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All artists bare their hearts, but none quite like Dana Margolin. Whether she’s rocking out or inward, the frontwoman and lyricist of Porridge Radio sings with an arresting, visceral intensity that never comes across as performative.

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So, it’s surprising — and heartening — to find an upbeat, almost breezy Margolin in pajamas at her London home once the Zoom cameras are turned on. The close-cropped, blond Joan of Arc hairstyle she wore in previous years is now shoulder length and brown, and she punctuates her comments with an easy laugh.

This may have something to do with Porridge Radio’s fourth album, Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There for Me, which Secretly Canadian will release on Oct. 18. It’s a breakthrough record for Margolin and the band, and a cathartic sequence of songs in which the former anthropology major reclaims her identity after losing her way in what she describes as the “fog” of an intense breakup, after months of touring and promotion behind the British band’s excellent last album, 2022’s Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky, its first to hit the top 40 in the United Kingdom. “I have let go of my needs to be perfect and to be pure,” Margolin says. “I just want to have a nice life. I want to be with the people I love.”

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Clouds in the Sky finds Porridge Radio putting the hype of its 2020 Mercury Prize nomination well behind it and achieving a new level of artistry and sound. The poetry of Margolin’s lyrics has also evolved. Her songs have become more sophisticated without sacrificing the emotional wallop of her earlier work — a conscious effort on her part, and one of the subjects she discusses below with Billboard, along with the visual art she also creates and her tendency to fall in love easily.

You look very chill in pajamas right now, but on Porridge Radio’s records and at your concerts, you perform with an intensity that most humans cannot or will not approach. Do you live life outside of music like that?

You know I never really realized that not everybody experiences the world as I do until a few years ago. And it was quite shocking to me to find out that most people don’t have this kind of constant experience of their emotions.

What are the pros and cons of living with that kind of sensitivity?

It’s often very painful and exhausting to always feel like that. It’s a lot — but also, I feel that I have very strong connections with the people in my life, and I get to make music and share it, and people come towards me because of it. I always had this fear that it would push people away. It took having a really bad relationship that made me feel like I was too much. Suddenly, I was like wait, other people aren’t like this. They don’t have this intensity and why am I so weird? I’m always experiencing all the feelings of everything past and the future. Now, I’m okay with it. I think some people would kill to feel as much. Sometimes it’s incredibly difficult and painful but it’s given me a lot of love and connection and beauty, Also, I get to be in a band and go travel the world with my friends. I feel lucky even though sometimes I’m despairing.

It’s like in “God of Everything Else,” where you sing, “You always said that I’m too intense/ It’s not that I’m too much/ You just don’t have the guts.”

[Laughs.] That one is kind of cheesy. It’s so on the nose, but in a way, I was just like, right.

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These songs all started as poetry, right?

Yeah, in a way. They all started from me writing with more focus on the words. I was challenging myself to be a better writer. My songs always started as poetry in some way. With these especially, I felt that.

You refer to a swallow in some songs and in one, a sparrow. Did you have specific symbolism in mind in using this bird imagery?

I was looking for a symbol for a particular relationship that I was describing, and I was drawn to birds and the symbolism around birds. Especially with swallows, it was this idea of somebody who goes away and comes back, or somebody who is there and then they just disappear. I was thinking of migrating birds, and this idea of somebody who needs to travel because it’s in their heart. They need to go away. They need to be far away from you, but they always come back. Then I think by the time it turned into a sparrow, the idea of, I thought you were one thing — and you were something else.

You sing about you having to be someone that you aren’t. 

Yeah. That’s me.

“God of Everything Else” reminds me of the Porridge Radio song “7 Seconds” in terms of the emotions that it evokes. “7 Seconds” is about a self-destructive relationship as well. Was that the same person, or do you fall in love easily because you’re so vulnerable?

You know, I do fall in love so easily, unfortunately. But no, there are multiple relationships. They’re from different periods of my life and very different people.

Dreams figure a lot into your songs. Is that a literary device for you, or do you remember and record your dreams?

I’ve always had very intense dreams. It’s not even a practice of writing down my dreams. It’s just that I have so many. I enjoy leaning into this idea of a dreamlike state, where the dreams I’m having whilst I’m awake and the dreams I’m having whilst I’m asleep are blending into each other. And I’m not sure which is which. What I like about poem or song is that something can be presented as real life, and you can’t necessarily tell if it’s a dream, something that really happened, a fantasy or a daydream.

Where was your head at when you wrote these songs?

I spent a long time when I was writing these songs feeling incredibly depressed and having this extreme sense of burnout. This feeling of fog that is enveloping me as I go around my life — of being unable to distinguish myself and my surroundings from these fantasies and imagined versions of what’s happening. I really wanted to bring that feeling into the songs which I think is what I almost do. The main one that really does that is “In a Dream I’m a Painting,” which was maybe the most literal version of that.

Was the burnout you were experiencing from a heavy touring schedule and making up dates postponed during the pandemic?

Yeah, definitely. We played over a hundred shows in a year. That doesn’t include the six months before that year that we were touring. We just didn’t stop. We were touring two albums and releasing one of them in the middle of that tour, and I was so tired. I felt like I had to do everything, but this is the first time I have had this opportunity to do this. I really wanted to — had to — prove myself, and I had to do it justice. The end result of that was I said yes to everything. We were playing loads and loads of shows. I was also doing interviews all the time and doing promos, doing sessions. And we were traveling. It took everything out of me.

Then towards the end of that year, I fell in love with someone and all these feelings of intense burnout, sadness and exhaustion were tying into this excitement and potential, and it was quite confusing. Then we got home, and I suddenly had nothing to do. I was just functioning and like, who am I? I didn’t know how to do anything, like go and have a coffee or see my friends. I hadn’t been home for so long, I was like, “Hey, can you ask me to hang out?”

And traveling the world on a tour has to change you as a person?

Yeah, you become a version of yourself that is constantly in motion, that has not quite caught up with yourself.

The covers of previous Porridge Radio albums have been your artwork. The cover of Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There for Me, is a photograph of you looking at a birdlike sculpture. How did that come about?

I made this sculpture of a swallow, and I made it whilst I was writing these songs because I was really focused on this idea of the swallow. I’d also been doing lyric paintings that reflected the songs either in their states as poems before they became songs, or after they’d been put into songs. I had all these different images. When we were recording the album, at that point we didn’t know what it was going to be called. I remember talking to Georgie [Stott], who plays keys, about what it should be. And somehow, we both secretly arrived at this idea that it should be a photo.

I was thinking that it should be a photo of the swallow sculpture. I hadn’t finished making it, but I knew that I wanted it to be a mobile which fit into this [Centre] Pompidou show we did in April 2024, which was this huge live show my sister directed which had all these shadows and puppets. Somehow, we realized that I should be in the photo, but then because of that, I needed to find somebody who could take the photo that I had in my head.

A friend sent me the work of about 20 photographers. I saw Steve Gullick’s work, and I thought he could capture this image that I had in my head. Luckily, he followed us on Instagram. I sent him a message that just said would you be interested in doing this. He said, “Yeah, let’s have a phone call.” I described it to him and did a sketch of the album cover and showed it to him. Then we spent a whole day in my art studio playing around with the swallow. My sister was there as well giving movement direction. He managed to capture the image that I had in my head. He really brought it to life. I love this picture.

Weren’t you inspired after seeing some of Alexander Calder’s mobiles and sculptures?

It was around the release of the last record. I was in New York and went to the Whitney [Museum of American Art]. They had this video playing of Alexander Calder’s Circus, and I fell in love. It was so whimsical in such a serious way —and so beautiful. I spent a long time watching documentaries about him and thinking about mobiles and shadows. I’ve always enjoyed the way that sculpture exists and interacts with the space, the world it’s in. I think the swallow mobile I made is very close to his work.

I love your word paintings. Have you gotten a proper gallery exhibit?

Not a proper one, no. I would love to have one, actually. Very fun. I have a lot of paintings from this album that I don’t quite know what to do with.

I first heard “Sick of the Blues” as a single before I heard the album. I loved it then, but where it falls at the end of the album makes it all the more powerful. It functions as both culmination of a journey and the start of a new one. Was that what you were trying to accomplish with the track list?

Yeah, exactly. We were all kind of amused because we didn’t know the first single was going be “Sick of the Blues,” which, for us, was the closing piece that ties the album all together. If you start with [the album’s first track,] “Anybody,” it’s this intense introduction that takes you through everything else that you’re going to experience across the album. Then you end with “Sick of the Blues,” which is just like oh, f–k it.

“I’m going to make it. I’m going to get through this.”

Exactly. It’s like — “I don’t believe this yet, but I will at some point. I’m just going to hope for the best and go for it.” And that was why it came at the end.

In “Sick of the Blues,” you sing, “I’m sick of the blues, I’m in love with my life again/ I’m sick of the blues, I love you more than anything.” It makes the listener think, “What do you love more than anything? Life or the person you lost?” You’ve done that with other songs, like “7 Seconds” — the lyrics are open to interpretation.

I think it is important that people come to the songs with what they have and what they need from them.

Based on the song credits, it looks like you work collaboratively with your bandmates.

This was the first time that I really felt comfortable having those credits with everyone. Even though the process was very similar in that I wrote these songs on my own, I showed them to the others, and over months and months, we arranged them together. We also did the preproduction together, and we were all in the studio together recording. It was all mixed with us together.

It felt like everyone was more a part of it than they ever had been. Their input was what made the making of this album feel fresh, even though we have been a band for years. Me and Georgie and Sam have made music together and been close friends for about ten years now, but this felt like the first time in a lot of ways that it was ours, and that I was really relying on them.

When I was researching this story, a lot of the press was about Porridge Radio’s nomination for the Mercury Prize. Now that you’ve come so far from that, with this album, where do you see Porridge Radio as a unit, a group of artists?

It’s funny. We’d already been a band for about five years, and then suddenly, the industry said, “Oh, this is a hot new band.” We weren’t. It was chaotic at the beginning, with us figuring out where we were in relation to each other. And it was me kind of figuring out I had all this emotional outburst to give and found the space to do it. I was like, “Oh, no one cares about this, but this is for us.”

Suddenly we’re this hype band and I’m getting the Mercury nomination. I was like, “This is amazing, because this means that I’m going to be able to do this as a job at some point.” I also remember being almost cynical about it. Like, the music industry chooses you for a minute, and then it spits you back out again.

