacket, RCSLA t-shirt, Rolex watch.
Eric Ryan Anderson
But his love of music couldn’t keep him out of trouble. Everyone around him had a hustle — even his father, who ran a wholesale meat business, was a bookie on the side — and he wanted one of his own. “As f–ked up as this may sound, there were drug dealers and drug users,” he says. “I wanted to be the guy getting money, not the guy losing it.”
Jelly has three older half-siblings, but he’s the only child from his parents’ union, which he says was his father’s fifth or sixth. His parents divorced when he was 13, and Jelly felt responsible for his mother, who suffered from mental health and substance abuse issues. “I told my dad before he died [in 2019], ‘I wonder, if I’d have moved in with you when you divorced, if I’d have went to Vanderbilt [University] or something.’ But I felt this need to take care of my mother back then. I think that’s what really did it, too,” he adds, in terms of why he turned to crime. “When he left, I was like, ‘Somebody’s got to do what he was doing, at least trying to figure out some money.’ ”
Still, he never abandoned music entirely. Customers who bought quarter ounces of cocaine also got a free mixtape of his raps. “I always knew that the music was my only chance because I knew [from] the way that people in the community responded to it that it could be big,” he says.
Jelly says when he was 16, he was arrested for aggravated robbery and charged as an adult. “I never want to overlook the fact that it was a heinous crime,” he says, his voice still filled with remorse. “This is a grown man looking back at a 16-year-old kid that made the worst decision that he could have made in life and people could have got hurt and, by the grace of God, thankfully, nobody did.”
But he’s also bitter that at such a young age the judicial system offered him little chance at rehabilitation. “They were talking about giving me more time than I’d been alive,” he says of a potential 20-year sentence. (He ultimately served over a year for the charge, followed by more than seven years’ probation.) “I hadn’t hit my last growth spurt. I was charged as an adult years before I could buy a beer, lease an apartment, get a pack of cigarettes … I feel like the justice system at that point kind of parked me on my only set path.”
Tennessee has a zero-tolerance policy for violent offenders, so that one charge is still on his record — and has very real repercussions. Jelly, an avid golfer, tried to buy a house in a community with its own course not long ago and was rejected. “Imagine changing your life in such a way that you can afford the kind of house in this community I was looking at,” he says. “My money was welcome, but I wasn’t, all because of something I did [almost] 24 years ago.”
Jelly can’t vote, or volunteer at most nonprofits, or own a firearm. Until recently, he couldn’t get a passport, which limited his ability to tour abroad. “The trick is when America finally says, ‘We’ll let you leave,’ the amount of countries that won’t let you come in … We had to cancel my London debut show.”
That cancellation is one of the few roadblocks that Jelly has faced recently. But after years of struggling, he’s finally knocking down the doors that once seemed closed. He’s writing with Miranda Lambert and Ashley McBryde, the latter of whom will open for him in select cities on his 44-date North American arena tour later this summer. Drake responds to his Instagram posts, and Garth Brooks, the artist he has seen most in concert, greeted him with a massive bear hug when they met in May at the Academy of Country Music Awards. In May 2022, he topped Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Airplay chart with “Dead Man Walking,” only to reach the summit of the Country Airplay chart seven months later with “Son of a Sinner.” Starting in 2022, he spent a record-setting 28 weeks at No. 1 on the Emerging Artists chart, which ranks the most popular developing acts in all genres.
But a difficult truth follows him: As he sings on “Unlive,” a Whitsitt Chapel track featuring rapper Yelawolf and co-written with McBryde, “you can’t unlive where you’re from.”
It’s April 20 — the widely recognized day of celebration for cannabis enthusiasts — and by the smell of it, Jelly Roll has already partaken by the time he arrives at the Grand Ole Opry, where Billboard first meets him. “As I walked in here, my publicist was a little worried about it, and I said, ‘Let me tell you something: I’m as high as I can be every time you’ve ever seen me,’ ” Jelly admits with a shrug. “The day doesn’t change that.”
As it is for so many country artists, the Grand Ole Opry was “holy ground” to Jelly even before he made his debut there in November 2021. After being released from jail in 2009 — while still wearing an ankle bracelet — he scraped together the money to see Craig Morgan there; while in jail, Jelly would play his 2002 hit “Almost Home” endlessly. He cried as Morgan played the song at the Opry, thinking, “’That’s what I want to do. I want to make people feel the way this makes me feel.’”
Several times during the day, Jelly steps outside to smoke a joint. He says it’s “better than Xanax” for his mental health and anxiety (he’s launched his own cannabis line, Bad Apple). He has cut down somewhat on his drinking and stopped taking the other harmful drugs “that really had a hold of my life,” including cocaine, pain pills and codeine. But those substances still have a hold on people from his past. “Unfortunately, my friends in Antioch haven’t quit dying from fentanyl or are getting locked up or still doing time. I’m still accepting collect calls to this day.” He estimates he has been to funerals for 30 friends who have died, mainly from drugs.
At April’s CMT Awards, Jelly won all three categories for which he was nominated. But the week was bittersweet. “I’d just had a friend overdose on fentanyl. I missed his funeral because I was camera blocking [for the awards telecast],” he says.
That’s Jelly’s life now. Though he lives on the other side of Nashville from where he grew up, part of him remains firmly planted in Antioch, while another part has Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson on speed dial, sits courtside at a Los Angeles Lakers playoff game in the same row as Adele and proudly shows off his latest chain, with a pendant that reads “Son of a Sinner” in diamonds. After Jelly’s song of the same title became his first No. 1 on Country Airplay, he went to the Icebox in Atlanta — “Where all the rappers like Lil Baby go,” he says — and had identical chains made for him and his co-writers ERNEST and David Ray Stevens.
“New playground, new playmates,” he says of his life today. “I live in a totally different space. But I’m always conscious of keeping in touch with where I’m from. My heart is to help,” he says of his old Antioch connections, even as he admits he has had to cut off old buddies still living what he calls “a certain life. They know I love them, but I can’t afford to risk being on the phone with you and [it] sounds like I’m involved in something I’m not involved with. I might not talk to you, but I’m still bonding you out.” To make a clean break, Jelly recently got rid of his cellphone for several months. Only a handful of people have his new number.
