umru

Hey! I’m currently in London in anticipation of my show at Colour Factory. I’m not sure I love the nickname “hyperpop royalty”, that term has always been a bit of a controversial descriptor, at least it used to be quite contentious — in my mind, the majority of pop music has always been experimental anyway. I’m based in New York but hold both American and Estonian citizenship and have been digging into the Tallinn music scene a lot more recently. Up until a few years ago, I was mainly known on the Internet and not as a DJ, people used to refer to my music as headphone music, I came from the Soundcloud Scene and an era of online sets on Minecraft and Zoom. I’m not known for playing strictly genre sets and my main concern has always been: what’s the craziest thing I can do? By now, I have some kind of distinct brand and style. I’m always mixing into the next track and I want to make sure there’s something distinct happening during my sets, making them as danceable as possible.

My last EP, Comfort Noise, was made during Covid and released through PC Music, which has since stopped releasing new stuff. Looking back, the sound was a lot more introspective and slow, a lot less high speed. My main focus was also producing for other artists, especially with a focus on pop song structures. Most recently, which came out a couple of weeks ago, is Cortisa Star’s debut album, who’s an incredible rapper from Baltimore. I worked on about seven of the nine songs on it and co-executively produced it. She blew up recording herself on a ChromeBook and it all feels super new and fresh. Since 2022, I’ve spent most of my time DJing and have become known for mixing genres together and coming up with the craziest blend or transition. I’ve been paying a lot more attention to the groove, all while making the set as enjoyable as possible. I’ll mix a half-time rap song over a double-time dance sound and I like to think that I do it in an intentional way. It’s always exciting for me when I find a combination of something that works when it shouldn’t, I try to chase those moments and it’s also the very definition of hyperpop, grabbing elements that shouldn’t work but do. No genre is off limits!

It’s funny because I just played a sold out show at Le Botanique in Brussels for 800 people and then flew straight to Sofia in Bulgaria where I performed in front of a crowd of 100. To be honest, my favourite experiences are when you’re performing right in front of people, maybe in a more intimate setting. I always try to tailor my sets to a specific city or event. In terms of curating them, I spend a lot of time on visuals and on the posters for the event and still use my signature head-torch which I clip onto my head. I found one in a thrift store back home. The very first time I ever saw a DJ do something like that was at an afterparty for the iconic SOPHIE in New York: it was Pig and they performed in a pitch black venue with big torch handheld flashlights and experiencing that atmosphere was unmatched. In my case, it also stops people from staring at me and it becomes part of the overall lights and room rather than lighting myself, I guess.

I’m incredibly excited about it, even though it feels like a small-ish release: there are three tracks on Disc 1 and their remixes on Disc 2. It’s an incredible feeling to have music out that feels representative of me, as I previously mentioned, I’ve been DJing so much that the pressure to put something out into the world just became more and more daunting. DJing is the least stressful thing, I always say yes so easily and it obviously sometimes goes poorly, with either nobody showing up or technical problems but the pressure is nowhere near releasing an EP. I’m also incredibly grateful to LuckyMe who have really influenced me throughout my whole career and whose artists are central reference points, like Hudson Mohawke or Jacques Greene who features on the new EP and whose tracks I’ve always pulled out during my sets, they work a charm every time. LuckyMe’s values are very anti-streaming and I consider them to be one of the few indie labels adjacent to PC Music, who together provide a recent history of influential music.

They’re not the only people I chose to work with but this time I was actually looking for dance music producers more than pop. Nikki wanted to do more vocal and pop stuff, and I hadn’t released a lot of music collaborating with producers, vocals were always my only collaborators, so that was exciting. Matter of Time is the main single, it’s actually one of my many unreleased tracks from 2 years ago and people always reacted great to it live. It’s a transitional release, featuring one looping vocal with no chorus or verse, different production grooves and there’s no writing process behind it. Warpstr’s howling was the first thing we recorded and from there we progressively started working vocals into a song. That’s definitely my element, a vocal loop always adds to a song, the human ears are trained to recognise this.