And then came the endless touring.

We ended up touring a really long time, and I got so completely jaded by the whole industry — by the way you’re expected to tour and live. It feels like everyone is expecting you to do everything, you’re not really making much money, and you’re supposed to be so grateful for this thing that you have that is extremely painful and physical. I’ve seen so many friends go through this kind of whirlwind and come out exhausted, disappointed and alienated.

And now with this album I think we’ve made the best thing we’ve ever made. It’s so exciting to me. I loved writing and recording these songs. I’m excited to release it and tour it. I’m like, “That’s enough, right?” My goal is to enjoy my life; to just be in it and not worry too much if anyone cares — because sometimes people care and sometimes, they don’t. I’m letting go. I’m releasing my expectations of myself.

You feel like that’s finally happening.

I think this record has allowed me to do that, and even in the process of recording it’s the first time that I felt like I could be anything that I needed to be whilst recording. I mean, I was crying for about a week of making this, and I made it. Maybe what I’ve learned from this is that I’m allowed to be intense, and I’m allowed to have peace.

Last week, rising British pop acts Rachel Chinouriri and Cat Burns released the emotional new single “Even.” The song addressed the pair’s respective rise over the last few years. Chinouriri released her debut album What A Devastating Turn Of Events in May and enlisted actor Florence Pugh for the “Never Need Me” music video; Burns, meanwhile, hit No. 2 on the U.K. Singles Charts with “Go” and was nominated for a Mercury Prize for her debut LP, Early Twenties.

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The song speaks to the double standards Black artists are held to in the U.K. music industry, as well as the mislabeling of their releases. Despite their love of indie music and varied inspirations across genres, they’ve been frustrated with the battles they’ve faced to be heard.

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“Wish I didn’t have to climb twice as high / For them to see me, isn’t it crazy,” Burns reflects on “Even,” while in the chorus, the pair asks: “We talk the same, dress for fame / Why does no one else believe in / Us the same?”

Fellow British artist Master Peace – real name Peace Okezie – is credited as a songwriter on “Even” and knows the issues all too well. He released his debut album, How To Make A Master Peace, earlier this year, which featured contributions from alternative legend Santigold and dance producer Georgia. The record was infused with indie rock stylings and nods to Bloc Party and The Streets, but he says he still faces misrepresentation of his music and feels some opportunities have passed him by.

“We are from a place where we have to work a hundred times harder than the average white guy, because people see as Black artists and just chuck us in the R&B space. It’s a cop-out,” Peace tells Billboard.

In 2020, Tyler, The Creator spoke out against the categorization of his music as rap while collecting a Grammy Award and criticized the use of the ‘urban’ music category. There’ve been similar issues in the U.K. A 2021 study by Black Lives In Music reported that 63% of Black music makers had faced racism in the U.K. music industry, and included testimonies by artists of microaggressions and mislabeling of their music.

“For the work that we’ve put in, we should be further than we already are,” he says of Chinouriri, Burns and himself. “You can easily fall victim to it and think ‘it’s never going to work because there’s no Black U.K. pop stars,’ or you could be like us and step up and cut through.”

How to Make A Master Peace was released in March this year and charted at No. 30 on the U.K.’s Official Album Charts. He’s since landed an Ivor Novello Award for their rising star trophy, collecting alongside fellow ceremony winners like Bruce Springsteen. He supported Kasabian at their massive homecoming show in Leicester, England, earlier in the summer and recently landed a nomination at the Independent Music Awards (AIM) in the best music video category. A run of live dates is now taking place in the U.K., but he still feels like people within the industry and potential listeners need convincing of his credentials.

“On paper when you look at all the achievements you think ‘why would he complain?’”, Peace says. “I wouldn’t say I feel like an outsider in my scene, but do I feel like I’m held up the same way as certain bands or artists? Probably not.”

He signed to Universal’s EMI in 2020 and had a string of releases under the label. He says that hype around his live shows – particularly given the lack of releases – was what got the majors involved. “As a result,” he says, “people had nothing to reference [my music] to” beyond a YouTube freestyle which saw him creatively rap over a-ha’s “Take On Me.”

When his A&Rs left EMI, he followed them and inked a deal with PMR Records, whose previous success stories include Disclosure, SG Lewis and Jessie Ware.

“At EMI it was about dropping tunes, but I don’t think they understood what we wanted to build; maybe at the time I didn’t even understand.” He started again from scratch as an independent artist, but refined his direct, party-starting sound and continued collaborating with songwriters and producers like Julian Bunetta, who has credits on Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” and her 2022 single “Nonsense.”

His album’s release dovetails with the ‘indie sleaze’ hype in recent years, a moment where younger fans on have revisited works by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Strokes and more, and been enraptured by Lizzy Goodman’s Meet Me In The Bathroom oral history and documentary. “Where I’ve come from and my background, I’ve always been in fight-or-flight mode. I’ve always wanted to take a leap and risk things,” he says. “It was a big risk making an indie sleaze-inspired album when no one knew about what that was all about.”

Now Peace is keeping the momentum up with How To Make A(nuva) Master Peace, a new EP that acts as a deluxe record to his debut. “Dropping the album when I did got me so many amazing opportunities, so I want to keep it up,” he tells Billboard.

But most of all, he wants the music world to recognize his work and what his contemporaries are doing without stereotyping. “I’m a Black, alternative artist that makes pop music and sits in that space. I want to be that guy who people look at and think, ‘His thing is valid’.”

Shortly after the April release of his breakout smash single, “Million Dollar Baby,” Tommy Richman and his close collaborator and good friend Kavi made a “club pop-out” appearance together. The club, Abigail in Washington, D.C., holds about 250 people — but it was soon clear to Kavi that that wasn’t going to be nearly big enough.

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“The second we stepped out, there was actually, like, paparazzi taking photos of us. I’m walking down to the club, and there’s a line around the block, packed out,” Kavi recalls. “Around 700 people showed up… It was just such a wonderful night.” He pauses, then stipulates with a laugh: “At least for me and Tommy. I don’t know if everyone else [thought so], because it was just so packed at the club!”

Such flashbulb moments have quickly become commonplace for Richman, Kavi and the rest of their inner creative circle — which also includes “Baby” co-producers Max Vossberg and Jonah Roy, recording artist Paco (currently opening for Richman on his Before the Desert mini-tour) and videographer Josh Belvedere, whose kinetic behind-the-scenes clips of the song’s recording helped it catch prerelease fire on TikTok. Kavi says his role on the team is as much executive producer as producer: “When [Tommy] sets down a vision, I can think of people that can collaborate on it that would be best for it and sounds that we can chase — just sort of creatively direct which way it should go.”

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While the 21-year-old Los Angeles-based producer is one of five credited on the sublimely smoked-out, falsetto-led “Baby” — with Mannyvelli and Sparkheem rounding out the group — Kavi was responsible for the song’s “aha” moment. He was going through a sample pack of Canadian producer DJ Smokey’s that he found on Reddit and heard the vocal chop that ended up inspiring the song’s striking, pitched-down opening hook. “I was just like, ‘Oh, this is sort of hard!’ ” Kavi recalls. “And Tommy agreed… So we catered that vibe based off of the chop that I found and just built it into its own world.”

Born Kavian Saleh in Iran, where he grew up in Shiraz and Tehran, Kavi moved to L.A. at the age of 11. Growing up in Iran, Kavi says his musical influences were a mix of alternative rock bands like Muse and The Cure and EDM acts such as Skrillex and Knife Party, “a mishmash of what my parents showed me and what any 12-year-old on YouTube would find.” Not hip-hop, though: “Rap music doesn’t really exist in Iran,” he says. “And if it does, it’s pretty ass.”

That changed upon his U.S. arrival in the mid-2010s, when the future producer was exposed to rappers like Future and Chief Keef. “Wow… This is what it’s about!” he recalls thinking. “It really, like, tweaked me out.” His infatuation with those artists led him to study the techniques that then-rising producers like TM88 and Southside used on their records. “My main focus at first was very, very much just trap beat-oriented,” he says. “That’s all I did for a good four years.”

His relationship with Richman began about three years ago, when Kavi DM’d the singer-songwriter after catching his 2021 song “Chrono Trigger” on TikTok. The two began a creative relationship and friendship, and after pausing on collaborating while Kavi continued his trap production work, they reunited in 2023. When they started recording again, two of the first songs they worked on together were “Million Dollar Baby” and its follow-up, “Devil Is a Lie,” released in June.

Kavi admits that the immediate success of “Million Dollar Baby” — which debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and spent its first 17 weeks in the chart’s top 10 — was not something his crew saw coming. “We were like, ‘Oh, this is a good vibe, this is sick,’ ” he remembers. “It wasn’t anything where we all sat down and were like, ‘Wow, this is a headbanger! This is crazy!’ It just was another record we worked on.” (Kavi says that he personally prefers the more “swagged-out” groove of “Devil Is a Lie” — which did not quite match the runaway success of “Baby,” but has shown impressive legs, debuting and peaking at No. 32 and spending 13 weeks on the Hot 100.)

Still, he is grateful for the exposure “Baby” has granted his close-knit team — “the best part about this is… all of us are coming up together, and we keep the sound and the circle very sacred and tight,” he says — and for the opportunities it’s now affording him, both as one of the central collaborators on Richman’s debut full-length, Coyote, and with his own work. Since his “Baby” breakout, Kavi has linked up with A$AP Rocky and also has been doing more pop-oriented productions for the first time with Disney Channel star Kylie Cantrall. Kavi says he has begun studying the work of pop super producers like Jack Antonoff and Max Martin as he tries to expand his skills and his portfolio: “I think I’ve developed my sound more now to not necessarily just be one-sided when I’m in the room.”

Meanwhile, Kavi is also working on his own solo music, which he likens to enigmatic alt-R&B singer-songwriters like Jai Paul, and plans on having his newly minted star buddy make an appearance on his upcoming debut project as well — though Kavi hopes that ultimately, his own name starts to stand out.

“Tommy’s my main priority because that’s like my best friend — we’re developing something great here,” he explains. “But I’m trying to build my own legacy as a producer as well. I don’t mind being the guy in the background… But also, I want my name to be known as, like, ‘Oh, this is Kavi’s production. Wow, that’s great.’ Build a legacy around it and just make some amazing music, you know?”