At 23, while incarcerated for drug dealing, Jelly “all but gave up,” he says. “I was like, ‘I’m going to die in prison or young.’ ” Then he experienced what he calls his “road to Damascus” moment. “May 22, 2008. A guard knocks on my cell door midafternoon during lockdown,” Jelly recalls. “He goes, ‘You had a kid today.’ I’ve never had nothing in life that urged me in the moment to know that I had to do something different. I have to figure this out right now.”
Jelly knew when he went to jail that a woman he had been seeing was pregnant, but he says impending fatherhood had just felt like another mistake in a litany of bad decisions. “I was just irritated by it,” he says. “Like, ‘I’ve really f–ked up now.’ ” But Bailee’s birth inspired him to change. He was granted a transfer from the violent offenders unit to the education unit and started studying for his GED — which, much to his surprise, he passed on his first try. “I spent less than 60 to 70 days in high school. I thought I was a real dumbass. I thought I was learning disabled,” he says. “I walked in there and smacked that b-tch out of the park.”
Once released, he met his daughter on her second birthday. “I grilled hamburgers and hot dogs,” he says. Bailee now lives with him and his wife, Bunnie, whom he married in 2016, and he frequently sees Noah (nicknamed Buddy), who is from another relationship. He calls Bunnie, a former sex worker who now hosts the popular Dumb Blonde podcast, “a beacon of change in my life. You’re talking about a woman that came in and took a child that was soon to be born and a child that [we were] soon to have full custody of,” he says. “I would have never got custody of my daughter without her. I wouldn’t have had the stability or the money.”
After his release, Jelly turned to making rap music his career, independently releasing albums, posting music on YouTube and taking any gig he could. From 2010 to 2015, he lived in an old van, driving wherever there was work. “I’d go to Columbus [Ohio] and do $50 features; I’d sell rap verses for 50 bucks,” he says. “I was so petrified of sitting idle because I was afraid I would resort back to what I felt like I knew.”
Jelly Roll photographed on April 21, 2023 at Warren Studios in Nashville.
Eric Ryan Anderson
Though Jelly’s breakthrough on the country charts is recent, he first appeared on Billboard’s R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart in 2011 with the independently released Strictly Business, a collaborative album with Nashville rapper Haystak. It peaked at No. 67 — which is news to him today: “That makes me want to call my distributor and get an audit on the money,” he says with a laugh.
Over the next five years, Jelly — who taught himself the ins and outs of the music business through various partnerships with artists and both local and national distributors — charted several more albums, including 2013’s No Filter with Lil Wyte, which reached No. 17 on Top Rap Albums. He collaborated with friend Struggle Jennings on the Waylon & Willie series of four rap albums, released between 2017 and 2020, and named after Jennings’ step-grandfather Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson. The volumes addressed bleak topics including substance abuse and the inescapable weight of a troubled past (even in the pursuit of love, as on the RIAA gold-certified single “Fall in the Fall”).
On such efforts, Jelly would occasionally sing, though he says he was “petrified” to do so for an entire track. But some liquid courage, karaoke and Bob Seger helped him find his voice. He bursts into “Old Time Rock & Roll”: “Risky Business, baby,” he says, name-checking the 1983 movie that gave Seger’s tune a new life. “Any time that song comes on, I’m single for three minutes. I’m Elvis Presley. I’m singing to women. It just brings it out of me.”
“There are not many artists out there that can rap like he does and then switch over to a soulful, melodic voice that’s instantly recognizable,” says fellow country artist and longtime friend Brantley Gilbert, who co-wrote and sings with Jelly on Whitsitt Chapel’s “Behind Bars.” “He is one of the most genuine people you’ll ever meet. He’s consistently himself and never changes who he is to fit a certain mold. He has had some experiences that not many artists in this genre can say they’ve had, so he’s able to open up a whole new world to folks while making those experiences relatable to everyone.”
“Save Me” — which initially appeared on Jelly’s 2020 independent album, Self-Medicated, and which he remade with Lainey Wilson for Whitsitt Chapel — was one of the first songs Jelly released as a singer with no rapping. “We were all in the darkest place we’d been in a long time when I wrote that song in May 2020. They were still spraying boxes with Lysol,” he says. “We were all living with our own thoughts a little more than we’re used to.”
His ability to capture the truth of the moment earned Wilson’s respect. “Jelly goes against the grain and is 100% himself 100% of the time,” she says. “I love that about him as a human and an artist.” After “Save Me” came out, labels started calling. “My heart was to do country music and be respected on these streets that I grew up on,” says Jelly, who is now managed by John Meneilly. (Jonathan Craig serves as his day-to-day manager.) “And [BMG Nashville president Jon] Loba got it. But he also knew that I wasn’t willing to give up control of my masters or my creativity, so he was open to us working out a deal that could reflect that. It’s a fair partnership.”
After Stoney Creek vp of promotion Adrian Michaels heard Jelly, he brought him to the attention of Loba, who Googled the video for “Save Me” and was sold. “I saw that pain, vulnerability, that tenderness,” Loba says. “I loved his vocal. I just said, ‘That’s a country song.’ I was convinced his storytelling, his heart and his brand would be accepted by our genre.”
Though Whitsitt Chapel, produced primarily by Grammy nominee Zach Crowell, bears the name and likeness of its namesake rural, red brick church, Jelly made the project for people like himself who may not find salvation on Sunday morning. As he professes on current single “Need a Prayer,” “I only pray when I ain’t got a prayer.”
“You’ll never see a man pray harder than as soon as sh-t gets tight,” he says. “I was like, ‘What if worship music is honest? What would my worship song sound like to God?’ ”
History has a funny way of repeating itself. Just as Jelly’s friends took him to church when he was 14, last year, Bailee started attending a small church with her friends and asked Jelly to accompany her — an experience that started him on his path back to Whitsitt Chapel.
