RA Exchange

The Berghain resident on punk's ethos, choosing the difficult path and his new album, My Own Shadow.

Marcel Dettmann has become synonymous with Berghain and its primary cultural export: Berlin techno. He began DJing at Ostgut, Berghain's predecessor, in 1999. When Berghain opened its doors in 2004, he was one of its first residents, on a roster that grew to include luminaries like his longtime collaborator Ben Klock.

In this RA Exchange, Dettmann talks about the long road from bedroom DJ to one of techno's leading figures: first falling in love with '80s new wave records, running a record store out of his mother's house, sharing vinyl with neighbourhood friends like future Berghain resident Marcel Fengler, and eventually landing behind the counter at Hard Wax, which he calls his "school".

Dettmann has been a fixture on the techno circuit for more than 25 years, yet there are still sides of his artistry that fans may not know. My Own Shadow, an expanding project of EPs and visual work that now includes a full-length album, shows his creative world from another angle. He breaks down the album's cinematic imagery, reflects on the years it took to get where he is, and explains why the path that takes the most work is the one that pays off.

My Own Shadow is out November 13th on !K7.

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Two decades in, the UK drum & bass duo are still filling stadiums. They talk staying hungry, resisting the algorithm and their eighth album, Generic Everything.

In 2003, Saul Milton and Will Kennard of Chase & Status were sending drum & bass demos to their heroes over AOL Instant Messenger. Two decades on, they're among the biggest acts in UK dance music. In 2016, they became the first UK electronic act to headline London's O2 Arena. Their productions have racked up more than two billion streams, and they've sold 2.6 million albums, more than four times as many as drum & bass's next-biggest act. In 2023, they had four records in the UK Top 40 at once, a run that helped win them the Brit Award for Producer of the Year.

So what does a second act look like 20 years in? In this RA Exchange with music journalist Nathan Evans, Milton and Kennard dig into how they keep pushing forward. They discuss Generic Everything, a record about refusing to sound like everyone else in an age of algorithms and AI, and why they worry about what technology is doing to creative work. They also talk about how they choose collaborators, from Skrillex to Little Simz and D Double E, and how they've folded styles like baile funk into drum & bass. Listen to the full episode.

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The German producer on touring with Nine Inch Nails, pushing past criticism and his new full-length album, 7LLVSION.

Alex Ridha is notoriously private. Ridha, AKA Boys Noize, has been making headlines over the last couple of years: you may have seen him on tour alongside Trent Reznor’s industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails, or in the credits of the soundtracks for Challengers and Tron: Ares. It follows an illustrious run of collaborations with Lady Gaga and Skrillex, discreetly making him one of the most influential producers moving between the underground and pop.

But long before all of this, Ridha was just a 16-year-old making music in Hamburg. He went on to start his own label, Boysnoize Records, and broke through in 2007 with his debut album, Oi Oi Oi. His sound, an abrasive mix of EBM, industrial, French touch and electroclash, won over a young generation of ravers around the world and inspired particular devotion in the US.

In this RA Exchange, Ridha discusses what it's like to have Trent Reznor's ear; how it felt to have his music panned in Germany but celebrated abroad; and his hesitation about putting out a solo album in what he sees as an oversaturated music landscape. Ridha is now scoring his first film on his own, a horror movie called Replacer, and on November 6th he releases 7LLVSION, his first solo album in five years. Listen to the full episode.

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On the heels of ii, three of hip-hop's most boundary-pushing artists talk collaboration, creative risk and the threat of AI.

Kenneth Blume, Denzel Curry and Vince Staples came up around the same time, as rap's centre of gravity was shifting online and an older guard was dismissing much of what came out of it as a passing fad. Blume, formerly known as Kenny Beats, made his name producing for rappers, then opened up his process on his YouTube series The Cave. He has since moved into rock, producing records for Geese and Weezer. Curry emerged from Carol City, Miami, by way of SpaceGhostPurrp's Raider Klan. This year he has cut a single and a co-headline tour with the hardcore band Knocked Loose, and launched a new underground rap supergroup, The Scythe. Staples first surfaced in Long Beach as an Odd Future affiliate, pushed into experimental electronic territory on Big Fish Theory with producers including SOPHIE and Flume, and starred in his own Netflix series. A decade on, all three are still moving hip-hop forward by refusing to stay in one lane.

In this RA Exchange, the three appear together on the heels of ii, the new album from Blume and Curry. They discuss their process in the studio, the fights that draw out their best material and how their ideas of risk, failure and success have changed over time. As longtime friends and collaborators, they also reflect on how hip-hop has shifted around them: the rift between generations, the threat AI poses to working artists and whether they're really at their creative peak. Listen to the full episode.