This article appears in the Oct. 5 issue of Billboard.

“I have a question,” Dabeull asked. “Do you have the funk?”
There was only one answer at Brooklyn Steel, an 1,800-capacity venue in New York City — an affirming roar.

The French producer was in New York City in September promoting his new album, Analog Love, with his first ever full-band tour. But the short jaunt, which also stopped in San Francisco and Los Angeles, was freighted with extra importance — less of a tour, more of a mission of renewal. “My job is to make funk a modern music again,” Dabeull says. 

He speaks about this goal in unabashedly grand, romantic terms. “I don’t make funk music for money,” he explains. “I make funk music for people’s dreams.”

That is no small task, but Dabeull’s efforts have been more successful than most. His top five songs on Spotify have over 135 million streams combined, outshining many of his funk-obsessed peers — not to mention many of his early influences, whom have often languished in obscurity in the streaming era. 

Dabeull “is one of the best, if not the best, modern funk artists out there because of his analog aesthetic — it’s all raw synths recorded live,” says Ivan “Debo” Marquez, one of the co-founders of Funk Freaks, a DJ collective and record label from Santa Ana, California. “Nobody in the modern funk scene has actually had the reach that he’s having.” 

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It took a while, though. For years, Dabeull had to prioritize other styles of music, like electro house, to help generate income, as he wasn’t established, and the genre he adored was out of favor. 

He grew up in Paris, and discovered American funk through friends and increasingly frequent trips to record stores as a teen in the late 1990s. “I never went to school for music,” he says. “My school is reproducing the Bar-Kays, Kleeer, really good funk from the 1980s.” (Kleeer’s 1981 album is titled, appropriately, License to Dream.)

A young Dabeull would play LPs on repeat, picking apart the grooves: “What bass is that? What guitar is that? What effects are on that guitar?”

In the U.S., much of the vital funk of the early 1980s — often known as “boogie” — never got its due outside of the Black community, “hampered by a disco backlash at pop radio,” as Nelson George wrote in his book The Death of Rhythm & Blues. “Of the 14 records to reach No. 1 on the Black chart in 1983,” George noted, “only one reached the pop top 10.” 

This freeze-out still has lingering effects to this day. As Dabeull put it, “for a lot of people, funk music [from this era] is seen as cheesy.” 

Dabeull performing in Brooklyn

Lucia Aboytez

It’s an unfortunate phenomenon: Nearly universal love for the hits of Michael Jackson and Prince doesn’t necessarily trickle down to Midnight Star’s “Wet My Whistle” or Kashif’s “I Just Gotta Have You (Lover Turn Me On).” Some indelible music from this period, including tracks from the S.O.S. Band, the Chi-Lites, and One Way, never even made it to Spotify — another obstacle to fandom in the modern era, as finding the good stuff can take on elements of an archival project.

In many of these songs, the bassline is the true star, svelte and muscular like an Olympic athlete. This is why good DJs can still rely on these records to whip up dancefloor mayhem. “Some people like steppers, the slower stuff,” Marquez explains. At Funk Freaks parties, in contrast, “we like the get-your-ass-dancing, sweat-the-alcohol-out feel” of boogie. 

And Dabeull’s strongest productions can hold their own alongside the original gems. On songs like “On Time” and “JoyRide,” a track for frequent collaborator Holybrune, the basslines are formidably plump, but still limber. Synthesizers flash like emergency flares; the drums remain curt and clipped; vocalists trace breathy arcs in the space cleared by the bullish low-end.  

Holybrune also sings on “You & I,” Dabeull’s most popular song, which sounds as if he took Dennis Edwards’ 1984 classic “Don’t Look Any Further,” crumpled it into a compact ball, and then shot it out of a cannon. Dabeull’s band shores up its bona fides by hurtling through other throwbacks: At the show in Brooklyn, they played a snatch of Earth, Wind, and Fire’s “Boogie Wonderland” along with the Rah Band’s “Messages From the Stars;” one guitar riff evoked “Get Down Saturday Night,” Oliver Cheatham’s sparkling ode to weekend debauchery. (The band also delivered a runaway-train version of Michael Sembello’s Flashdance anthem “Maniac” — less groovy than “Boogie Wonderland,” but no less effective.)

In case anyone doubted Dabeull’s fealty to 1980s funk, when it came time to record Analog Love, he got his hands on the mixing console Jackson had used to record Thriller. “He’s a bit of a perfectionist,” Marquez says. (Funk Freaks released a vinyl-only Dabeull 7″ in 2020.) Dabeull prefers the word “picky.”

“We are not here just to play the songs on the album,” Dabeull says. “We want to bring it back to the way it used to be.”

Lucia Aboytez

The console, which weighs more than 1,000 pounds, had previously been in the possession of the French band Phoenix, who paid $17,000 for it during the sessions for their 2013 album Bankrupt! But the equipment had fallen into disrepair. “They said, ‘If you can fix it, you can have it,’” recalls Julian Getreau, who serves as music director for Dabeull’s nine-person band, and is credited on his releases as Rude Jude. 

While that mending process took two months of “working every day,” according to Dabeull, it was worth every ounce of elbow grease: “Making funk on this board was magic,” he says reverently. “To keep the funk alive, you have to do it properly,” Getreau adds. “You cannot go the easy way.”

Maybe it’s the board — there’s a touch of the Jacksons’ “Walk Right Now” in the hard charge of the Analog Love track “Look in the Mirror,” while some of the louche slink of Thriller‘s closer, “The Lady in My Life,” seeps into Dabeull’s “Fabulous Kisses.” “Let’s Play” goes another direction altogether, reimagining West Coast G-funk as tender music for lovers.

A sizable chunk of the crowd at the Brooklyn Steel show was not alive in the mid-1980s when Jackson conquered the world with Thriller — that was their parents’ music. The importance of this is not lost on Dabeull. Many listeners who worship funk are “a bit older; they get nostalgic about what they heard when they were younger,” he says. “We want people that are younger to get intrigued and get into it, so it’s not seen as an old kind of music.”

His plan seems to be working, at least in the three American cities he visited on tour. Because Dabeull’s show in L.A. sold out quickly — “that’s the Mecca of funk,” Getreau notes — some fans hopped a plane to see him play in New York, adding the price of a cross-country flight to their concert ticket. (Holybrune kindly ferried their posters backstage for Dabeull to autograph.) Another fan made the pilgrimage south from Montreal, declaring the show “the most fun she’d ever had.”

After his performance, Dabeull seemed slightly dazed by all the attention Stateside. “For us, it’s unbelievable,” he said. A few minutes later, a member of his team informed him that all the merch had sold out. “It’s crazy,” Dabeull replied. “Why?” 

His publicist offered a gentle retort: “Because people like you.” Or, perhaps, they really do have the funk.

It was July 8, 2023, and the locals at the Oregon Country Fair were twirling.
Leah Chisholm had grown up attending the earthy music and arts festival with her parents and brother. Now she was onstage there, performing. The globally popular DJ-producer, better known as LP Giobbi, had recently performed at Coachella and would soon jet to Belgium to play dance megafestival Tomorrowland, but DJ’ing the fair — “my favorite place on the planet,” she says — meant more to her.

LP’s mother, father and other family and friends were in the front row, vibing to her blend of remixed Grateful Dead songs and house music, including tracks from the debut album she had released two months prior. The fair had hosted acts like the Dead, Bruce Hornsby and The Black Crowes in its more than 50-year history — but LP Giobbi was the first electronic artist to headline. This homecoming show could have been a peak moment. Instead, it was a wakeup call.

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“I just felt so exhausted, and that was such a sad thing for me,” she says. “It was like, ‘I got it. This is not how I want to live my life.’ ”

Just from scrolling her Instagram, it had been evident that since rising to electronic world prominence circa 2021, LP had been Doing a Lot. She was hopping across time zones for gigs at clubs, festivals and afterparties. She released her album Light Places in May 2023 and launched her label, Yes Yes Yes (named after the unofficial motto of the Oregon Country Fair), the following September. She founded the organization Femme House, which works to create opportunities for women and gender-expansive people, people of color and LGBTQ+ creatives in music through education, scholarships and more. She was (and still is) the global music director for W Hotels. Raised by Deadhead parents (Mike and Gayle, who’ve been to more than 100 shows since first seeing the band in 1973), LP launched her Dead House party series — where she puts her dance music spin on the jam band’s songs, including at official afterparties for acts like Dead & Company — and officially remixed Jerry Garcia’s 1972 debut solo album, Garcia, in January 2023.

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She was, as they say, killing it. And she was fried.

Ashley Osborn

“I had put so much pressure on myself,” LP says today on a sun-drenched September afternoon in Laguna Beach, Calif. She has been working on music here in a friend’s backyard studio, where we’re barefoot and curled up on the couch drinking purple smoothies. “It was like, ‘This is an opportunity most people never get. You have to give your all into everything you do.’ That took over as me being a workaholic.” Amid the “extreme highs and extreme lows” of what effectively became a never-ending workday, it was hard to really show up for her family, friends, fiancé or “for the music, really.”

It wasn’t unusual for LP’s tour manager to catch her crying on flights while she listened to the Dead’s wistful “Brokedown Palace” on her headphones, feeling both closer to and farther away from her family as Garcia sang, “Mama, mama, many worlds I’ve come/Since I first left home.” “He’d be like, ‘You OK?’ And I’d be like, ‘I’m just trying to process!’ ” she says, breaking into her generous and terrifically oversize laugh.

Figuring out how to grow and enjoy her success while also staying connected to where she came from is why her new album is called Dotr. Out Oct. 18 on Ninja Tune, the project is named for how she signed notes to her parents when she was a kid and didn’t yet know how to spell “daughter.” She tears up several times while talking about them. “They’re everything to me,” she says.

While LP produced Light Places amid the swirl of a rising career, she made her new album as the road “kind of swallowed me whole” during a period of tremendous grief. Three of the album’s 17 tracks are named for significant women in LP’s life who died while she was making it. Her fiancé’s mother, Patricia Lynn, whom LP knew for more than a decade, died in March 2023. Her piano teacher since childhood, Carolyn Horn, died the next month. Then Susan Milleman, a professional singer and close friend of LP’s mother, died the month after.