“That little back-road church reminded me so much of this little church, and it was just so nostalgic because Bailee’s getting in trouble [and] smoking weed,” he says. “She’s going through what 15-year-olds go through. I went through all that. I know that’s whenever my life turned all the way worse. It started bringing up all these emotions of me being right there on that fence.”
Nahmias jacket, RCSLA t-shirt, Jason of Beverly Hills necklace, Icebox necklace.
Eric Ryan Anderson
After going to church with Bailee, Jelly ditched all but two of the 70 songs he had written for a new project and started on what would become Whitsitt Chapel, which also addresses the hypocrisy he has witnessed from so-called Christians questioning his faith (particularly on songs like “Nail Me”).
“I never thought that I would do something in life that would make people care to hear my story. So equally, I never thought that my story would ever be judged,” he says. “It just hurt my spirit. It was all happening while I’m cooking this album. I had Christian people that were judging my faith based on my use of language or marijuana or drinking references. I just felt really cornered, and it felt really judgy.”
Loba has a message for any Christians who question Jelly’s faith: “I say to them, ‘He will bring more people to God than 95% of the pastors.’ He is touching an audience that has felt invisible [and] dismissed. On the album, there’s hope that you can be redeemed.”
So for Jelly, Whitsitt Chapel is a starting point, not a destination. “Whitsitt Chapel planted the seed of a higher power. We were a very Southern family, so [we did] a lot of praying before dinner and stuff, but it was the first time I feel like I separated from the house and found God by myself,” he says. “So if I was going to make an album that felt so faith-based, I wanted it to reflect where I felt like it started. I think we’re all trying to wash away something.”
Jelly Roll loves Winnie the Pooh. He also loves Jim Croce and James Taylor. And he especially loves the 1993 Disney movie Cool Runnings, loosely based on the story of the 1988 Jamaican Olympic bobsled team. “Because 98% of every problem in my life I caused, but one or two times in my life the most heartbreaking things I dealt with was the stuff I didn’t cause,” he explains. “Cool Runnings made me understand that sometimes you can do everything right and the sled still breaks. I needed that for the sh-t I went through in life.”
To sort through the wreckage of his past, he’s in intensive therapy, including “timelining” his life. He’s up to age 12. Therapy “is one of the first things I splurged real resources on,” he says. “I found [trauma] to be like one of the roots of probably my obesity, right? This isn’t a lack of discipline. I run a multimillion-dollar business. I work 12, 15, 18 hours a day. I’m a disciplined man. It’s got to be something else.”
As he fights to “overcome some of these demons that I’ve had to deal with,” he’s also taking Bailee to therapy. “Her father was in jail when she was born. Her mother ended up hooked on heroin and disappeared,” he says. “I’m watching the cycle still continue. That’s another reason it’s so easy to draw inspiration from my songs: I’m still watching it in real time.”
He looks at his life in two acts now: Act 1 is the Jelly who used to do bad things; Act 2 is the Jelly of today. “I was a less-than-desirable human in that era,” he says of the time before Bailee was born. “I like to separate myself from that guy like two different people now because it’s the way I’ve made peace with that. And that dude wasn’t a good dude, man.”
Asked if he believes God has forgiven him, Jelly goes silent and tears up. After a long pause, he says, “I think God forgave me way faster than I forgave myself.” As for what it will take for him to forgive himself? “Being a man of service. Trying to care about people.”
Nahmias jacket and pants, RCSLA t-shirt, Icebox chain and bracelet, Rolex watch, Kaws x Air Jordan sneakers.
Eric Ryan Anderson
In December, Jelly sold out Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena — an astonishing feat not just because he’s still a developing artist, but because the venue is just a little over a mile from where he turned 15, 16 and 17 as inmate No. 00364950 in Davidson County Juvenile Detention Center. (The run-up to the concert and Jelly’s compelling backstory are captured in the Hulu documentary Jelly Roll: Save Me, which premiered May 30.)
Jelly, who is booked by CAA’s Hunter Williams, donated all his money from the Bridgestone concert (over $400,000) to Impact Youth Outreach and other organizations to, among other things, build studios in that same juvenile detention center, and he has already pledged to help fund a studio in a new building opening at the center in five years.
“More than anything, I just want to try to help these kids” who are now incarcerated, says Jelly. He wants them to understand that he believes in them in the way he wishes someone, anyone, had believed in him when he was younger. He funds programs at the facility to teach kids Pro Tools and offer them classes with visiting producers and engineers. “Who knows where I’d be if they had a real education unit in juvenile at the time,” he says. “If they’d had a studio, if they’d had trade work and I was being inspired every day instead of being reprimanded.”
And his plans go far beyond the detention center. The day before this interview, he bid on a $4 million building in North Nashville that he wants to turn into a community center. Beyond music, helping at-risk kids may be Jelly’s true calling. “Whenever I’m done doing the circus of the music business and I want to leave the carnival and be a normal human, that’s what I’ll do,” he says.
For now, his own honesty and search for redemption are resonating with fans, who comment on his social media that his songs have saved their lives. “Who in life can say they really helped somebody in the darkest moment of their life that was fixing to kill themselves?” he says. “I look at that as something that inspires me to do more.”
He hears the same praise face-to-face. As he leaves Billboard’s photo shoot at an old paint factory, a worker rushes out to tell him that because of Jelly’s music, he’s approaching 18 months of sobriety. Jelly asks the exact date, not once but twice, and tells him he will be thinking of him on that day.
Fans also recognize him and want to party with him — an offer he happily accepts. During a video shoot the day before at Tin Roof, a bar he and his father used to frequent on Lower Broadway, some bros from Pennsylvania recognize him, and filming halts while Jelly joyously glad-hands and buys a round of tequila shots.
Bunnie calls the public smile that hides the pain so evident in Jelly’s songwriting “the Robin Williams effect,” referring to how the late comedian’s outward exuberance masked inner turmoil. “My wife is like, ‘[People] would never think that this lifetime of pain and carrying caskets and death and drug addiction and all this dark sh-t would come out of you if [they] just met you at a bar,’ ” he says.
