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In 2023, the producer Kevin Saunderson wandered into the home studio he shares with his son Dantiez in Detroit. What he heard blasting from the speakers seemed familiar. “I said, ‘Man, that sounds like me!’” Saunderson recalls with a laugh. “[Dantiez] used some of my bass sounds.”
As one of three men widely credited with inventing Detroit techno, Saunderson is used to encountering artists who have borrowed scraps of his style. But this time, he got a chance to put his own twist on another producer’s unwitting homage.
“We’re always around each other,” Saunderson says of Dantiez. “We’ve already been doing Inner City [another group] together, and he sounds like me in some ways. So I thought, why don’t we just do an album together?” That release, e-Dancer, which takes its name from one of Saunderson’s projects in the 1990s, is due out June 13.
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The two men spoke to Billboard over Zoom from their Detroit home: Dantiez, laid back, lounged on a couch in one part of the house, while the elder Saunderson spoke passionately in another room about the genre he helped create. He has embraced the role of elder statesman and techno historian in recent years, doing frequent interviews about the style’s origins and even guest editing a series for Mixmag. “I’ve been in it since the beginning — I’m the beginning of this movement in many ways,” he explains. “I’ve seen a lot, and I want to be a driving force trying to educate people to our music.”
Over more than three decades, Saunderson’s discography has ranged from vocal dance-pop classics — Inner City’s “Good Life” and “Big Fun” — to the scrappy, scraping techno on e-Dancer’s canonical album, 1998’s Heavenly. “If you opened the techno songbook, Kevin Saunderson may have the most diverse — and in some ways, most prescient — discography of all,” Sam Valenti, founder of the label Ghostly International, wrote in January. “In any other country,” Valenti added, “he’d be given every tribute and lifetime achievement award imaginable.”
The producer DJ Spinna put it more simply in a recent Instagram comment: “Just Want Another Chance” — the song in which Saunderson invented the “Reese Bass” sound that he heard Dantiez using in the studio — “changed my damn life!!”
e-Dancer started as a retort to a dance world that often polices its borders, wary of the potential for dilution that accompanies mainstream success. Inner City’s first two singles traveled far beyond Detroit and even the wider, if still insular, world of dance-heads, becoming top 10 hits in the U.K. (“Good Life” also cracked the Hot 100 in the U.S.) “I had all that success with Inner City, and all the Detroit guys were joking with me — ‘You’re commercial, now we can’t play “Big Fun” in the club,’” Saunderson explains. “It ain’t underground enough.” e-Dancer was meant to demonstrate that Saunderson still “had that other sound” in his arsenal.
He put out the first e-Dancer single in 1991; the title was “Speaker Punishing,” suggesting this wasn’t easygoing ear-candy. The follow-up, “Pump the Move,” put harsh chattering electronics front and center — softening them slightly with a cushy synthesizer line — while the B-side was squirrely and agitated, with the strafing energy of acid house. Heavenly collected tracks from these singles along with more songs from the mid-1990s.
In the last decade, Saunderson has decided to revisit some of his early successes. Nearly 20 years after Heavenly, he gently retouched the songs on Heavenly Revisited (2017), and followed that with Re:Generate (2021), which gave producers like Adam Beyer, Robert Hood and Special Request a chance to rework tracks from the original album. In 2019, Saunderson also relaunched Inner City, enlisting Dantiez — now a dance music producer in his own right — to join the new version of the group with Steffanie Christi’an handling vocals in place of original singer Paris Grey.
Father and son have established a working routine that Saunderson summarizes as “he starts it, and usually I finish it.” “Even though we live together,” adds Dantiez, who also puts out music on his own and with his brother, “it’s hard to actually get us both in the studio at the same time.”
Between start and finish, though, tracks undergo endless tweaks. “I usually go through six, seven, eight versions of a song before it even makes it to [Saunderson],” Dantiez says.
And even with the album due out shortly, they continue to iterate. The early advance copy sent to Billboard had a hard-driving, string-soaked vocal cut titled “Symbolical,” but Saunderson said he would likely pull out the drums before e-Dancer came out, making the song “real ambient, just the violin and her voice.” A previous version of the album-closer “Escape” — which pairs revving synths with a mean, ankle-level bass line — featured a male vocal, but it was later removed.