“I was in the studio trying to finish songs,” she says, “and I was just like, ‘I don’t give a fuck about anything right now.’ ”

But she worked through the pain. Amid house tracks featuring artists like Brittany Howard and Portugal. The Man, there’s Lynn wishing her a happy birthday in a sampled voice message. A sample of Milleman singing centers a track named for her, and “Carolyn” opens with a stunning piano solo that LP recorded when she realized Alzheimer’s was starting to noticeably affect her teacher.

While making the music, a light bulb went off in LP’s head about her 20-hour workdays and infinite to-do lists. “Here I am promoting women and Femme House, and I was not tapped into any of my feminine energy,” she says. “It was all very like, masculine productivity ‘do do do’ energy that just got out of balance. With all these powerful women who passed away who I was honoring, it was just like, ‘Wake up.’ ”

Ashley Osborn

Through “a lot” of therapy, she made adjustments. While her tour schedule and general output are the same, now “I’m just doing it differently,” she says. “I’m not sending as many emails, and I’m not making as many DJ edits.” Plus, the hard work has paid off. “I’m waking up to the idea that I don’t have to prep seven hours for every gig because I’ve become a pretty good DJ,” she says. “I can go to dinner with the promoter and friends and family instead of working in my hotel room until the second I step onstage. My life is still pretty unbalanced, but in that unbalance, I’m finding balance.”

For her aptly titled Way Back Home Tour, she’ll play 21 shows across the United States from October through December. Nearly all of them will be performed in the round, which makes “a really big difference” in how she connects with the audience. The tour will take her through standard U.S. dance hubs like Los Angeles, Chicago and Brooklyn, but also places like Asheville, N.C., and her native Eugene, Ore.

These B-markets have become familiar terrain for LP through her Dead House sets, where she plays Dead tunes crossed with electronic music. These typically more rural, hippie-friendly cities, and the audiences who see her play in them, are more her speed. “Those are my people,” she says.

She means this more literally than most in the sprawling Dead tribe. Mike and Gayle raised her in Dead culture even before she was born, attending the Eugene show of the band’s legendary July 1987 tour with Bob Dylan, when Gayle was eight months pregnant with LP. “I made it all the way to the front of the stage because the crowd just opened a path to let me through, I was so huge,” recalls Gayle, who adds that her unborn daughter was “particularly active in the womb during the ‘Drums/Space’ segment” of the show. Deadhead culture later helped LP — who found her stage wardrobe of vintage Dead T-shirts stashed in the crawl space of her parents’ house — orient her career around the sense of community that is the core of not just the jam world, but the dance world, too. While her parents see themselves in the fans coming together to lose themselves on dancefloors at their daughter’s shows, they’ve also worked to understand her career — Gayle reading up on foundational house music figure Frankie Knuckles, even going to see where he used to play in Chicago. (Now 37, LP listened mostly to jam bands and jazz until her boyfriend, and now fiancé, introduced her to electronic music when they got together 12 years ago.)

But while LP fits elegantly into the long-standing crossover between jam and electronic music, these facets of her career are still different enough to warrant separate teams. WME represents her for her global DJ career, getting her gigs in Ibiza, across Europe and beyond, while she works with Ben Baruch of 11E1even Group — the management firm that also represents jam acts like Goose, The Disco Biscuits and Dead & Company bassist Oteil Burbridge — for Dead House. With Baruch, she has taken her Dead concept to the source, playing Dead & Company’s Playing in the Sand Festival as well as afterparties during its 2023 summer tour and following one of its 2024 shows at Sphere in Las Vegas.

It’s naturally all been a mind-bending thrill for her parents, whom LP introduced to the Dead’s Bob Weir at a show. Gayle thanked Weir “for all the years of joy you’ve given my family.” Weir looked her in the eye and put his hand on his heart. “The pleasure,” he responded, “is all mine.”

“There are moments where I can be like, ‘OK, I’m aware of how cool this is,’ ” LP says, “and that was one of them.”

Another making-it moment came in 2023, when Taylor Swift asked LP to remix her song “Cruel Summer.” When Swift tagged her in an Instagram post about the edit, LP gained 1,000 new followers in 10 minutes. But she was also concerned the project might affect how she was trying to position herself in the underground dance realm. “I’ve been working hard to get the respect of the CircoLocos of the world,” she says, referencing the revered techno party based at Ibiza club DC10. The day the Swift remix came out, she got her first CircoLoco offer — and the team there complimented her on the remix.

“It legitimized me to people who have no idea what dance music is,” she says. “But what I didn’t see coming is that the cool kids were also like, ‘Wow, congrats!’ ”

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Her grinding has also given her leverage and a platform. “It’s just so cool that the more I do or the bigger I get, I can use this power [for] the thing I care about most, which is empowering women in our industry.” She initially thought expanding Femme House, which she co-founded with artist management consultant Lauren A. Spalding in 2019, would be an uphill battle; instead, power players have been eager to get involved.

Spotify, Insomniac Events and New York promoter Jake Resnicow have been key Femme House supporters, with Insomniac working with LP on, among other projects, booking rising Femme House artists as openers for the promoter’s shows at the 2024 edition of the Amsterdam dance industry gathering ADE.

“There are so many people in positions of power who have come to me and been like, ‘How can we make our lineups more diverse? How can we release more diverse artists?’ What I’m learning is that people eat what they’re fed, and the industry is finally like, ‘Do we have a balanced meal on our plate?’ ”

Meanwhile, LP and her fiancé recently finished building a house in their home base of Austin. The space includes a studio and room to expand — because the album is called Dotr not only to honor her parents “but also because I want to call in my own daughter.”

With family so close to her heart, it makes sense that she wants to start one of her own. When it happens, she foresees “a time when I have to slow down even more.” But it’s OK, because as she has recently figured out, it’s less about doing the most than about being present for life as it happens.

“I’m not the best producer, the best piano player or the best DJ,” she says. “What my gift actually is is feeling good and whole in my body, finding my joy and being a reflection of that joy for other people so they can see it in themselves.”

Seven years ago, Drag Race stars Jinkx Monsoon and BenDeLaCreme saw an opportunity to ring in the holiday season the way they wanted to — as two friends just gabbing to one another in front of a live audience.
“We could have just sat on stage and shot the s–t for an hour and a half,” Monsoon explains to Billboard. “That’s how this whole idea started, with us saying ‘Let’s just sit on stage, maybe do a couple numbers and bulls–t about the holidays.”

Today, that original concept has grown into an annual tradition for the pair that extends far beyond just chatting and singing in front of a crowd. The Jinkx & Dela Holiday Show, instead, transformed over multiple iterations into a spectacle of costumes, dancers, high-production performances and an ever-evolving story — one that usually pits the two performers’ disparate dispositions against one another.

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Each year, the pair use the plot of their show to tackle topics of the moment, including the oncoming approach of AI technology and adjusting to a post-COVID world. For this year’s show — which kicks off its 33-date North American run on Nov. 7 in Charlotte, N.C. — the pair recognized that there’s really only one topic they felt needed to be addressed; our current, fractured political discourse. “There’s a lot of fear right now,” DeLa explains. “We have never shied away from taking on those hard topics, but doing it in a way that also can bring joy and hope.”

It certainly helps that the pair are well-versed in the political challenges of this election — in July, Jinkx and DeLa joined forces with fellow Drag Race stars Alaska, Willam, Monét X Change and Peppermint to create the first-of-its-kind political action committee Drag PAC. Aimed at engaging young voters to exercise their rights in the upcoming election, the organization has already provided prospective voters with the tools needed to register to vote and spread the word about the high-stakes election taking place on Nov. 5.

Below, Jinkx & DeLa break down the creation of their latest special, their thoughts on the upcoming election and their approach to young voters who don’t feel represented by either candidate in 2024.

Let’s talk about the special! What made you want to continue your tradition of doing this holiday tour?

Jinkx: It’s grown through the years — it started as something special, and just becomes more and more special each year, and that’s because there was always true heart and intention from the very very beginning of this project. We are writing a two act musical spectacular for the seventh time, because what we created that first year resonated with an audience that wanted to come back the next year. Their support through the years has allowed us to grow and take more time; now, we take off four months a year to devote to this project. As freelance artists, that’s crazy. But it pays off, because it is not only a wonderful artistic endeavor, but it is one of our best ways to stay in communication with our audience.

DeLa: It’s really about the spirit of this thing. It’s so great to be able to do this, but also, Jinkx and I love spending this time together, we love spending this time with our show family. We wanted to create a new tradition for us and for our audiences, and now, this is coming home for Christmas for us. 

What can you tell us about this particular Jinkx and DeLa Holiday Show? What are some of the new areas you wanted to explore with this year’s version?

DeLa: Every time we come at this, you can always expect that special Jinkx and DeLa flavor — we have a very specific brand of comedy, we have a very specific odd couple dynamic that makes for a very good time, and we come at it with a lot of humor, and camp, and sparkle, and spectacle, and original music, and pop parody. But we’re always also coming at it with keeping what is culturally happening around us in mind, so that will always dictate what is happening in the show. And this year, there is a lot of division happening, politically and otherwise.

Jinkx: I feel like drag queens are expected to be funny. Not every drag queen is funny, but there is an expectation that we’re going to tell some jokes and we’re going to entertain you, right? DeLa and I both chose comedy because it is a wonderfully effective tool for communication and for introducing new ideas. Throughout the years, I’ve learned that even though comedy kind of gets treated like this light-hearted, frivolous art form, it actually has been the most powerful way for me to convey very important messages to my audience.

When you double that with Christmas and what a difficult time of year this is for our community, it’s a no-brainer that people resonate with the work that we put a lot of passion into. This time of year is hard for all of us, and you don’t even have to be queer for it to be hard for you. 

The two of you clearly have an excellent working relationship as artists — what, in particular, about the other person makes them a good collaborator, to you?

Jinkx: I think if you asked us at different points over the last seven years, we might have had different answers. But right now, it’s pretty easy to say that there is trust and respect here. We have so much trust in one another that you can actually believe that this person is making a suggestion that we should wear specific costumes not because she thinks it’s the best option for her, but because she thinks it’s the best option for the show. To find another artist who wants to remove their ego from the conversation and put on the best show possible is rare. It’s hard to get there as an artist, but when you find an artist who brings that out in you, it’s a unique privilege as a performer. 