But those who have listened to his music already feel a certain kinship with Jelly — and he has a message for them: “I want to be a guidepost of hope for people to know that losers can win. That who you were isn’t who you are.”
It’s a message he still tells himself. And as he moves forward, he wouldn’t mind if his good works brought him a pardon from Tennessee’s governor. “A pardon would change my whole life,” he says, then quickly adds that he would only accept it if it came with a change of policy for currently incarcerated youth. “Maybe we’re disciplining an age group that should be rehabilitated. I just want to have that conversation, and if it can end in a pardon, f–king let’s go.”
A pardon would mean having many of his rights restored — and should it happen, he may have to take a little joyride around a certain ritzy neighborhood that didn’t believe in second chances. “I’d love to move back to that neighborhood and ride around in my golf cart blaring gangster rap music, flipping people off,” he says with a wry chuckle. “I’m joking, but I’m not.”
This story will appear in the June 3, 2023, issue of Billboard.
HipHopWired Featured Video
Source: Leon Bennett / Getty
The greatest thing about Hip-Hop, apart from the culture’s diverse catalog of timeless music, is its ability to encourage thought, conversation and action.
Music aficionados can turn to Hip-Hop no matter the mood or state of mind. There are rap songs that talk about poverty, the drug trade, and education; records that delve into the paradigms of parenthood and family matters. There are tunes that even the romantics and in love can rock to. But no genre does a better job of analyzing the politics of warfare.
For better or worse, these songs are rooted in the military mind. Some advocate strapping on your boots and going to combat (both literally and figuratively), while others recount a tale of battle. In light of Memorial Day, here are 13 military-themed rap songs. These ought to remind us that conflict, off and on home soil, is real.
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Photo: YouTube
[embedded content]
Canibus Ft. Free & Pras – “Patriots”
“Free be the one rocking shit, special operatives/ Specializing in weapons diagnostics/ My survival tactics be drastic like Rambo/ I’m straggling niggas with my bow and arrow elastic”
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In Billboard’s monthly emerging dance artist spotlight we get to know Salute, the Vienna-born, Manchester-based artist making colorful, comfy club tunes.
The Project: Shield EP, released earlier this month on Ninja Tune’s Technicolour imprint.
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The Origin: Salute, born Felix Nyajo, was raised in Vienna, Austria, in what they describe as a traditional working-class suburb. “Pretty chill, not too much happening,” they say. “Summers were super hot and the winds were super cold. It was good.”
Between their parents and older brother, the household playlist rotated American gospel, highlife, R&B, soul and hip-hop — but as far as their dance music influences go, video games were crucial. FIFA Street 2 and SSX brimmed with the exciting, frenetic sounds of jungle, grime and U.K. garage and inspired Salute to learn production.
When they were old enough to get in the mix of Vienna’s small club scene, they quickly hit their ceiling. “I kind of felt a bit suffocated, because I knew nothing was gonna come of me staying there and trying to have a career in music,” they say. To get closer to the industry, they moved to the U.K. in 2014. Going to clubs every weekend served as a crash course in U.K. dance music, from breaks and bass music to house and techno.
Over the next five years they continued releasing music, including the My Heart mixtape and Condition trilogy, based on themes of mourning. Salute’s sonic shift across these early releases is evident, from syrupy post-dubstep instrumentals inspired by Hudson Mohawke and Mount Kimbie to an acutely more clubby vibe. In September of 2021, their track “Joy” launched Atlantic Records U.K.’s dance imprint Signal > > Supply. And in what must be a career milestone for any U.K. artist, “Joy” also appeared on an episode of Love Island U.K.
The Sound: Salute, 27, describes their style as “fast and soulful house music,” a catch-all term encompassing their many influences including U.K. garage, techno, classic house and French house. It’s also incredibly warm, inviting and cozy — it just feels good.
The Record: Shield is Salute’s first EP on Ninja Tune’s Technicolour imprint. To some, the title connotes visions of protection and defense — literal armor. For Salute, “It’s just comfort. Most of these songs just feel very comfortable to me… Obviously a lot of them are very, but at the same time they feel like a blanket.”
The EP’s opening track, “Run Away With You,” sets this tone with a soaring mix of synths, vocal snippets and accents that, like a sunrise, inspire a mood of promise and possibility. Over a brisk rhythm and ballooning bassline, vocalist No Rome sings, “I would run away with you if you would run away with me, too.” Meanwhile, buzzing lead single “Wait For It” anticipates the ecstasy of partying all night. Made around the same time as “Joy,” it sat in Salute’s vault for years, just waiting for the right moment for release. Similarly, “Feels Like My Hands Are On Fire” has existed in several iterations over the past five years. Salute finally finished it with help from The 1975’s George Daniel, whose careful restructuring added a greater pop appeal.
“Peach” with Sammy Virji is the most recently produced of the bunch. A rolling bassline and crooning vocals coated in a silk finish, it rightfully caused a stir when Salute debuted it at their Boiler Room set last December. The song is also a callback to 2012-2013, the years they call “one of the golden eras of dance music … I feel like music back then was just super fun, and I think that’s one thing that kind of got lost over the years, up until recently.”
Managed By: Will Frost and Luke James of London’s House Of Us
Management Strategy: “Broadly, the strategy is always adapting,” says Frost, “but when it comes to Felix’s records, it’s always been having a huge degree of trust which we’ve built up over the years of working so closely together, around ten years now. When they’re putting together a project, I have complete trust in their vision for the body of work whether that’s creatively in the visuals or the music itself, and they’ve always given me space to help them with the right people to either write a vocal or get the right mix engineer or feature on the record and it all shows in Shield, which is some of their best work to date.
