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Kygo on stage
Kygo performing at Electric Mack-A-Poolooza in Miami Beach on 7 August 2015. Photograph: Larry Marano/Getty Images
Kygo performing at Electric Mack-A-Poolooza in Miami Beach on 7 August 2015. Photograph: Larry Marano/Getty Images

How tropical house’s dreamy escapism took dance music by storm

This article is more than 8 years old

Since emerging from the bedroom of Kyrre Gørvell-Dahll – AKA Kygo – in 2013, the genre has gone global and made a superstar of its creator. With upbeat tunes and an everyman appeal, perhaps it’s no surprise

In the late spring of 2013, Kyrre Gørvell-Dahll was a 22-year-old student of business and finance at Edinburgh University. He was born in Bergen, Norway, where he studied piano for 10 years and started making electronic music, inspired by the electronic dance music (EDM) giant Avicii. In Edinburgh, armed with a MacBook, Logic software and a Midi keyboard, he experimented with different sounds and posted the results on SoundCloud and Facebook under the name Kygo. He hit the jackpot with his sweet-natured, mid-tempo remix of Passenger’s ballad Let Her Go, debuting the distinctive twinkling keyboard sound that has decorated many of his tracks since.

“I called it Sexy because I felt like it was a sexy sound,” Kygo says with a bashful laugh. “When I saw everybody loved it I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to continue with this style.’ I think people were looking for something new in the EDM scene and found it in my music.” He did not finish his business course.

Kygo’s track Firestone charted in the top 10 across Europe.

The style Kygo developed in his Edinburgh bedroom, known as tropical house, has become absurdly, record-breakingly popular. Kygo himself has gone from unlicensed remixes of James Blake and Marvin Gaye to commissions from megastars such as Coldplay and Ed Sheeran. Last December, he exceeded 1bn streams on Spotify faster than any artist before him, reaching that milestone in only one year. Simultaneously, tropical house has infiltrated pop at the highest level, via German producer Felix Jaehn’s blockbuster remix of OMI’s Cheerleader and Justin Bieber’s No 1 hits What Do You Mean? and Sorry. Its hallmarks are a relaxed tempo (around 100 beats a minute, compared with EDM’s standard 120), wistful good vibes and sounds that signify sunny climes: pan pipes, marimbas, steel drums. It’s the tuneful, laidback flipside to mainstream EDM’s blaring hyperactivity.

Unusually for a dance genre, tropical house has no roots in clubland and thrives where it was born – on SoundCloud, Spotify and YouTube. Without any underground origins, it has never really been cool, which is part of its mass appeal. The sound is benign, inviting, non-judgmental and effortlessly international. There’s no risk of enjoying it in the wrong way, or discovering it too late, because its biggest star is also its originator – and he’s not very cool, either. If Coldplay – Kygo’s favourite band – were a dance genre, they would be the frictionless, borderless sound of tropical house. “It’s not a sound you would associate with any particular place,” says Philip Sherburne, who writes about dance music for titles such as Pitchfork. “It’s everywhere and nowhere at once. It’s from the ether.”

Robin Schulz performing in Milan in February. Photograph: Francesco Prandoni/Redferns

Down the line from New York, where he’s on tour, Kygo is straightforward, optimistic and relaxed – much like his music. “He is the nicest, most loyal and humble guy,” says his manager, Myles Shear. “I don’t know if he thought any of this would really happen.” With typical modesty, Kygo says he was “in the right place at the right time”.

In 2013, EDM’s relentless peak-time rush was beginning to wear thin; several European dance hits of the time reflected a growing appetite for melodic house or deep house (no relation, confusingly, to the hip, jazz-influenced deep house of the late-80s and 90s.) Tracks like Sonnentanz by Austrian duo Klangkarussell, Jubel by French producer Klingande, and German DJ Robin Schulz’s remix of Waves by Mr Probz favoured hazy synths, acoustic guitars and saxophone riffs, while the videos majored in fresh-faced millennials frolicking in the sun, leading Mixmag to dub it “Instagram house” in August 2014. Alastair Webber of Island Records told Mixmag it “soundtracks a European summer perfectly”.

Many of the producers, like Kygo, were amiable young Europeans who started out by posting DIY remixes of mellow pop songs on SoundCloud. It was through the site that Shear, only 19 at the time, contacted Australian DJ Thomas Jack in 2013 and invited him to come to Miami. Hanging out in Shear’s college apartment, the two new roommates discussed how to capture the music’s “Caribbean cool vibe”; Jack, Shear’s first client, came up with “tropical house” as the title of his free online mix series, which has since featured sets by Kygo, Jaehn, Schulz, Klingande and Bakermat.

Stay, the fifth single for Kygo’s debut album, Cloud Nine.