DeLa: Jinkx and I have just continued to propel each other to get better at everything. We come at this with very specific skill sets, and with different strengths — throughout the years, we’ve built each other up, we’ve helped each other, I feel like I am a freer, more comfortable improvisational artist because of it. I know that Jinkx feels like she’s gotten to learn a little bit about storytelling from me. It’s something that comes out of that incredible inspiration from each other. As a result, we not only are a stronger pair on stage, but we’re better comedy writers together. 

The other project the two of you worked on earlier this year was the creation of Drag PAC. What made the two of you want to engage in this specific way in the election?

Jinkx: The credit actually has to go to a wonderful member of our community, someone who has helped create a lot of work for drag queens and queer entertainers since the pandemic, and that is our good friend Big Dipper. He really is the brain behind Drag PAC, and I don’t mind saying that because he puts in a lot of work so that we can come together as a group of very busy entertainers and use our platforms and our voices in a way that hopefully — actually, no, that will empower our community and give us voice in the political arena. 

This is a very high-stakes election, especially for the LGBTQ+ community. With less than a month until Election Day, how are you feeling about the outcome of the campaign and our collective future as a country? 

DeLa: I, personally, am feeling a great sense of gratitude for the way I’m seeing our community come together. I feel fortunate to get to step up and be a voice in the way that I do, and I feel inspired and grateful to see so many other queer people in the public eye doing that, as well as just seeing queer individuals across the board realizing that, collectively, we can make a lot happen, we can protect things and we can make change. That has been true of the queer community for decades, and I think both Jinkx and I feel very fortunate to be a part of the legacy of drag that has fought for queer rights and for the rights of all disenfranchised communities. As scary as what’s happening can be, and as infuriating as it can be, the counter to it is us knowing our extreme power. I feel a sense of knowledge that we are unbreakable, and no matter what happens in the next couple months, we will not stop fighting.

Part of Drag PAC’s aim is to engage young voters specifically, and there are a lot of Gen Z voters who have made it clear that they are not satisfied with either candidate in this election. As two people hoping to mobilize young voters, how do you approach conversations with people who don’t feel represented by the candidates?

Jinkx: In my lifetime, I’ve never lived through anything more tumultuous or divisive than the last eight years of politics. I know that those people who do not want to endorse either candidate, in many cases, are thinking about the fact that endorsing either candidate makes your friends from Palestine, your friends from the Middle East, your friends who are being actively affected by what Israel is doing, feel like you don’t care about what’s happening to them because it’s not happening to you.

I am not the most satisfied person when it comes to our government, but I’m at a point where I understand that if we want to have the kind of future where we can really dissent to things and have more options than just two candidates, then there’s only one option to vote for right now to make that future possible. I think it’s pretty obvious that, under Trump, we would lose our ability to protest, to dissent, to speak out against our government. He’s made that very clear. If you want to talk about what you can do right now to try and ensure that future that undecided voters are trying so hard to manifest, then there really is only one option right now. 

DeLa: It’s important to note that Drag PAC, as an entity, is about motivating Gen Z voters, and there is no endorsement for a specific political candidate there. The intention is to encourage people to do their own research, find the candidates that align with their own values, and then take the steps to make change through our system. That free thinking is an important piece of all this. But as individuals, yes, Jinkx and I absolutely have our personal endorsements.

I also think there’s so much nuance here. I think about Rep. Ruwa Romman from Georgia, who is a Palestinian-American who was not allowed to speak at the DNC. There’s so much to say about that, and I think it’s also important for people who have strong opinions about this to go and listen to this person that they are upset they didn’t get to hear from at the convention — she has a very nuanced approach to this. She cares deeply for the Palestinian people, but she also has a lot to say about how voting Democrat is an important part of this process when you zoom out and see the full picture. That’s something we’re trying to tackle in our show this year — the importance of larger thinking, of listening, of not getting so entrenched in your own story about what’s going on, but really connecting to others face-to-face and listening to what people have to say. Sometimes, it’s not what you assume it’s going to be. 

Before we wrap this up, is there anything else you want to add?

Jinkx: Yes — we’re comedians, I promise. [Laughs.] 

DeLa: One hundred percent. I mean, one thing Jinkx and I are so proud of is that we’re not afraid to come at the hard stuff directly. At the end of the day, though, we are both inspired by drag. We love to make people laugh. The point of this show is that, at a hard time of year, in a hard year, a bunch of people get to come together and look at some beautiful visuals, outfits, props and performances from our brilliant cast, and get to reap the benefits of some really skilled performers who have developed a very real camaraderie over the years. Hopefully, people will come and experience some joy from this thing, and also come out feeling a little better about some of the harder stuff. 

Jinkx: We’re not just spokespeople for the community — we benefit from being members of this community, too. The audiences charge us to keep going, and we only hope to charge our audiences to keep going, too, and to provide some food for thought.

It’s a constant refrain in the modern music business: “A hit can come from anywhere.” 
The increasingly varied nature of hits, which now erupt from South Korea and South Africa and Mexico and carom from country to country in the nearly frictionless streaming landscape, has been reflected on Billboard’s two global charts. Halfway through 2022, 85% of top 10 hits on the Billboard Global Excl. U.S. ranking were releases from artists outside of the mainland U.S. That number rose to 92% in 2023.

But unexpectedly, the big global hits in the first six months of 2024 came primarily from one place: America. 

Halfway through this year, U.S. acts accounted for 60% of the top 10 hits on the Global Excl. U.S. chart. And American artists were also responsible for the top eight songs on the Billboard Global 200 this summer. “American artists are crushing this year,” says Scott Cutler, co-CEO of Pulse Records. Pulse has contributed to the surge — the company signed Tommy Richman, whose bouncy, high-gloss “Million Dollar Baby” was No. 8 on the Global Songs of the Summer ranking. 

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Executives attribute America’s show of musical might this year to three factors: The strength of the release calendar for U.S. stars, at a time when many prominent acts from outside the U.S. have been off cycle; the boom in country music, which is finding an increasingly global audience; and American labels’ increased emphasis on international marketing. 

U.S. global dominance in music used to be a given. But that changed as listeners around the world adopted streaming services, and the cost of making and marketing music plummeted thanks to new technology and social media platforms. “When the cost structure changes, local [music] bounces back,” Will Page, former chief economist at Spotify, told Billboard last year. 

In a 2023 paper, Page and Chris Dalla Riva, a senior product manager at the streaming platform Audiomack, documented this shift. They found that less than 20% of the top 10 songs in Poland, France, Netherlands and Germany were by local artists in 2012. A decade later, however, homegrown acts accounted for 70% of top 10s in Poland, 60% in France, 30% in the Netherlands, and 20% in Germany. The authors called this shift “glocalisation.”

That said, these country-by-country gains are probably partially obscured on Billboard‘s global charts, because they aggregate streaming and sales data from more than 200 territories, according to Glenn McDonald, the author of You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favorite Song: How Streaming Changes Music. 

Imagine that Polish listeners are playing more Polish rap, but also some Sabrina Carpenter. Similarly, French listeners are enjoying more French rap, but dabbling in Carpenter’s discography as well. If you pool the two listening populations together, Carpenter will still be popular, but French listeners are unlikely to appreciate Polish rap, and vice versa. 

Still, it’s notable that the upper reaches of Billboard‘s global charts show such a pronounced uptick for American artists so far this year — defying the last two years of data as well as conventional wisdom about the increasingly competitive nature of the music industry around the world. 

Executives believe the surge is partly due to random chance. While superstars set their own schedules, either due to coincidence or competitive spirit, seemingly every American heavy-hitter has dropped an album this year. That group includes Ariana Grande, Ye, Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, Future, Taylor Swift and Post Malone. 

At the same time, international powerhouses like Harry Styles have been quiet. The members of BTS are serving in the military, so they haven’t released much music or scored a major hit. (Jung Kook‘s “Seven” was Billboard‘s global song of the summer last year.) And recent albums from Dua Lipa and Ed Sheeran haven’t been as successful as past projects.

On top of that, “it feels like a new generation of stars are here” in the U.S., says Peter Kadin, senior vp of marketing at EMPIRE. “There was a void for a time after the pandemic. Now artists that have been developing for a few years have really come into their own.” EMPIRE has its own budding star in Shaboozey. Carpenter, Chappell Roan, Richman, Benson Boone and Teddy Swims have also scored breakout singles this year, giving the U.S. an unusually strong slate of hits from newcomers who can be promoted abroad. 

And it’s notable that some of these big singles are emerging from Nashville: Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” is one of two country songs that finished in the top 10 in the song of the summer race on the Billboard Global 200. Luminate has surveyed a 12-week summer listening period for the past four years and found that streaming of country music outside America keeps rising. If international demand for the genre continues to increase, this gives U.S. labels another potential source of hits to export, one they couldn’t draw from the same way a decade ago.

Their approach to exporting has changed, too. U.S. labels once focused first on American consumers before looking abroad. Now they are often running global campaigns — or even starting promotion abroad, in territories where marketing is cheaper and fandom can be more of a social activity, before they begin a push Stateside. “It’s much easier to tap into all of these other markets because so much of promotion is digital now,” says Mike Weiss, head of A&R at United Masters.

Stellar, a Copenhagen-based marketing company, was founded in 2019 with the express purpose of helping artists find and nurture audiences in Southeast Asia and Latin America, which they might have neglected before streaming. The timing was right: “We have experienced a growing international focus from U.S. labels realizing the essential need for working artist campaigns with a global perspective,” says Felipe Martinez, Stellar’s head of Latin America. “Arguably U.S. labels have shown to be ahead of the curve in this understanding, while other markets seem to be more conservative in their international marketing efforts.”

At least this year, these efforts appear to be paying off for American artists. “If we see energy coming out of the Philippines or India,” Kadin says, “we’re going to run with it.”

Instead of doing her homework one day after school, the multihyphenate born Atia Boggs used her time for a different assignment. She had just bought Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and recalls coming home, sitting down and writing all the lyrics on flash cards. “That’s when I realized how important a good song was and how substance matters,” says Boggs, now 37 and known as the songwriter–producer INK. “And that really inspired me in a whole new way… I learned how to create my own path.”