I actually got a production credit on Charli’s Pop 2 on the song I Got It, whose verse is super high energy and quite bonkers, with some of my sounds sprinkling throughout the song. I think most significant was our work on the song Click on her Charli record, I recorded a hook off that with her in my apartment in New York and the final song still includes that recording for the hook. The main difference is I started Click with her whereas in I Got It I was adding extra sounds to something they already had recorded. More recently though, I collaborated with the incredible Empress Of and co-produced two songs Sucia and Fácil on her gorgeous 2024 release For Your Consideration, where I also use looping vocal elements and I’m incredibly proud of the result.

Henrik was always a super legendary name adjacent to PC Music, he was part of the first generation of Soundcloud producers who started to lovingly use elements of mainstream pop, which was an entirely new concept for listeners — he was this experimental artist embracing pop elements that felt cringe to others, he’s an amazing influential producer from Norway. Basically, everyone on the record is a legend to me. GRRL I went on tour with at the end of last year and we’ve been friends for a long time, again from the early Soundcloud world. They're a DJ and an archivist and have their own NTS show which is like a chronicle of all things in online music and repost 100 Soundcloud links a day: they have the best music knowledge of anyone I know and are an amazing producer. X&G’s Gaszia was a huge influence, we met when I opened for him for his X&G duo project in 2017. His understanding of groove, Baltimore and Jersey club, make for the craziest sound. He’s also an incredible DJ, he’s become known for a string of high quality DJ tools and edits, so it just made perfect sense to have him do a remix.

I’d say that as a performer, it definitely feels that way. My earliest performances were always supporting or opening for somebody else, whereas recently I’ve been headlining shows in Europe and in Asia. Releasing new music is always more of a scary process for me, I also felt like I was trying to experiment and play more types of music and ultimately the aim was to release something that felt more like my sets. On this EP, I taught myself some new tricks, used some weird sound designs and a different skill set. I kept on asking myself, what makes an instrumental song good enough? It’s way more minimal than anything I’ve released yet, it’s so easy for me to DJ, yet so scary to release a new batch of work into the world.

I actually booked the whole lineup and it’s kind of become my thing to have these crazy poster designs and especially work with my designer friends. I’ve become known for having fresh, high-effort maximalist posters and in this case I wanted a Europe-related theme to accompany my tour, hence the 3D scans of artefacts which I believe are from the National Museum of Scotland. I just randomly picked ones that work visually. The whole idea was to brand clubbing culture as this bygone era, reflecting a commentary on the future of clubs in cities like London and NYC where everything has become more corporate, these rogue figures of the old world appear on the poster, making it look historical when it’s actually happening now, adding a pessimistic undertone. Ultimately, I just think it’s a fun way of branding something. All of the artists on the list are friends and very diverse, including Dazegxd from NYC who’s heavily influenced by DnB and Bok Bok who founded UK record label Night Slugs. I’m very heavily influenced by the UK music scene, including rap and artists like Bloody Shield.

It released so soon after my EP because we wanted to release right after Underscores performed the song at Coachella. We’re longtime friends and collaborators but this is actually our first release together, although she did contribute some additional production to Matter of Time. We’ve played a bunch of high-energy back-to-back sets together and we’ve just announced a 4-city DJ tour, Popnite in May. The cover art was actually directed by Hannah Diamond and shot in New York by mthr trsa, a full circle moment!

When I play a pop song during a set, I’ll always pick the catchiest part of the song, which the crowd responds to the best. Recently, I’ve been playing a lot of Addison Rae’s High Fashion and also mixing in oklou. Last month, I did a set for Kiosk Radio in Brussels, where I mixed Do Nada by DJ Lycox and Vanyfox into a remix of Justin Timberlake’s SexyBack. Both tracks have the same type of chord stab and it really worked its magic!