The Dantiez track that reminded Saunderson of his own work is “Emotions,” the second song on e-Dancer, which lays out the album’s throughline: A bass, frayed around the edges, that skulks and snarls under many of the tracks, seemingly spoiling for a fight. That buzzsaw sound reappears on “Dancer,” with wordless vocals wafting above it, “Frequency,” where the synths stutter and screech like rusted car brakes, and “Reece Punch,” which pairs it with pounding four-note piano runs. Dantiez once said that the key to a killer club track is “a big kick and a great bassline,” and he stayed true to that principle on e-Dancer.
Since Saunderson’s output has been so “prescient,” as Valenti put it, he remains at ease even as techno continues to evolve around him. The style has gone through “so many different phases,” Saunderson says. “Tech house became very popular. I was always in between [genres] — I could do something very techno or really house. I never said I was doing tech house at the time, but it’s really an in-between version of house and techno [like what I was doing].”
Lately Saunderson has noticed that in the U.S., “the trend seems like everything has gotten faster.” It can be “a little complicated” following up a set from a DJ who is racing along at 150 beats per minute, but he’s seen that before too — as Saunderson posted on Instagram recently, he’s been “playing hard ‘n fast long before TikTok techno was a thing.” When playing out new tracks in his sets, he has found that “Melodica,” “Emotions,” “Dancer,” and “Frequency” have elicited the strongest response from club goers.
Following the release of e-Dancer, Saunderson and Dantiez will take their act on the road, performing at Loveland and MUTEK Montreal. They also have a party in Detroit, The Hood Needs House, that they are hoping to bring to other cities. On top of that, Saunderson maintains a busy solo DJ schedule, including a recent party at Detroit’s Movement Festival. At the event, he described recently as “techno Christmas,” he celebrated his KMS Records label and also featured his two sons — Damarii along with Dantiez — in the lineup.
“I find a way to play a few classics each set so people get a good education,” Saunderson says. “Some people may not know who the hell I am. But they hear me, and they get kind of blown away.”
Gen Hoshino sat down with Billboard Japan for its Monthly Feature series focusing on currently notable artists and works, to chat about his first new album in six years simply entitled Gen.
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The new project, released May 14, is the Japanese superstar’s first full-length studio set since his previous smash hit album POP VIRUS. It contains 16 tracks including singles “Fushigi,” which topped the Billboard Japan Hot 100, “Create” (Japanese title: “Souzou”), the 35th anniversary theme song for Super Mario Brothers, and “Comedy” (“Kigeki”), the ending theme song for the anime SPYxFAMILY. Gen also includes a variety of other songs such as “Mad Hope (feat. Louis Cole, Sam Gendel, Sam Wilkes),” “2 (feat. Lee Youngji),” “Memories (feat. UMI, Camilo),” and “Eden (feat. Cordae, DJ Jazzy Jeff),” with guest artists from various countries.
The album is clearly different from Hoshino’s previous works in terms of sound design and songwriting. It reflects the changes in his production style that began during the pandemic, and his attempts to “sing about himself,” something he had previously tried to avoid doing. The 44-year-old singer-songwriter is set to break new ground in pop music with his latest project.
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Gen debuted at No. 2 on Billboard Japan’s Hot Albums chart and No. 1 on the Download Albums chart on the tallies released May 21. Hoshino broke down the production of his latest project and shared his current mindset after his six-and-a-half-year journey in this new interview.
Gen shows the various changes that you’ve gone through since your last album POP VIRUS, and at the same time, it’s a work that opens up a new phase in pop music. I imagine the starting point was “Create.” What’s your take on the process from your previous album to this one?
Gen Hoshino: The EP Same Thing that I released after POP VIRUS was a project that was like a “journey to find out about the outside of myself.” Until then, I’d basically been creating music on my own, but I wanted to know how other people were doing it and also to update my world. After going through that, I started writing “Create” and the pandemic struck. During the time I couldn’t leave the house, I taught myself how to produce music on a digital audio workstation (DAW) from scratch, and made a song called “Oriai” to try it out. I thought, “I can handle this” (DAW production), so I produced “Create” again from scratch. Looking back, I think that was the starting point for this album.