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She taught herself guitar and started street performing, walking “miles on miles” from downtown Atlanta to the residential Buckhead neighborhood “playing for pennies.” Without any music industry connections, INK sought a mentor online, searching for her favorite songwriters such as James Fauntleroy, with whom she became Facebook friends in the late 2000s. “He was a mentor for me in the very beginning,” she says. “That gave me the confidence to say, ‘I can do this.’ ” Her first big break came in 2019, after she had co-produced and co-written Chris Brown’s song “Don’t Check on Me,” which featured Justin Bieber — and Brown decided it should feature INK, too. “It gave me so much exposure and another boost of confidence to have a superstar say, ‘Hey, we’re going to introduce you to the world.’ That was one of the moments that led to the unstoppable train I’m on now.”

This year has proved to be INK’s biggest, and busiest, yet — but she teases 2025 will be even crazier, as she’s working on her own music and a documentary while continuing to collaborate with music’s upper echelon.

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Beyoncé, Cowboy Carter

“Beyoncé was definitely a catalyst for the freight train to keep going,” says INK, who started working with Bey before COVID-19 hit on Cowboy Carter tracks including “Ameriican Requiem” and “16 Carriages.” INK recalls how, in 2019, they met at Roc Nation’s Grammys week brunch: “We have an inside joke because I went up to her and said, ‘Hey, I just wanted to let you know, I’m going to be writing your next album.’ And she giggled and said, ‘What’s your name?’ We just hit it off.” Soon after, INK was working with producer Ricky Reed, who introduced her to Beyoncé’s A&R executives. “They said, ‘We would love to have you be on this journey with us from the start.’ And five years later, Cowboy Carter was delivered.”

INK was friends with Lopez’s A&R executive long before he had the gig. So when it was time to assemble a team for Lopez’s personal album This Is Me… Now, he told INK, “You’re the first person I thought of for this.” INK most loved how “there’s not a session that happens without [Lopez]… I remember one time, she was like, ‘Hey, pull up today, but I’m going to send you a different address.’ And it’s the movie set [for Atlas]. We’re recording parts from the album in her trailer, and she comes in covered in blood, wet, cuts, bruises all over her body. And then she’s on the mic recording the song that we just wrote in her trailer. I thought that was the coolest thing ever, and it just showed the work ethic.”

Latto, “Look What You Did”

INK has long worked with Latto’s producer, Go Grizzly, another Atlanta native, but she had yet to work with the “Big Energy” rapper herself until this year. As INK recalls, she and Grizzly were working in Paris when they “cooked up the beat” that became “Look What You Did,” off the rapper’s third full-length album, Sugar Honey Iced Tea. “We did a beat in the studio, and then he was like, ‘Yo, you already know we have to get Latto on this.’ She heard it, she loved it and snapped.” INK had previously worked with Mariah the Scientist, who featured on “Look What You Did,” earlier this year when she guested on 21 Savage’s American Dream album. “So the dots connected,” she says.

This story appears in the Oct. 5, 2024, issue of Billboard.

On a balmy recent August evening, Gustavo Dudamel strode onto the stage of the Hollywood Bowl wearing a huge golden gauntlet on his left hand.
He wouldn’t get to use it. Dudamel is dramatic, but he’s no comic book villain; he’s the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and he was there to conduct the orchestra for the world premiere of Marvel Studios’ Infinity Saga Concert Experience. So instead of wielding the power of assorted Infinity Stones to change the world, Dudamel accepted the “vibranium baton” presented to him by Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige (a reference to the fictional metal of the Marvel universe) and performed some magic of his own, conducting two-plus hours of raucous music from 25 different Marvel movies, backed by gigantic video screens with 3D projections, dancers, fireworks and thousands of screaming fans.

The whole thing looked more like a rock show than a symphony concert. Then again, Dudamel is the closest thing to a rock star the classical music world has.

After nearly two decades in Los Angeles, Dudamel hobnobs with the likes of Chris Martin and John Williams, is close friends with Frank Gehry (who designed the stunning Walt Disney Concert Hall, the L.A. Phil’s home that opened a little over 20 years ago) and counts Billie Eilish, Gwen Stefani, Ricky Martin and Carlos Vives among the dozens of pop world luminaries who’ve guested under his (non-vibranium) baton. He has won five Grammy Awards (including, this year, best orchestral performance for the L.A. Phil’s recording of composer Thomas Adès’ Dante) and placed nine albums at No. 1 on Billboard’s Traditional Classical Albums chart. His life is the subject of the documentary Viva Maestro! And, though never officially confirmed, he was clearly the inspiration behind the character of the free-thinking, mercurial Latin maestro played by Gael García Bernal in the Amazon Prime series Mozart in the Jungle, in which he had a small role as a stage manager.

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In the span of just two weeks from the end of August to mid-September, Dudamel conducted Strauss with the Vienna Philharmonic in Salzburg, Austria, and then flew to Los Angeles where, including the two Marvel shows, he led the L.A. Phil in nine concerts, conducting Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony and Beethoven’s Ninth; dances by living Puerto Rican composer Roberto Sierra; Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals and scenes from Bizet’s Carmen; plus two evenings of contemporary Latin music with Mexican pop/folk singer Natalia Lafourcade. It’s a staggering musical offering. All told, more than 100,000 people attended Dudamel’s nine summer concerts at the Hollywood Bowl with the L.A. Phil, which he will again conduct on Oct. 8 at the opening night of Carnegie Hall’s 2024-25 season in New York.

“He is unique in the classical music world because not only does he lead the orchestra and elevate the work of the L.A. Phil in terms of excellence, but he also connects the orchestra with different kinds of music, collaborating with artists [in other genres] with which we wouldn’t typically perform,” L.A. Phil president/CEO Kim Noltemy says. “The result is he brings orchestra music to so many different people. That is one unbelievably unique piece that makes Gustavo special.”

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For Dudamel, it’s part of a deep-rooted belief that music as an art, with purpose, supersedes specific forms and genres. “As an orchestral musician, you value the work of these pop artists, and likewise, pop acts have the opportunity to see that the academicism of the other side isn’t overwhelming, but rather, it’s the same thing in a different style,” he says. “Yes, there’s a fascinating technical complexity [to classical music]. But in the end, what matters is what you feel and what people perceive. We have to erase people’s fears regarding classical music. It may be intellectual in execution, but music’s power is spiritual.”

Not since Leonard Bernstein has a conductor done as much as Dudamel to make classical music accessible — or so thoroughly captured the public imagination. The two maestros share a not just persuasive but borderline evangelical approach to relentlessly promoting music as a “fundamental human right,” not just by broadening what qualifies as “classical” repertoire but also broadening the concept of the orchestra itself. Bernstein’s televised Young People’s Concerts were central to his efforts to expand classical music’s audience; Dudamel has worked to create youth orchestras worldwide. And then, of course, there’s the hair: Bernstein’s silky pompadour flung about wildly as he conducted, and while Dudamel’s signature curly brown mop is perhaps a little less springy than when he made his U.S. conducting debut with the L.A. Phil in 2005 and is now peppered with gray, it still pops and sways with the music.

It’s a visible reminder of the personal stamp he continues to leave in a world of relatively staid personalities, and undoubtedly a factor in his broad recognizability. Dudamel is one of the few faces in classical music known far beyond the space, no doubt one of many reasons the L.A. Phil will miss him when his last season as music and artistic director ends and he officially takes over the New York Philharmonic in its 2026-27 season as music and artistic director.

When he does, Dudamel will become the first Latino to helm the oldest symphony orchestra in the United States, joining a pantheon of giants that includes Arturo Toscanini, Gustav Mahler and Bernstein himself. Expectations for his arrival are so heightened, says N.Y. Phil executive advisor and interim CEO Deborah Borda, that even though Dudamel will not formally join for another season, “we saw a record surge in subscription sales, as patrons are concerned they won’t be able to secure tickets once he starts.”

For Dudamel, being the first Latino to lead the N.Y. Phil long term is a matter of “immense pride. But I feel it doesn’t have to do with a race or a culture,” he says. Historically, he notes, the great symphony orchestras in the United States and beyond have been led mostly by European men who not only represented the music they performed, but also the European migration to this country and Latin America.

Dudamel’s story is completely different. The real triumph “is about where I come from,” he says. “I don’t come from a traditional music conservatory. I come from El Sistema de Orquestas, a program where you grow up playing music with your friends.”

It’s the morning after he has conducted Carnival of the Animals and Carmen, and Dudamel has joined me for coffee in an empty Hollywood Bowl meeting room. He has traded the formal white dinner jacket of the Marvel show for offstage casual — track pants, short-sleeved T-shirt and sneakers — and his trademark mix of impish humor (accentuated by his still-­boyish dimples) and deep thoughtfulness. Born and raised in Venezuela, Dudamel learned English as an adult, and though it’s grammatically perfect — albeit with a clipped, precise accent — he prefers his native Spanish, which he speaks very quickly (as most Venezuelans do) and with the erudite lingo of an intellectual, often citing the likes of Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno or Mexican writer Octavio Paz.

Today, we’re talking not just about his new appointment and the legacy he’ll leave behind in L.A. as he begins to build another in New York, but also the legacy he grew up with — one that still defines him.

At 43, Dudamel is almost as old as El Sistema Nacional de Orquestas y Coros Juveniles e Infantiles de Venezuela (The National System of Venezuelan Youth and Children’s Choruses and Orchestras). Known simply as El Sistema, it was founded in 1975 by musician-economist José Antonio Abreu, who held several government appointments and built El Sistema as part of the government structure, guaranteeing its existence and funding regardless of who was in power.

El Sistema was created more than 20 years before the Hugo Chávez regime, built on the premise that music education should be free and accessible to all children, everywhere in the country. For Abreu, who died in 2018, the power of music was transformative, spiritual and lasting, particularly in a developing country rife with poverty. What started with a first rehearsal attended by 11 children eventually grew to 443 schools (each called a “nucleus” in Sistema terminology) and 1,700 satellite centers that teach over 1 million children in Venezuela’s 24 states, according to El Sistema’s official webpage.

Abreu’s philosophy — famously, he said that “a child who plays an instrument with a teacher is no longer poor; he is a child on the rise” — is one Dudamel not only espouses but assumes as his identity. He’s still the music director of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela and will tour Europe with it next year for El Sistema’s 50th anniversary. (The tour stops are connected to cities with which Dudamel has a personal history.) He has no plans to change his commitment to it. “I would give my life for the orchestra,” he states bluntly. “It gave me everything I’m living now, and that’s why I share it as much as I can.”

Gustavo Dudamel photographed September 3, 2024 at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.