“Now with the excellent Luke on the management team, the strategy has very much become building a fanbase who will come to watch Felix play. Felix’s sets are so incredible, and the reception and interaction with the crowd because of their skill and energy is unmatched, so we want to maximize that by putting on amazing shows, capturing the atmosphere of the night and building an audience that will buy tickets to experience it for themselves — we are seeing it grow rapidly over the last few months globally and have some really exciting plans as we also develop it in to a live show that still maintains that energy from their DJ sets.”
First Song That Made Salute Love Dance Music: They cite Lethal Bizzle’s 2005 single “Kickback,” which appeared on the FIFA Street 2 soundtrack, as their introduction to grime. “I was completely blown away by it ’cause it was unlike anything I’ve ever heard,” they say. The moment led them down a YouTube rabbit hole where they discovered artists like Dizzee Rascal and Wiley on the way to dubstep, garage and the wider web of U.K. dance music.
Advice Every New Dance Artist Needs to Hear: “Just make as much music as possible. You can’t really skip that step. There’s no way to like, just overnight, become really good. If you’re starting out, what you’ll naturally tend to do is to imitate an artist that you really like, which is a good way to learn production. I actually encourage it.
“But after a while, you’re gonna have to make a decision about what it is you want to do in music. The only way you can do that is by thinking very intentionally about the space you want to take up. That requires asking yourself questions about what your taste is, what you want to achieve as a DJ or a producer, whether you want to DJ at all, what you want your place to be, why you enjoy making dance music, what it is about dance music that makes you happy. I feel like that allows you to develop a sense of identity, which is something that people who listen to music can latch onto… I think people can really sense when the music comes from somewhere special.”
Why They Make Music: “The most important thing when I make music is I’m having fun doing it, and that makes me really happy. Figuring out how to achieve that has been one of the biggest things for me… putting an idea from your brain into a computer is the funnest part of it all.”
Up Next: Salute is currently on the U.S. leg of their international spring/summer tour, with stops Thursday (May 18) in San Francisco, Friday (May 19) in Los Angeles and their first EDC Las Vegas set this Saturday (May 20.) “I’d hear about [EDC] on podcasts that I was listening to like, ten years ago,” they say. “When I got the offer to play it, I kind of laughed to myself ‘cause like, that’s actually quite crazy.”
After Vegas, it’s non-stop until September: Salute is scheduled to play a full slate of festivals — Parklife, Glastonbury and Defected Croatia among them — while also touring Asia for the first time and later playing Ibiza’s lauded Circoloco.
“To be clear, there’s almost no commercial incentive for me to do this,” says Moby, breaking into a chuckle.
The Grammy-nominated electronic musician is 57 years old, his well-cropped beard more white than gray and his head as bald as it was in 1999 when his breakthrough album Play made him an MTV mainstay.
A “vegan” neck tattoo peeks out from his gray hooded sweatshirt, which stands out just enough from his white wall and beige window curtain as we talk via Zoom, but his minimalist approach to decor stands in contrast to his penchant for intellectual verbosity and philosophical musings.
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“At the risk of sounding melodramatic, one of my goals in life is to never go on tour again as long as I live,” he says. “It’s not like I’ve rerecorded these in the interest of promoting an upcoming tour. Also, in the spirit of honesty and full disclosure, it probably costs more to make these orchestral records with tons of guests and fancy orchestras than will ever be generated in revenue. So it’s purely… and maybe I even feel a little guilty about this because it seems quite selfish… it’s just a labor of love.”
That labor is materialized in Resound NYC, an ambitious album on which Moby recreates 15 of his biggest hits and personal favorites with orchestral accompaniment and a powerful cast of vocalists. Grammy-winning jazz singer Gregory Porter, Lady Blackbird, The Temper Trap’s Doug Mandagi and Pussycat Dolls lead singer Nicole Scherzinger all make appearances on a tracklist that includes “Extreme Ways,” “South Side,” “In This World,” “When It’s Cold I’d Like to Die” and more.
It follows in the footsteps of 2021’s Reprise, which was also released on the 125-year-old classical music label, Deutsche Grammophon. Yet Resound NYC feels bigger and bolder, focusing specifically on songs written and released during Moby’s time living in New York City, a period encompassing 1994 to 2010.
“One thing that New York really taught me is how wonderful and exciting juxtaposition can be when it shouldn’t exist,” Moby says. “The fact that New York is a filthy, dirty, hard place that’s also beautiful and can be very elegant and poignant. Especially in the ‘70s and ‘80, walking down the street and hearing hip-hop juxtaposed with someone playing classical cello, juxtaposed with salsa, juxtaposed with Arabic music. I think that encoded itself into my DNA to make me think culture should not be siloed. Culture should be a melting pot. It should be this weird, unexpected surprise that if [the parts] were a little bit off wouldn’t work.”
Resound NYC embodies that mix of sonic flavors, bringing new depth and grandeur to beloved fan favorites, offering fresh and welcomed dimensions to familiar melodies. The album opens with the hopeful tinkering of a piano on “In My Heart” and immediately explodes into a wall of sound that ebbs and swells with furious passion until the final notes of closing track “Walk With Me.”
Moby’s career-spanning examinations of hope and sadness, mortality and exultation, feel richer and more alive as his palette of blues, jazz, funk, rock and gospel are recreated by a sonic army, each song hitting new dramatic heights to elicit tears or dance freakouts, or both.
“When I was really young, like nine years old, I studied music theory, classical music and jazz, and I didn’t love it, because it was more technical and academic than it was emotional,” Moby says. “Oftentimes the most powerful emotional expression can be the most rudimentary. You think of blues or punk rock. Think of Neil Young; very simple music that’s very emotional. I try to take that ethos, that spirit of almost reductive emotional simplicity and apply that to an orchestra — even though an orchestra by definition is complicated.”
“Simple” seems a strange word to describe Resound NYC’s expansive and maximalist layers of sound, but sit with each instrument’s part, and you’ll hear how a series of long-held notes and straightforward rhythms build one piece at a time to create moments of eruption and release.