I used to start out (writing songs) on my guitar, but with a DAW, I can use various sound sources and punch in the drums, bass, keyboards and stuff to create my own world by myself. When I first started using it, I was like, “OK, this is my thing” and was immediately hooked. From the very beginning, it felt like, “This is totally different from the way I used to make music.” My skills improved from there and the things I could do kept increasing.
It’s great that you were having so much fun during the production.
It was like that in terms of creativity, and there was also that innocence towards music at the center. It kind of felt like how it was when I started playing the guitar in junior high. I’ve been in the business for 25 years now, and in the 20th year of my career, I got a new toy. I can maintain objectivity while doing the actual work feeling like a junior high school student. That was an experience I’d never had before.
The album includes tracks featuring Louis Cole, Sam Gendel, Sam Wilkes, Lee Youngji, UMI, Camilo, Cordae, and DJ Jazzy Jeff.
Before, I used to write a song on my guitar, write the score, have the band members get together, discuss it and record it, and that was it. This time it was different in that I started by creating the basic track on my own on a DAW, and if I thought that a part would work better recorded live, I had a musician come in and record it, then put that back on my computer and edited it again.
For example, for “Mad Hope,” I handed the beat that I’d made to Louis and said to him, “You can play it this way, or you can arrange it,” and he sent me the data of him playing it the same and the version where he’d arranged it. I then decided where and how I could use those various takes and edited them. After that, I changed the structure of the song to make it longer, so I visited Louis at his home and recorded some more. It was like I was making everything from beginning to end always at my fingertips.
So the flow was like, as I worked on the songs, the faces of the people I wanted to collaborate with would come to mind and I’d make an offer. “2” was like that, too. After I started writing the song, I thought, “It’d be great if Youngji rapped on this,” so I asked her to do it.
She covered your song “Koi” at her Japan show last year. Did you have any previous contact with her?
I liked her music and listened to it a lot, and have also seen the variety shows she appeared on. She debuted as a rapper while in high school and is definitely “current” in terms of sound and skill, but I sometimes detect a whiff of female rappers from the ’90s in her and she has various sides to her which fascinated me. Then a fan of hers sent an email to my radio show telling me that Youngji had covered “Koi” at a concert in Japan and said she was a fan of mine. We followed each other on Instagram after that.
You both wrote the lyrics for “2 (feat. Lee Youngji).” What kind of themes did you share?
It was about two people being invincible when they get together, and also about making it a song of empowerment for each of us. I already had my lyrics, and when I told her the theme, she came back with some great bars. She also offered to rap in Japanese, and her Japanese verses were really great, too. UMI and Camilo, who worked with me on “Memories,” as well as Cordae and Jazzy Jeff, who took part in “Eden,” really understood what I was trying to do, and they each interpreted it through their own filters and reflected that into their music. I was thinking how fortunate I was while working on the project that I could interact with them in such an organic way.
So you didn’t know which direction the sounds would end up?
Right. But there was one thing I wanted to do sound-wise. Each song contains a variety of sounds. There are unadjusted sounds recorded with very cheap microphones, clean sounds recorded in a good studio, synth sounds from computers and those from real synthesizers. The theme of the sound production is that all of these sounds, clean and messy, old and new, are all equivalent and they can all exist at the same time. You can hear the sound of a guitar with noise mixed in that I played at home and the clear sound of a guitar that Ryo-chan (Ryosuke Nagaoka) played in the studio in a single track, or sounds from 2025 and sounds made in 2021 existing at the same time. Past and present, clean and messy are next to each other. It’s an album where I assembled various sounds according to my senses.
You’re currently in the midst of your Gen Hoshino presents MAD HOPE domestic tour, and will be embarking on your Asia trek from August.
It’s been a while, six years, since I’ve been on tour. It’s called MAD HOPE, so I guess it’s like a concept tour, and since I haven’t toured in a while, I want to include both my latest songs and the old ones. Live shows belong to the audience is how I basically see it, so I hope everyone enjoys it the way they like. Heading home afterwards saying, “That was fun,” “That was good” is great, isn’t it? I prefer making the music, so when it comes to performing live, I always just feel so grateful. I’ve always felt that the best thing is for everyone to enjoy the show, and that feeling has never changed.