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But in the last few years, throughout Venezuela’s many political government crises and now, after the contested July reelection of President Nicolás Maduro — who has been in power since 2013 and whose latest reelection has been widely disclaimed both domestically and internationally as rigged — Dudamel has sometimes been criticized by other Venezuelans abroad for not speaking out more against the government.

Some critics have suggested that Maduro has used Venezuela’s youth orchestra to his political advantage. Renowned Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero has long called it a propaganda tool; when Dudamel conducted the ensemble at Carnegie Hall days after Maduro’s reelection, Human Rights Foundation parked a truck outside the venue displaying the message “Maduro Stole The Election” and asking Dudamel, “How long will you continue to serve as Maduro’s puppet and henchman?” The organization explained on social media that it wanted “to remind the world of Maduro’s fraud and to call out Dudamel for engaging in shameless propaganda and providing cover for the Venezuelan dictator.”

But, Dudamel points out, he has not been silent. He has written New York Times and Los Angeles Times op-eds calling for an end to repression in Venezuela and speaking against the government’s plans to rewrite the nation’s constitution. In 2017, after Venezuelan government forces killed a young violinist during a protest, Dudamel published an open letter, writing, “Nothing justifies bloodshed. We must stop ignoring the just cry of the people suffocated by an intolerable crisis. I urgently call on the President of the Republic and the national government to rectify and listen to the voice of the Venezuelan people.”

“I am one voice,” he says today. “People think if I speak out everything is going to change, but that’s not the case. There needs to be radical change, and that will take a lot of time.

“We live in a world of immediacy, where there’s always pressure to say something,” he adds when I ask why he hasn’t spoken out more in the wake of July’s contested election. “When do people actually reflect before speaking? You have to consider the entire situation. El Sistema de Orquestas represents all Venezuela, not just a part of it… El Sistema is focused on the neediest communities. That’s the truth. Isn’t that a way to change the country, far more than shouting? So you have to be prudent because you’re part of that. I’m not an individual speaking as an individual because that’s not how I grew up. I grew up in an orchestra.”

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This was Dudamel’s mindset during his own first El Sistema experience. He started music lessons at a school in his native Barquisimeto, a quaint city of under 1 million people in northwestern Venezuela. This was the mid-’80s, still years before Chávez took power, but a decade into the existence of El Sistema, which by then was thriving.

“I was only 5 years old, but I remember it perfectly,” Dudamel recalls. “It was the home of Doña Doralisa de Medina. It was a tiny colonial house where Maestro Abreu studied as a child. Doralisa was no longer alive, but El Sistema was there. The house had a red gate with musical notes. I walked in down a passageway and then to a patio, and I heard Chopin on the piano, a trumpet, violins. I fell in love with that cacophony.”

El Sistema didn’t pluck Dudamel out of abject poverty. His father is a working salsa trombonist; his mother, a voice teacher. His uncle, a doctor, was also a gifted cuatro player who taught Dudamel how to play popular Venezuelan music: waltzes, tangos, boleros — what Dudamel calls his very essence.

Perhaps because music flowed through his family, Dudamel’s own studies were encouraged but never imposed. He started conducting by accident, when his youth orchestra’s conductor arrived late for rehearsal and Dudamel took the podium, almost as if it was a game.

While no one ever told him he would make it big, his talent would have been impossible to miss. Abreu took an early interest in him, becoming a mentor and moral compass. He’s still very much alive in Dudamel’s head — he constantly begins sentences with “El Maestro Abreu…” — as are his teachings: to think long term, to learn from mistakes, to see music as a social instrument. It was Abreu, after all, who urged Dudamel, then in his early 20s, to enter Germany’s prestigious Mahler Competition, for conducting works by the vaunted composer, in 2004. When he won, it changed his life, catapulting him from local star to global wunderkind.

Among the jurors was Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Finnish composer and current San Francisco Symphony music director who was, at the time, music director of the L.A. Phil. “I was deeply impressed by the talent of this guy, but also, I felt he was such a good guy,” Salonen recalls. “I told him I wanted to invite him to L.A.” As he got to know Dudamel, he continues, “I became so convinced about him being my favorite person to take over in L.A. and become my successor, taking [the orchestra] in a different direction but keeping his curiosity and openness.” A mere three years later, Salonen’s wishes came true: the L.A. Phil — where Deborah Borda was then executive director — appointed Dudamel music director, effective with the 2009-10 season.

Dudamel’s personable demeanor and charismatic conducting style immediately enchanted L.A. audiences and the ensemble’s players alike — he is, after all, affectionately known as “The Dude” to both cohorts. But from the jump, his mission went far beyond the podium. “I was very young, and evidently there was a human and artistic connection with the orchestra and the administration,” he says. “But my first order of business was creating El Sistema here. That’s how YOLA began.”

YOLA is Youth Orchestra Los Angeles, the L.A. Phil’s music education program, that Dudamel created in 2007. It currently serves close to 1,700 young musicians across five sites in the city, providing them free instruments, intensive music instruction (up to 18 hours per week), academic support and leadership training. The program has inspired hundreds of versions around the world; in the United States alone, El Sistema USA serves 140 member programs, 6,000 teaching artists and 25,000 students. Dudamel also launched a mentorship program for young conductors in 2009 and now brings four each season to assist the L.A. Phil’s guest conductors.

But education and training are just part of the equation to “create identity and have people see themselves reflected in the [L.A.] Philharmonic,” Dudamel says. “Right or wrong, cultural artistic institutions are seen as elitist for many, especially those who don’t have resources. The adventure was to make of the [L.A.] Philharmonic an institution people could identify with.”

Dudamel began doing this gradually by being more experimental in his programming, adding more pop and jazz guest artists, bringing Hollywood into the mix (he has famously played multiple concerts of John Williams’ music, with Williams in attendance) and opening up the repertoire to new works and unexpected juxtapositions. A ticket buyer who might not want to hear a world-premiere commission might be lured in by Beethoven; one allergic to the idea of Beethoven might reconsider after seeing an orchestra perform with Ricky Martin.

“For me, it wasn’t only about building a good orchestra,” Dudamel says. “That already existed. But now we have one of the top orchestras in the world, respected as much for its technical level as for its proud acceptance of the repertoire and the way they perform it. This wasn’t ‘Oh, Gustavo, come in and do whatever you want.’ It was figuring out how to build it.” Dudamel had the Hollywood Bowl, Disney Hall and the orchestra. “All the elements were there,” he continues. “We just had to get the best out of them. And there’s still a lot to do.”

Gustavo Dudamel photographed September 3, 2024 at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.

Joe Pugliese

Dudamel conducted the L.A. Phil at the 2011 Latin Grammys and the 2019 Academy Awards. He led the orchestra alongside Billie Eilish and FINNEAS as part of the concert film experience Happier Than Ever: A Love Letter to Los Angeles, released on Disney+. And he performed at the 2016 Super Bowl halftime show with members of YOLA, alongside Coldplay, Beyoncé and Bruno Mars.

“His authentic, warm connection with audiences really changes how people feel when watching a concert. Audiences are so excited to see him, and there’s a buzz around him,” Noltemy says, noting that pandemic era aside, attendance and audience diversity at the L.A. Phil have increased while the average age of concertgoers has decreased. “He’s certainly not the only conductor who has increased attendance and brought diversity, but he did so in L.A., a city that is so spread out. His concerts at Disney Hall tend to be sold out.”

Those results have occurred even as Dudamel has made a huge effort to foster contemporary composition (typically not an old-school orchestra subscriber’s favorite programming), commissioning music from composers around the world. During his tenure at the L.A. Phil, the orchestra has premiered “at least 300 new works” written specifically for the ensemble, he says, including many from Latin America.

“Latin American repertoire has to stop being [perceived as] exotic,” he says. “It’s not about ‘Wow, we’re playing Latin American music!’ No. It’s the fair thing to do. And the only way to include it in the repertoire is playing it but at the level it deserves, making it part of the regular repertoire of any orchestra.” Case in point: Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz, a Dudamel mentee who was just named Carnegie Hall’s composer-in-residence for the coming season. In July, Platoon released her first full album of orchestral works, Revolución Diamantina (performed by the L.A. Phil and conducted by Dudamel), which is being submitted for Grammy consideration.

Just how much of his approach with the L.A. Phil Dudamel will be able to replicate in New York remains to be seen; as he says, he has yet to formally arrive and experience the orchestra. But in recent months, he has been working with both orchestras to forge a connection between the two.

In April, when Dudamel conducted the N.Y. Phil’s Spring Gala at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall, he featured rapper Common, former New York Yankee and classically trained guitarist Bernie Williams and student musicians from several New York music schools, performing a program that also included classical works by Villa-Lobos and Strauss, as well as a premiere commissioned by the N.Y. Phil and Bravo! Vail Music Festival.

It was the kind of bold, cross-genre programming that Dudamel delights in doing in L.A. and clearly wants to emphasize in New York. “It was something completely new and wonderful. For me, that’s the kind of thing that makes the music transcend beyond the sometimes strict academic and intellectual isolation that classical music represents,” he says. “We can develop a lot in terms of repertoire and go beyond Lincoln Center and connect more with the entire community.”

Gustavo Dudamel photographed September 3, 2024 at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.

Joe Pugliese

The N.Y. Phil, for example, is known for its massive annual free outdoor concert on the Great Lawn in Central Park, which is always attended by no less than 50,000, and it also performs in all five boroughs during its annual Concerts in the Parks. But the L.A. Phil has the Hollywood Bowl, an outdoor venue that seats 18,000 and is the orchestra’s home for the entire summer. It’s a big difference that Dudamel would like to somehow bridge.

He also joins the N.Y. Phil after the 2022 reopening of Geffen Hall following a $550 million renovation that drastically improved its acoustics. He says the new venue did not factor into his decision to go to New York, “but it was very important, especially for the orchestra. It’s been a plus to elevate the morale. Now the orchestra is in the process of building its sound with the ‘instrument’ [that is the new hall].” Optimism is also high following the Sept. 20 finalization of a new labor contract that ensured 30% raises for the orchestra’s musicians over the next three years, bringing their base salary to $205,000.

