Production in electronic music can sometimes feel like an arms race — in a crowded marketplace, producers often try to stand out by unleashing the most volatile basslines or the keenest drum programming. But the New York-based producer Jai Wolf started earning acclaim when he turned away from music’s incendiary edge. “It’s captivating, vulnerable melodies that people get entranced by,” he tells Billboard. “Songs that people come back to make them feel nostalgic, youthful, emotional.”
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Wolf is not the only artist looking to inject a new degree of sentiment and tunefulness into the mainstream electronic space. During a conversation with Billboard last year, the duo DJDS declared, “our approach is wanting to make dance music that has the width of emotions that’s allowed to a conventional band.” ODESZA, whose Foreign Family Collective has released Wolf’s last two singles, also announced unabashedly melodic intentions in previous interviews: “I think people are ready for pretty music where it isn’t just noise.”
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Wolf started working in this vein by accident shortly after graduating college, when he was given an opportunity to turn in an official remix of Melanie Martinez‘s “Dollhouse.” “That turned into a really chill, slowed-down remix, no drop or anything,” he says. “I didn’t think it was going to be popular, but two years later: four million plays.”
Before he put his spin on “Dollhouse,” Wolf had been making dubstep, influenced by artists like Skrillex. “I thought all the names [of dubstep producers] were so serious and harsh-sounding,” he remembers. He chose a goofy title to set himself apart from his peers: No Pets Allowed. (Looking back now, he calls it “corny.”) After three years, though, Wolf decided he didn’t want to spend the rest of his career making dubstep. “I found there to be sort of a ceiling,” he says. “It was super saturated.”
He graduated from NYU a year later than expected — “I was slacking off so much making music” — and the imminent threat of the real world forced him to try something new. “If I wanted to get serious, I needed to pivot and make a statement,” he recalls. “I changed names to Jai Wolf in April.” That summer, he started reworking the Melanie Martinez track for Atlantic Records.
The original “Dollhouse” tells a story about the gulf between reality and public image with the aid of a gnawing, hollow beat. Wolf dressed up Martinez’s version with big-room tools — ornate synths, jabbering drum programming — but while many remixers attempt to rearrange tracks for club-floor onslaughts, he never detonated “Dollhouse.” “‘Remix’ has the connotation that it has to have a big drop,” Wolf explains. “But I don’t treat it like, ‘this needs a dance beat.'”
Listeners endorsed his approach. “Over the first year, as the plays were rising, it was obvious that people like this more chill and ambient side of the music I was making,” Wolf says. “So when I was remixing ODESZA’s ‘Say My Name,’ instead of making an EDM banger, I was like, I’m going to make a chill remix of it.”
That rendition has accumulated more than a million plays, and it also earned the attention of ODESZA. “I was charting on Hype Machine and they were charting on Hype Machine,” Wolf notes. “They followed me on SoundCloud ’cause they saw that. I had no idea who they were — this was before they blew up. We started talking through email.” ODESZA liked Wolf’s version of “Say My Name” enough to include it as part of a subsequent remix package.
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The Seattle duo soon became an independent success story: their In Return album, released on the Ninja Tune imprint Counter, debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Dance/Electronic Albums chart. When ODESZA launched Foreign Family Collective as a way of disseminating music from other like-minded artists, they tapped Wolf for a single, “Indian Summer,” which went on to become one of his most popular songs.
As streams steadily increase, so does the size of the venues Wolf plays on tour. He’s announcing the second phase of his Kindred Spirits tour today exclusively on Billboard (see dates below). “One thing we’ve tried to do this year is transition from clubs into venues — playing places that bands play at or rappers play at, which is scary,” Wolf explains.
He cites acts that aim to push their live show beyond pulling up tracks on a laptop as inspiration for his own gigs. “We don’t want to just show up, plug in, play music, and walk away. That’s what every single DJ does; they’ve seen that 100 times. We’re gonna have our own custom light setup, custom visuals, something that makes it more engaging, energetic, beautiful. We want to make a show where people walk away and say, ‘that was incredible.’ Obviously I’m inspired by heavyweights like ODESZA, who put on a phenomenal live show.”
Onstage, Wolf gets to see the impact of his melodies firsthand. “I get emotional too,” he says. “The bond I have with all these listeners is the emotions I have in my head — translated into musical notes.”