–This interview by Tomoyuki Mori first appeared on Billboard Japan
HANA dropped a new song called “Burning Flower” on Monday (June 9), and shared the accompanying music video on YouTube the same day. “Burning Flower” is a fiery, danceable number with an addictive “acchi” (it’s hot) interjection repeated in the chorus. The choreography is by the members themselves, and their dynamic dance performance set to […]
Adam22 makes no secret about embracing the cuckold lifestyle, which is when a person watches their partner do the nasty with someone else, and he’s capitalizing on the kink. In a new announcement video, Adam22 is partnering with Swedish furniture company QUQ Chairs to release a line of exclusive seating arrangements made for those who want to be close to the action.
In a video posted to his social media pages, Adam22 explains the partnership with QUQ Chairs, which says it supplies furniture to several fictitious hotel chains, including Motel 5, Super 7, Travel Inn, Econo Inn, and Holiday Lodge Express, all in a bid to illustrate what the chairs are made for.
“I’m the latest Brand Ambassador for iconic Swedish furniture designer QUQchairs.com,” Adam22 says. “I couldn’t be more excited about this partnership for something I’m so deeply passionate about!”
“I am excited to create the most ergonomic chairs for the bedroom,” he added. “As the spectator, you have the perfect view at all times….The chair allows the perfect amount of freedom for your wrists and hands.”
Yikes. Or congratulations? Sorry, we don’t mean to kink shame. Do you. Or watch someone do her. Or him. Whatever your flavor, right?
Adam22 made himself the face of the lifestyle after releasing and directing a video of his wife, Lena The Plug, getting down with fellow adult film performer Jason Luv.
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A Los Angeles judge says hip-hop powerhouse Top Dawg Entertainment must face allegations that the company “doxxed” two women after they sued the record label for sexual harassment and assault.
In a ruling Wednesday, Judge Michael E. Whitaker refused to dismiss allegations that the company broke California state law by revealing the identities of the two accusers in a response statement to the media that called the lawsuit a “shakedown.”
Top Dawg had argued that the statement was fair game because lawyers for the two women spoke the media first, but the judge was unpersuaded.
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“Defendants argue that it was plaintiffs who initiated the inflammatory press release and it was necessary for them to publicly respond and correct the record,” the judge writes. “Plaintiff’s correctly point out, however, that publicly revealing their true identities was not a necessary part of correcting the narrative in the public record.”
In a statement to Billboard on Thursday, Top Dawg’s attorney Allison Hart vowed to challenge the ruling further: “We have the utmost respect for the court, but believe that yesterday’s decision that our clients were not allowed to disclose the plaintiffs’ names was in error, and we intend to immediately appeal and continue vigorously defending against plaintiffs’ bogus claims.”
An attorney for the plaintiffs, meanwhile, praised the court’s decision: “Our clients believe the Court’s ruling speaks for itself, and are gratified the case has been set for trial,” said Shounak S. Dharap. “They look forward to presenting all the evidence to a jury of their peers.”
Using the pseudonyms Jane Doe and Jane Roe, the two women filed a lawsuit in December against Top Dawg, a top hip-hop label best known for helping to launch the careers of Kendrick Lamar, SZA and Doechii. Doe, a public relations staffer, says she faced “inappropriate workplace behavior,” including harassment and assault, as well as unpaid wages; Roe, a friend of a Top Dawg artist, says she was “sexually harassed twice by TDE employees.”
In addition to the company itself, the lawsuit names execs Anthony “Moosa” Tiffith Jr. and Brandon Tiffith, the sons of TDE founder Anthony “Top” Tiffith, Sr., as defendants.
“TDE’s leadership knew about these instances of sexual abuse, as well as the failure to properly compensate Ms. Doe, yet took no action to prevent further violations, discipline the individuals involved, or offer supportive services to plaintiffs,” their lawyers wrote.
Two months after the case was filed, lawyers for the women issued a press release publicizing their allegations. During the resulting media coverage, Top Dawg issued a strongly-worded denial, claiming the allegations were “fabricated” and filed by women seeking “ten minutes of fame.” Along with those denunciations, it also included the women’s real names, which had been unknown at the time.