Dudamel is also taking the reins of an institution that lately has had its share of highly publicized troubles. After just one year on the job, N.Y. Phil CEO Gary Ginstling stepped down in July amid rising tensions with the orchestra’s board, according to a New York Times report. And the orchestra’s public image has been tarnished after reports earlier this year resurfaced a 2010 sexual misconduct charge made against two of its musicians. Although charges were never filed against the two men, the controversy led to the musicians being put on leave; they then sued the N.Y. Phil for doing so.

As Dudamel is not yet officially the N.Y. Phil’s music director (for the 2025-26 season, he is music director designate), he won’t comment on administrative matters other than to acknowledge that “those are problems that need to be resolved.” And although the administration of the orchestra ultimately is not his purview, “Obviously the morale of the orchestra is my responsibility, and you have to keep that morale high, taking the best decisions and advocating for justice for everyone,” he says. “That’s essential. We’re not isolated from what happens around us.”

Whatever may have occurred before his tenure begins, Dudamel is without a doubt joining an orchestra that respects him as a conductor, whose musicians have a history and rapport with him. “There was an undeniable spontaneous connection between our musicians and Gustavo, so much so that he was literally their only choice to be our next music director,” Borda says. “Selling tickets is important, but we believe this is best accomplished when you have the right artistic leader.”

Dudamel is acutely aware of the expectations now surrounding him. “It’s a challenge, but life without challenge… it’s nothing!” he says with some relish. “But I’m not a savior here. I have nothing to save. What we have to do is build, and that’s not just up to me. We have a great team.” And after all, he’s Dudamel — and by now, he understands it comes with the territory.

“People want you to scream what they scream, but no. To me, change isn’t about screaming but about building things that last, as I learned from Maestro Abreu,” he says. “I sincerely believe artists should be symbols of unity … They must guarantee that cathartic, unifying space we all need — not just here or in Venezuela, but everywhere.”

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This fall, for example, Dudamel will lead the L.A. Phil in Mendelssohn’s music from A Midsummer’s Night Dream with his wife, Spanish actress María Valverde, providing narration — music by a German composer, written for the work of a British playwright who derived it from a Nordic story, now narrated in Spanish, conducted by a Venezuelan and performed by an American orchestra. Plus, the evening will feature the premiere of Ortiz’s new cello concerto.

“It’s the kind of thing you don’t even remark upon because it feels natural. But it’s a true reflection of diversity,” Dudamel says. “When you see all these elements come together, you realize, ‘Wow, this is powerful.’ ”

He speaks about this blend of so many seemingly disparate elements as if it’s destiny, or magic. But a moment like that — much like a career such as Dudamel’s — doesn’t occur by happenstance or without purpose.

“One thing about Gustavo I think needs to be said is that for someone who had a lot of success from very early on, he’s remarkable in that he never lost his center,” Salonen says. “He has never lost his ideals. He believes in music as a social cause, and he believes in music and the arts as a very central thing in keeping the fabric of society strong. And despite all the success and fame, he’s still the same guy I met all those years ago.”

This story appears in the Oct. 5, 2024, issue of Billboard.

For Ezra Collective, things rarely go according to plan. At the start of “Ajala,” the vibrant highlight of new album Dance, No One’s Watching, drummer Femi Koleoso jokingly calls out a crowd who didn’t quite get the memo to clap along. When the London jazz group collected the U.K.’s Mercury Prize in 2023 for their album Where I’m Meant To Be, they collapsed in a heap on the ground, shocked at the news. 

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Therein lies the appeal of their group’s emotionally charged hits: it’s OK to be caught off-guard. “The dancefloor can be a reflection of life,” Koleoso tells Billboard just hours ahead of its release on Partisan Records last week (Sept. 27). “Life’s not meant to be perfect, it’s meant to be honest. You can’t have a perfect life because so much of life is not in your control, but you can be honest about every situation you go through and try and weather the storm in a genuine way… that’s what all of the record is about.”

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Long a leader in the U.K.’s storied jazz scene, their new album looks set to take them to new heights. Dance, No One’s Watching could see the band’s first top 10 entry on the U.K.’s Official Album Chart. Later this year, they head to Wembley Arena for their biggest ever show and one of the jazz scene’s largest headline shows in the capital.

Made up of Koleoso, brother TJ (bass), Joe Armon-Jones (synths), Ife Ogunjobi (trumpet) and James Mollison (saxophone), Ezra Collective fuse elements of jazz, highlife, Afrobeats, hip-hop and more in their varied songs. Since meeting at a youth club focused on musicianship and jazz in their native London, the band have released three albums and collaborated with Loyle Carner, Jorja Smith, Kojey Radical and rising U.K. pop star Olivia Dean (the latter guests on new song “No One’s Watching Me”).

They’re one of many venerable independent jazz acts in the U.K. releasing consistently and meeting growing audiences. Last month saxophonist Nubya Garcia released her second studio album Odyssey, as did Nala Sinephro with the gorgeous Endlessness. It’s a scene with Ezra Collective at its core, and one that continues to flourish.

Koleoso discusses his contemporaries, why he wants to retain the giddiness of releasing music and how The Beatles and Fela Kuti inspired their new record.

How are you feeling about the release of the album? 

Just so happy. It’s the best part of the journey. My technique is that once the masters approved I won’t listen to the album again until it’s released. Honestly, I’ve forgotten most of it! So when midnight strikes I will open Spotify and listen to it like everyone else. And that helps my excitement levels match everyone else’s.

We’ve been doing it a little while now – 12 years as Ezra Collective – and I’ve been playing music for most of my life, but I’ve still got quite a juvenile innocence and get bare excited when I see my name on Spotify. Once you lose that excitement you’re done, you know?

How does this record compare to what you’ve done previously?

The most recent record [2022’s] Where I’m Meant To Be was very much a documentation of our lockdown and Dance, No One’s Watching is the documentation of being let out again. It was looking at the dancefloor on the Ezra Collective world tour and then writing a narrative for them. So the feeling was a lot of freedom and excitement to be outside again.

What were those gigs like for you?

It was wonderful. You could feel the anticipation of people turning up to Ezra Collective gigs like “I am here to have a good night.” I could feel it. People would come with a smile on their face and a pair of leggings and beat-up trainers, and I could look at them like “you’re here to dance.” People in baggy t-shirts and a pair of jeans and I’m thinking, “Yeah, you didn’t even bring a jacket and it’s November, you are here to dance.” I’m so grateful for that and we ended up mirroring that energy up on stage. 

How did you end up recording the album at Abbey Road Studios?

We felt if we were going to make a record documenting the dancefloor the only way for it to sound authentic was for it to have people dancing while we made it, and we needed a studio that had the space. It was never meant to be a live album but it was meant to feel live but sound like a studio record. So we needed people in the room dancing and vibing, but at the same time we needed the equipment to record every instrument’s detail at the highest level and that was the place where it was made the most possible.

That must have provided a unique challenge…

Yeah, but if you look back, other people have also done that. The Beatles did something similar with when they recorded Let It Be; they played the gig on the rooftop, and the recording of some songs from the roof concert made the album. It was the same with J.J.D. by Fela Kuti – it just sounds both deep in quality, but occasionally you hear someone scream. We were taking big inspirations from those types of albums in how we approached it. I’m really proud of how it’s come and you can feel the live elements in the album, but it seems on the sound system like a studio record.

It’s such a beautiful space, but what’s important about Abbey Road is that it’s not reserved to those who can afford it. It has to be for the music of today. You need Nia Archives, Loyle Carner and Dave and the band that are still in sixth form that you’ve never heard of. It needs to be a space that musicians aren’t intimidated by as that’s where you’ll get the best art.

Our first ever EP Chapter 7 was actually recorded at Abbey Road, but we only got in because an engineer snuck us in in the middle of the night and told us “you’ve got one hour before they kick you out” and we just played the songs once and that was it. This time it was nice to have permission to be there.

You won the Mercury Prize in 2023, a shock evident to yourself and the band. What was that moment like?

It was a crazy moment. It couldn’t have gone better. Because we were just excited about the nomination! But we’d honestly not even thought about winning. I told everyone to compose themselves and when they say someone else’s name, don’t be all upset about it. So when they said our name it was pure shock. That’s why we ended up on the floor. It was an unexpectedly beautiful moment. But it was a moment and then it’s back to normal the next day, you know? Which I’m grateful for.

The name Ezra Collective was a bit more recognizable after that moment. I think most of the U.K. music industry was aware of the band if they weren’t beforehand, but in terms of the band, I feel exactly the same as I did when we were in school and just started out. It was just me and my friends making songs and I was just grateful for every ounce of attention they got.

Olivia Dean provides vocals on the wonderful “No One’s Watching Me.” What was that session like?

She is so beautifully talented. It’s the perfect kind of session. She came into the studio and we just spoke about life, about how she was, and I asked her to tell me a bit about what dancing meant to her, and she was attracted to the idea that no one’s watching so just move and get on with it. So we discussed that and she was in the booth on her own with a pen and paper and after a couple of hours she said she was ready to record. 

I pressed the red button and this wonderful sound and most beautiful voice came out of her. And I remember instantly after she finished I was like “yeah, you can go home.” Like she didn’t need to add anything, it was so perfect. I think she was shocked at how quickly and easily she wanted to move on but I knew that perfection had been captured immediately.

We recently spoke to Gilles Peterson who featured you on the compilation We Out Here in 2018 alongside your contemporaries like Nubya Garcia, Moses Boyd and more. He discussed the fact that your scene knows the value of the community you’re creating that an outsider cannot replicate. Does that ring true to you?

Yeah that rings true. The word community and collective is more important than the name. It’s about how you’re investing into the community and people around you. That’s what the Ezra is all about, and that’s why I’m so proud to be considered a part of the U.K. jazz scene because it’s such a beautiful community.

Later this year you’re headlining Wembley Arena. How are you feeling about it?

I feel great! What a crazy thing to be doing, but I couldn’t be more excited. The game plan is the same it’s always been. There’s not an ounce of nerves. I’m sure on the day there might be a wobble but right now I’m feeling really great. 

Was there any hesitation in leveling up to a venue like that?

Nah… we knew we’d be fine [laughs]. The moment we played outside of a pub full of my friends and my family and there were people we didn’t know, that was when we knew we could do anything. It’s the same feeling when we did Ronnie Scott’s, Islington Assembly Hall, the Roundhouse, Hammersmith Apollo, Royal Albert Hall, it’s all the same feeling: it’s like, “Wow, if we can do that then we can do this.” So that’s the energy we’re walking into it with.