“I find myself really resenting art and music that doesn’t have that generosity of spirit,” Moby says, “meaning the willingness to try and reach the audience, whether it’s one person or a lot of people, in a way that potentially — presumptuously — might be rewarding for them. A lot of musicians, sadly, are very afraid of emotion, like the pursuit of cool is more important than the pursuit of beauty or the pursuit of emotion. I, embarrassingly, would much rather ignore the pursuit of cool and simply try to create beauty in so far as I can.”
Moby no longer lives in New York. He moved to Los Angeles in 2010, a few years after putting himself through rehab to kick increasingly problematic addictions to alcohol and drugs. Fans who’ve read his autobiographies Porcelain and Then It Fell Apart know how dark and uncomfortable his struggles became. In the latter especially, the producer writes in detail about sloppy and desperate nights spent chasing fame, glamour, ego and sex before finally succumbing to depression and even a 2008 suicide attempt.
Just as with writing those books, the task of transcribing, recomposing and rerecording some of his seminal works from that time has been a strange mirror.
“It’s like being reintroduced to yourself, but you’re sort of a stranger,” he says. “I was a mess, and sometimes it was a fun, dramatic mess. Other times it was just an embarrassing mess. There’s a temptation to be dismissive and say ‘I was just young and stupid,’ but that was still me. I was that awkward person making bad choices and having bad priorities. To lead a full integrated life, sadly, you have to be willing to look at that Jungian shadow self. I always thought the Jungian shadow self was your cool, violent, sexy, dark, goth self. But I’ve come to realize mine is just awkward, uncomfortable and probably talks too fast.”
Living in L.A. has given the artist a chance to refresh his own lifestyle and perspective. It’s also given him a front-row seat to the cartoonish attempts its citizens make to grasp ageless glamour, “from face-tuning to vampire facials.”
“I’ve been having this conversation a lot because of the rise of A.I., but there is a psychological, philosophical, existential aspect to [the] many ways in which humans feel they can technically improve upon themselves,” he says. “It’s so much more interesting when people accept their humanity, accept aging, the vulnerability [and] frailty. True strength, as far as I’m concerned, is both accepting the entropy that comes along with the human condition and being willing to be seen in that vulnerable, human state. I don’t know if I’ll ever get there, but one of my goals is to push myself to try and express that, either on my own or working with other people.”
He speaks at length about his love of the human voice for this very reason. It’s the instrument that best reveals the nuanced levels of emotional complexity.
“It’s almost comical the number of singers I’ve worked with and the weird diversity,” he says, “everybody from David Bowie to Ozzy Osborne to Britney Spears. I can’t even begin to think of the hundreds if not possibly thousands of singers I’ve worked with, all in pursuit of that vocal beauty and power. When it works, it’s remarkable. When it doesn’t, it’s incredibly frustrating.”
One of his favorite tricks? Recording a singer’s first few practice takes under the auspices that he’ll “do the real passes later,” knowing he’ll most likely get a more vulnerable performance when the singer thinks they’re not in the hot seat. Technical perfection is so rarely the harbinger of emotion. Like Moby says, “Would you rather listen to a 19-year-old pop singer with perfect pitch who’s been autotuned within an inch of their life? Or Leonard Cohen singing ‘Hallelujah?’”
No such ruses were needed to capture the soulful vocals on Resound NYC’s version of “Run On.” One of the barest and most stripped-down tracks on the LP, the tune originally started with a big brass section, live drums, percussion, a quintet, electric guitar, bass and piano.
“I had this big version of the song done, and [singer] Danielle Ponder was visiting her dad, who’s 89 years old and very ill, in his hospital bed,” Moby says. “He remembered singing this song when he was a little boy, so she held her iPhone up to him while he sang it. She sent me the recording, and I threw away everything I had done for that song and rewrote it around his vocal. Then she came in and did a duet with her dad’s hospital bed iPhone recording.
“In terms of authenticity? Dear God,” Moby continues. “I could listen to just an isolated acappella of him singing that song. It’s so special.”
When he isn’t seeking to expose the gooiest parts of humanity on record, Moby’s been keeping busy recording his Moby Pod podcast and launching a film and TV production company called Little Walnut.
The team recently released Punk Rock Vegan Movie, a full-length documentary that explores the little-discussed connection between the rise of plant-based lifestyles and the hardcore scenes of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Moby narrated, directed and soundtracked the effort, which includes on-camera chats with members of Bad Brains, the Misfits, Crass, Fugazi, The Damned, The Germs and many more. (Punk Rock Vegan Movie is available to watch on YouTube.)
“As time has passed, I’ve come to realize that my day job is actually animal rights activism,” Moby says. “That’s my primary purpose, and part of that was making this movie and giving it away for free. I wanted to try and do my little part to remind people that principles are good, and compromising principles is generally a bad idea… This algorithm accommodating culture that we live in it, it’s making my brain hurt. Who on their deathbed wants to remember, ‘Oh, I did a mildly effective job accommodating algorithms invented by someone in China.’ That’s not a good life.”
The decision to retire from touring is part of his own eternal search for that philosophical “good life.” The whole idea of moving from plane to green room to stage to hotel over and over again feels “unhealthy” and “uncomfortable.” Instead, he’s content to sit in his studio “which looks a lot like a monastic cell,” transcribing his life’s work into orchestral movements, recording podcasts, writing activist documentaries and just generally being.
“I really love sleeping in my bedroom here with the windows open, waking up, having a smoothie and going for a hike,” he says. “It doesn’t pay well, and there’s no ego gratification there, but it just feels so much healthier and nicer than waking up on a tour bus in a parking lot somewhere, sitting backstage waiting for some ego validation. I am thrilled that I finally ended up in a banal place, that I’m very happy.”
LP Giobbi is busy as hell. After opening for her musical besties Sofi Tukker in Mexico City, playing a Coachella pool party and then the festival itself in the span of three days, it’s reasonable she’d be tired.
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And another big week is looming. Before her Coachella weekend two set she’ll open for Yaeji in L.A. and play two shows in Denver. After Coachella, she’ll trek to rave mecca Ibiza to open for Bedouin and speak at the IMS conference, immediately after which she’ll circle back across the globe to Guatemala for Empire Music Festival.