Shortly afterwards, Shear heard Kygo’s Passenger remix and got in touch. “When I heard his music I felt, ‘No one’s not going to like this!’” Shear says. “Kygo is bringing music back into dance music.” He negotiated Kygo’s deals with Ultra – the biggest US dance label – and Sony, and secured him a main-stage sunset slot at Georgia’s TomorrowWorld festival in 2014 when Avicii fell ill. “I didn’t know how people would react, because you can’t jump up and down, but when I played that show it was crazy,” Kygo says. “I think people appreciated a little break between the hard-hitting bangers.”

As a form of house minted by affluent Europeans rather than inner-city Americans, tropical house’s dreamy escapism speaks to a lifestyle that’s idyllic but affordable, if only for a fortnight in the summer. It evokes a vague but potent feeling of nostalgia for the recent past, the way you might look back on your Instagram shots of a blissful summer holiday in October. Vice’s Clive Martin wrote last year that it suggested “a time and place cobbled together from Qantas adverts, episodes of Made in Chelsea, Boden catalogues, TripAdvisor reviews [and] other people’s gap-year photos”. On YouTube, tropical house tracks are still invariably illustrated with beaches, sunsets and tanned girls in sunglasses and bikinis. It’s the music of happy times, rather than the hedonism of all-night clubs (“I actually haven’t even seen that much drugs,” Kygo told Billboard recently. “I feel like red wine gets you in that chill vibe”).

“It fits in with the Tumblr/Instagram aspirational aesthetic,” says Sherburne. “You see good-looking people in bathing suits sipping mojitos in nice places and you wish your life was more like that. I was watching a Thomas Jack interview, and the interviewer asked him why he’s such a happy person. He said, ‘Why be sad?’ That’s his whole philosophy of life, and he makes music that goes along with that.”

Tobias Rieser (left) and Adrian Held of Klangkarussell. Photograph: Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images

Kygo, who is usually photographed smiling and wearing his baseball cap backwards, is the perfect anti-frontman for this self-effacing, audience-friendly sound. “Just bring up good memories,” he says, “that’s what I’m trying to do.”

Tropical house’s barriers to entry are incredibly low. If you like pretty melodies and sunshine, walk right in. You can dance to it, but you can also slot it into a yoga playlist. Its popularity has been helped by shifts in the EDM landscape, such as the rise of dance music as a force at festivals, where the notion of beautiful, happy, young people relaxing in the sun fits perfectly with tropical house’s self-definition – “The image in my head was people at a summer festival, sitting down in the grass having a beer,” says Kygo, who will have his own festival, Cloud Nine, in Norway later this year – and the waning dominance of the musclebound “EDM bro”. Kygo’s audiences feature roughly as many women as men. “His music is something anyone can relate to,” Shear says. “He is music. This is the next big thing. This is a legend.” He’s certainly sufficiently big business that last month he was featured on the cover of Billboard, the surefire sign of a cash cow in the US music market.

Tropical house’s momentum has been so unstoppable that Sony was keen for Kygo to mark his territory with a few actual hits, starting with 2014’s Firestone, before anyone else adopted his sound, but Kygo and Shear both consider Bieber’s take on the sound the sincerest form of flattery. “It’s awesome,” says Shear. “It means we’re creating a movement.”

Thomas Jack
Thomas Jack has said he no longer wants to put out tropical house music. Photograph: Miikka Skaffari/Getty Images

Kygo’s forthcoming debut album, Cloud Nine, features guests such as Tom Odell and Labrinth, and – Kygo promises – moves beyond tropical house. Adam Granite of Sony thinks he has the same pop potential as Avicii or Calvin Harris. “Kygo has an incredible sense of melody, and he has been very smart to work with great topline writers [the people who write the main melody – the topline – of a song]. We view him very much as a pop artist. We’re looking forward to a career that will hopefully extend well beyond an of-the-moment genre description.”

As for tropical house, it remains to be seen where a sound with hordes of imitators but no experimental fringe can go from here. Unlike its eclectic precursors, Balearic and chillout, it lacks an eccentric hinterland. Jack is already restless, telling Noisey last year: “I don’t even wanna do it any more.”

“There’s a big marketplace for light, agreeable electronic pop, and I’m sure there will be another tag put on that soon,” says Sherburne. “I don’t see the tropical thing sticking around for that much longer. It’s the Xanax of light electronic pop. I don’t think there’s any range of emotion at all. It’s interesting that it takes Justin Bieber to inject some danger into this genre.”

Kygo, at least, is “super happy” with his success so far, although he’s most comfortable back home in Bergen, far from the crowds and the industry buzz. “When I’m on the road and it’s super stressful, it definitely affects my music,” he says. “When I’m hanging out with my friends and my girlfriend and things are good in my life, then it’s better.”

Why be sad?

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