A week later, attorneys for the accusers added a new claim to their lawsuit, alleging that the press statement had illegally released the womens’ names. They claimed the move violated a recently-enacted California statute that allows people to sue when they’ve been doxxed – a modern term for maliciously releasing someone’s identity on the internet.
Seeking to dismiss that new accusation, Top Dawg argued that the two women never had a legal right to sue under the “Jane” pseudonyms in the first place. But Judge Whitaker suggests that call had not been Top Dawg’s to make on its own.
“The court need not decide whether plaintiffs’ would ultimately have been able to proceed under pseudonyms or would have been ordered to proceed under their real names,” the judge says. “The court and parties were deprived of that answer when defendants revealed Plaintis’ true names in a public news article, mooting the issue. Thus, at the time the statement was made, it revealed plaintiffs’ true identities, which were not previously publicly known.”
Following the ruling, the entire case against Top Dawg remains pending. The defendants might now ask the judge to dismiss the original allegations of sexual harassment and assault; if such a motion were denied, the case would move forward into discovery and toward an eventual trial.
One of the last projects Liam Payne worked on was a new Netflix show called Building the Band, which finally has a release date eight months after the singer’s tragic death. The streaming service shared the premiere date along with a first-look video on Wednesday (June 11), revealing that the series will drop July 9. […]
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During his half a decade stint as the head coach of the New York Knicks, Tom Thibodeau earned himself a Coach Of The Year award and led the team to four playoff appearances in his five-year tenure and though fans were mostly relieved to learn the news that Thibodeau had been fired by the team’s owner, James Dolan, Thibs doesn’t seem to harbor any ill will towards the franchise, the fans or the city (unlike a Julius Randle).
A week after the Knicks fired Tom Thibodeau following the team’s elimination at the hands of the Indiana Pacers, Tom Thibodeau took out a full-page black-and-white ad in The New York Times to thank the Knicks and the city of New York for helping him live out his “dream job” as he was able to coach the Knicks back to relevancy following decades of pain, scandals and disappointment for fans of the franchise.
“I am grateful that dream became a reality. Thank you to our players and coaching staff who gave everything they had, and to everyone who makes the franchise special. I am proud of everything we accomplished together, including four playoff appearances and this year’s run to the Eastern Conference finals – our first in 25 years.”
Unfortunately for the team, it seemed like Thibs was outreached by Indiana Pacers head coach, Rick Carlisle who seemed to have Thibs number at every twist and turn throughout the series.
With rumors swirling that Thibs was fired by the team after players were interviewed about the situation, it didn’t help that one of the teams top players allegedly said he couldn’t continue to play for Thibodeau next season. Though no names have been leaked as to who might’ve made such a statement, people assume it was one of the Knicks starting five players as Thibs never plays his bench anyway. Another reason many fans wanted Thibs to be relieved of his head coaching duties.
Regardless of how you may have felt about Tom Thibodeau, the man did make the Knicks winners again and helped bring back excitement to the Mecca of Basketball that hadn’t been felt in decades.
Thanks, Thibs.
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Raphael Saadiq, who once worked alongside former En Vogue singer Dawn Robinson in Lucy Pearl, had choice words for his former bandmate. During a performance in his hometown of Oakland, Raphael Saadiq shot down claims that Robinson made about living inside her car and made other jabs as well.
As reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, Raphael Saadiq closed out his “No Bandwidth: One Man, One Night, Three Decades of Hits” tour at the Fox Theater. Employing a no-phones policy, Saadiq used this as a means to let off some inner thoughts regarding Robinson.
Saadiq compared Robinson to Lauryn Hill, addressing the singer’s widely reported issues with her Fugees bandmates before bluntly stating, “Actually, I’d rather have Lauryn,” and he wasn’t done there.
Singing the hook for Lucy Pearl’s hit single “Dance Tonight,” Saadiq took a larger swipe by singing the song’s familiar hook and saying, “See! I didn’t need her. I could’ve sang it myself,” and right before he stopped monologuing and ended this chat with the crowd adding, “That sh*T about her living in her car is not real.”