Despite this insanely busy life on the road — she hasn’t been back to her home in Austin, Texas since January — LP is bright-eyed and enthusiastic. Her presence is both energizing and grounding, reflective of who she is as an artist: joyful, optimistic, supportive, inclusive, self-assured and driven. Despite having just over an hour before she’s due onstage at L.A.’s Novo theater, she takes her time while sitting down with Billboard to discuss her new album.
Over the past few years, as she picked up steam with a string of euphoric singles (including “Sinner” with Bklava, “Somebody To Love” with Ben Kim, “Say A Little Prayer” with Amazonian Rockstar, “Carry Us” with Kaleena Zanders), she had over 13 labels reach out to her, eventually finding a home with Ninja Tune’s Counter Records. All the while — on trains and planes and in stolen moments in airports, hotels and rented studio space — she was writing her debut album Light Places, out this past Friday, May 12.
The album is a kaleidoscopic sonic tapestry of synths, percussion, LP’s signature piano riffs and a chorus of uplifting female vocalists including Sofi Tukker, Caroline Byrne, Little Jet and Monogem. There’s a strong undercurrent of joy throughout, yet many of the tracks showcase a different side of LP’s sound, particularly the stripped-down beauty of opener “If Love Is A Skill” with her longtime champion Sofi Tukker, along with the psychedelic sun-soaked vibe of “All In A Dream” with DJ Tennis and Joseph Ashworth and the sweet melancholy of “All I Need.”
The recently announced All In An Airstream Tour will see LP and DJ Tennis travel in an Airstream to locations across the U.S. including Joshua Tree, Berkeley, Big Sur, Asheville and New Orleans for pop-up performances. LP’s 2023 tour schedule also includes big festival sets at Lighting in a Bottle, Tomorrowland, Defected Croatia and Ibiza, along with a stage takeover of her Femme House brand at Elements Music & Arts Festival.
Beyond additional dates in Ibiza and Brazil, a residency at Superstition in Austin and multiple treks across North America, she’ll also be serving up her Grateful Dead-inspired Dead House shows for official Dead & Company afterparties — which, as the daughter of Deadheads, is something she’s still freaking out about. Jerry Garcia’s estate also recently tapped her to remix his 1972 debut solo album via Garcia (Remixed), a trippy marriage of LP’s love of jam bands, psych rock and dance music.
It’s all wonderful — and a lot to unpack. Below, the producer breaks it down.
Did having the format of the album and the pressure of it being your first help you hone in on your sound or the way that you worked on the songs?
Up until now, I’ve been a singles artist. The best thing about this process for me was that it allowed me to write B-sides [lets out sigh of relief], tracks that didn’t need to be hugely successful on Spotify or have a vocal hook in the first 10 seconds.
I wrote most of the album on planes, trains and in hotels. Then I flew to Paris and got in the studio with [DJ] Tennis and [Joseph] Ashworth and [Michael] Cheever. We took all the MIDI parts and rerouted them through vintage synths; we were in this amazing studio that had every vintage synth possible. We put everything into the same world sonically. We also recorded live drummers and layered that with electronic drums.
This album isn’t necessarily for the club, it’s more of a musical journey. I actually ended up making club edits for pretty much all of the tracks, which are the versions I play out, but the album itself got to stand alone and fueled me in a different musical way.
You talked about being in motion with a lot of the album, but where did you start and how did you know when you were done?
Well, you never know. You know you’re done when the label’s like, “We need the f—ing album.” When I signed this deal, I really took my time. I had 13 label offers. I picked the label thinking, “How do I want this music to identify? Who do I want this music to identify with? How do I want it to be seen or shaped?” So, when I landed on Ninja Tune, I had an idea of how deep I wanted to go with the album versus a more mainstream dance label.
I had hundreds of bits of songs and maybe 50 tracks. And I started road testing some of them to see what’s working for the dance floor, and maybe what’s not; I wanted to balance both. Along the listening process, the album told me what it needed. I just had to listen.
The album sounds like you sat down and spent time with it.
Oh, my God, I wish. I’m always writing and always touring. I’m hearing more artists all over the world and I’m deeply influenced by what I’ve heard and where I am. The music I’m writing now is very much for the club, I don’t want any vocals on it. It’s sort of the opposite direction [of the album]. It’s been fun to see where this body of music takes me.
I wanted to talk about “All I Need” and its interlude with the sweet voicemail — is that your grandma?
It’s actually [my tour manager] Xander’s grandma. We had just played this amazing gay music festival, Utopia, in Isla Mujeres. The day after, the promoter took us out on a boat, and Sophie was there and we were having drinks. It was one of those “life is good” moments. Xander’s grandma Shirley called him the next day and [left a voicemail saying], “I hope you got a good tour, I saw you sitting on a boat with a drink in your hand, looking like a millionaire.”
Light Places is named after your dad’s favorite Grateful Dead lyrics.
It’s from the song “Scarlet Begonias”: “Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.” I was in Australia and was feeling extremely ungrounded and untethered. When I’m home, my dad and I pass a notebook back and forth to write a poem together. I called him and asked if we could do that when I’m on the road. Now, we write a poem before every show I play. It brings me back home. On his 70th birthday, I made it into a book for him, and it’s now a merch item. It’s my favorite thing that I do.
That’s so great.
I was like, “Dad, I need a name for my album. What are some of your favorite Grateful Dead lyrics?” He sent me this huge email where he broke down all of his favorite lyrics to different songs. I had just finished a gig in Ibiza, it was four in the morning, and I’m reading his email. I was deliriously tired and read that line and “light places” danced in front of me. I realized, “that’s LP.” It’s so funny how language can give meaning to us. I realized that’s what I want to do, create emotionally light places for people.