The outlet reports that Saadiq frequently had to quiet the raucous crowd, and was even flashed by a woman in attendance while another kept showering her affections towards the singer. He also took some time to share stories about his other past collaborators, but slickly used the storytelling moment to hush a loud patron.
“What makes me a great collaborator is that I’m a great listener,” Saadiq said, while addressing the patron, “Not like you. I. Am. A. Listener.”
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K-pop quintet LE SSERAFIM announced the dates for their first-ever North American tour on Thursday (June 12). The eight-date outing by KIM CHAEWON, SAKURA, HUH YUNJIN, KAZUHA, and HONG EUNCHAE as part of their Easy Crazy Hot world tour is slated to kick off on Sept. 3 with a show at Newark, N.J.’s Prudential Center and feature stops in Chicago, Grand Prairie, TX, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Las Vegas before winding down with a Sept. 23 show at Arena CDMX in Mexico City.
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Tickets for the North American shows will go on sale starting with the FEARNOT membership pre-sale, which kicks off on June 24 at 4 p.m. KST, followed by a general on-sale on June 25 at 4 p.m. KST; click here for full pre-sale information.
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The North American swing will be the capper to the group’s world tour in support of their 2024 EP trilogy, Easy, Crazy and Hot, all three of which debuted in the top 10 on the Billboard 200 album chart. According to a release, the run of shows that kicked off in March in South Korea, “weaves together the unique concepts and narratives from each album into one spectacular experience.”
During a string of shows in Japan, the group shared a loving message with their FEARNOT fan group, saying, “Let’s make this moment we share hot, fun, and unforgettable!” Before arriving in North America, LE SSERAFIM will wrap up shows in Japan before moving on to Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore.
Along with the new tour dates, the group is gearing up to release an English-language version of their first original Japanese single, “DIFFERENT” (English Ver.) on Friday (June 13). Check out a teaser of the song here.
Check out the dates for the 2025 LE SSERAFIM Easy Crazy Hot North American tour below.
Sept. 3: Newark, NJ @ Prudential Center
Sept. 5: Chicago, IL @ Wintrust Arena
Sept. 8: Grand Prairie, TX @ Texas Trust CU Center
Sept. 12: Inglewood, CA @ Kia Forum
Sept. 14: San Francisco, CA @ The Theater at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium
Sept. 17: Seattle, WA @ Climate Pledge Arena
Sept. 20: Las Vegas, NV @ Michelob ULTRA Arena
Sept. 23: Mexico City, MX @ Arena CDMX
Jeezy has said he’s finally at a peaceful place in his life following his tumultuous divorce from Jeannie Mai last year. Sitting down with The Breakfast Club on Wednesday (June 11), Jeezy said despite the bitter divorce he was embroiled in for most of 2024, his 2025 has been filled with nothing but peace.
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“Peace, yeah, peace man,” Jeezy said when asked where things currently stand with Mai. “I’m all about understanding. I’m all about what’s best for everybody, the greater good. I’m just telling you, I tell myself this every day: ‘Man, this is amazing.’ I don’t got no enemies, I don’t go no issues. I don’t want no enemies, I don’t want no issues. I just want peace, I just want joy, I just want freedom. I love my freedom, I love it.”
He went on to say that he can move “independently” now, including coming to The Breakfast Club whenever he wants.
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“I ain’t gotta check in, I ain’t gotta talk to no label, I don’t gotta do nothing,” Jeezy continued. “Shout out to Def Jam, love y’all. But it’s just like, freedom and ownership is everything, especially when you’re talking art, you’re talking culture, you’re talking your mind. I work hard my whole life, this is the season of me. I’m putting myself first at all costs. My peace is everything.”
The former couple’s divorce was finalized last summer and was anything but amicable. Allegations of domestic abuse were hurled around last April, which Jeezy denied.
“It’s disheartening to witness the manipulation and deceit at play and at this time my main concern is being an active father to our daughter as I continue to fight for court mandated joint custody,” Jeezy wrote on social media at the time about the child the pair share, three-year-old Monaco Mai Jenkins. “Rest assured, the truth will prevail through the proper legal channels.”