When I first started pursuing music, I didn’t know if it was a worthy enough endeavor. I was in school and did a lot of women’s empowerment studies and wanted to be an activist. My mom said, “The Grateful Dead shows that me and your father went to would hold me through and are what gave me so much joy in my life. If that’s what you do, that’s enough.” That is what I want people to feel when they leave my show.
How have your parents inspired you?
I dedicated the album to them. “Sometimes you get shown the light in the strangest of places when you look at it right” is kind of an ethos of how they raised us. We’d come home from school like, “This thing happened and it sucked,” and my dad would always tell us [the tale of] a guy and he breaks his leg in the summertime, but then there’s a war and everybody but him gets drafted.
They also really instilled the importance of live music in me at a very young age. There was always music playing in the house and we were always going to shows. That was kind of our church, standing in a community of people, being part of something greater than yourself. Also, they’re front row for everything. Every iteration of everything that I’ve done, they’ve been there cheering me on.
I played with Dead & Company and there’s a great video that somebody took where my mom is wearing my merch, riding the rail and as the song drops, she just starts head banging and smacks the person next to her.
What was it like playing with Dead & Company?
It was crazy. It’s Dead & Company’s last tour, and I’m doing their after parties in some key markets. I got to introduce my parents to Bob Weir, their hero. My mom said to him, “Thank you so much for all the joy you’ve given my family over so many years.” And he put his hand to his heart and said “The pleasure is all mine” with the most sincerity in the world. Deadheads are f—ing crazy; that fan base is so intense. To have toured and done this for 60 years and to have heard that and still “hand-to-heart” feel that way was mind-blowing. It was such an inspirational moment to me.
And you remixed one of Jerry’s albums. How did you get connected with them?
I became a female producer and in order to be taken seriously, I started wearing baggy clothes. It’s really f—ed up. My parents gave me their vintage Grateful Dead shirts, so I started wearing those, and children of Deadheads started connecting with me. In fact, DJ Tennis and I became friends because I went to one of his shows and he was wearing a Grateful Dead shirt.
A friend was working in a studio and saw that I was wearing these shirts and sent me some of their stems. When I was livestreaming and wanted to make it interesting for myself, I took their guitars and reworked and re-pitched them and started sampling them in my sequencer and layering them over different things. I would take Jerry’s voice and warp it and start playing around with that over other tracks.
I did a livestream that Bob Weir was also on, and his manager saw my set and called him. The Garcia estate — his daughter, Trixie Garcia — reached out to me and asked if I wanted to do an official remix for the 50th anniversary of his first solo album, which was crazy.
Jerry’s voice is like my uncle. It’s the voice that I heard the most in my house growing up. It was overwhelming, and an honor. Then they asked me to play at their festival and do these after parties for the last tour.
When you got asked to do the remix album, were you worried about messing with it?
For sure, the pressure was so intense and so real. There are some old school Deadheads that f—ing hate what I did, and they were not afraid to let me know. At first, that made me really sad [because] I’m just trying to bring this music to my community. But I had a few amazing moments that made that not matter to me.
I played my first Dead House show in Eugene, where I’m from, and this father and son flew in from L.A. and New York to come to the show. Afterwards, the dad pulled me aside and was like, “We’re a dysfunctional family. My son and I do not get along, and we hate each other’s music. I’m a Deadhead and he’s a raver. This was the first two hours that we’ve been in a room and shared happiness, affection and joy together. Thank you so much for providing that.”
You occupy this psychedelic space in dance music that is very fresh and inviting. Is that intentional or just a product of who you are, and the music that you were raised on?
It’s intentional in the way that I had to work hard to find myself and be okay with myself. Once I let go of needing to be cool, or following other people’s [ideas of] what’s cool in dance music right now, it [became] so natural to me. I grew up a jam band kid. Once I finally was like “this is who I am,” it started flowing more naturally and was way more fun.
Can you speak to your creative relationship and friendship with Sofi Tukker?
I owe a lot to them. The biggest currency you can be gifted is belief. And they did that from the very beginning. They saw me play a horrible DJ set, I didn’t even know how to DJ yet, and I was opening up for them at an afterparty at a festival. I was in a band at the time. They were like, “We loved your energy, we want you to go on tour with us.” They were doing their first tour and had just released “Drinkee.”
I literally learned how to DJ in front of their loving audience. I was so f—ing bad, and they gave me so much love and support. I’d get offstage and Tucker would give me some tips and talk me through the set. They literally built stages for me and started a label [Animal Talk] for me to release music. They have supported me every single step of the way. Their friendship and support have meant the world to me. Seeing the power that artists can have on another artist’s career was a huge influence for me to start Femme House and pay that forward.
What’s the next era of Femme House? Where are you taking it? It’s grown so much.
That’s a really good question and also overwhelming. My co-founder Lauren Spaulding and I have tried to do dream sessions, but I couldn’t even dream that this was possible. I’m hoping it naturally reveals itself. I’ve sort of spent my whole life driving and grinding, and now I’m really hoping that I’m in a phase where I can lean into the more knowing feminine energy and wait for it to come to me.
One day, I’d love to have a [Femme House] festival and all that stuff. Education is an important part of why there are so few female producers, as is visual representation. So, we’ve done a lot of stage takeovers and live activations, that’s been a big focus for us the last few years. We want to meet more cool people who believe in this mission and work with them.
What has helped you the most in getting to this point? Did getting the right team impact where you’re at?
I always say I won the lottery twice. Once when I was born to my parents, and then again when I got my piano teacher. That has continued to happen, via the people I met in my life who have supported and encouraged me and shown up and given me opportunities. That’s mostly why I’m here. I do work my ass off, but it takes so much more than that.
I have a really, really good team now. My day-to-day Julie is a beast. I’m gonna give a ton of credit to Xander. I would not be here without him, on an emotional and physical level. He does what I do, except his job is way worse. He has to be the first one up and the last one to bed and always shows up with a smile.
Do you dream of a Billboard hit?
No, I really don’t. Fame is a funny thing. The tiny bit that I’ve experienced of it, I’m like, “no.” At the end of the day, I want to be on my deathbed really proud of my art.
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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.