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Kicking off a run of artist-on-artist Exchanges for RA25, the musical multi-hyphenates discuss poetry, religion and their experiences as protectors of oratorical tradition.

There's a deep creative current running between music and poetry, and Saul Williams and James Massiah know those waters well. This week’s RA Exchange is the first in a series of intergenerational artist-on-artist conversations we’ll be running to mark our 25th anniversary. In it, Williams—the Grammy-nominated poet, musician, writer and actor—and Massiah—a South London poet and musician—talk about lyricism and what first drew them to the written word. Both grew up in the church: Williams as the son of a Baptist preacher, Massiah in the Seventh-day Adventist church, raised on the King James Bible. They discuss how those upbringings shaped their sense of oratory and morality, and the tension between rejecting institutional religion and still holding on to its aesthetic traditions.

They also get into what happens when a poem meets music, and what a dance floor can be beyond entertainment. Williams argues it has always been a training ground: a space for resistance, ceremony and mobilisation, where ideas can spark minds and movements. Massiah, meanwhile, explains how simply wanting to keep partying ended up radicalising him. As he puts it: "Where are we going to party if the bad guys have got all the good party locations?"

The conversation was recorded in Amsterdam, where Williams performed with Underground Resistance. His new album, Leap Life, is out now on Big Dada. Listen to the full episode.

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The frontwoman of Grammy-nominated The Internet talks ambition, contentment and her third solo album, Beard.

Syd, born Sydney Bennett, is nearly 20 years into a career that started when she was a teenager. She cut her teeth as the in-house engineer and DJ for hip-hop collective Odd Future before forming The Internet, the Grammy-nominated soul group that helped shape a strand of Los Angeles R&B in the 2010s. Two solo albums followed—Fin in 2017 and Broken Hearts Club in 2022—but she describes her third, Beard, as the first that feels fully her own. She made it in the same period she married her partner and, by her own account, arrived at a version of self-acceptance she'd been circling for a decade.

In this Exchange, Syd sits down with RA's Content Production Lead Antonia Odunlami to talk about the album's title, a reference to the facial hair she stopped removing after years of treating it as something to hide. They also discuss letting go of who she was "supposed" to be, why she's stopped chasing the "sleep when you're dead" ambition she was raised on, and her plans to get back behind the CDJs after years away. Listen to the full episode.

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The trance DJ on clickbait journalism, commercial success and making a name in the viral age.

Marlon Hoffstadt started DJing at 17. By 18, he got his first taste of moderate success, and at 20, it had all disappeared. What followed was several years in the trenches: demos ignored, labels uninterested and a career that seemed to be ending before it even took off. Hoffstadt went back to study journalism and PR, became a dad and continued to make music no one wanted to release. Then, somewhere at the intersection of the post-pandemic landscape and the rise of the TikTok influencer, he re-emerged as DJ Daddy Trance, a hands-in-the-air commercial DJ headlining festivals around the world.

This uncanny shift has made him the subject of sharp criticism from some figures in the underground scene where it all started for Hoffstadt. In this RA Exchange, the Berlin native directly addresses his detractors. He also talks about how he's channeled Berlin's underground sensibility into the world of expensive tickets and stadium-scale production; what changed between his throwing no-phone parties in 2019 and dominating a scene that profits from video reels; and his reaction to some of Resident Advisor's recent posts and articles—and what he, as a former PR professional, would have done differently. His new album, Das ist Daddy, is out now on Capitol Records.

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Frontman Paul Banks on the legacy band's creative evolution, why he prefers hip-hop to rock and their new album, This Mirror Weighs a Ton.

Interpol might not be electronic in the traditional sense, but they've long been the techno fan's indie band of choice. Cofounded by lead singer Paul Banks and guitarist Daniel Kessler in 1997—Banks is the lyricist, Kessler the composer—they emerged in Manhattan's burgeoning guitar music scene. Their 2002 debut, Turn On the Bright Lights, is widely considered one of the defining albums of the decade, and landed them in the middle of the early-'00s New York rock revival alongside The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and LCD Soundsystem. They went on to shape the moody, post-punk revival canon that defined the following decade.

Interpol are now back with an album that's been called their best in years: This Mirror Weighs a Ton. In this Exchange, Banks unpacks the LP's conception and composition with producer Andrew Wyatt—best known for his work with artists like Bruno Mars, Charli xcx and Dua Lipa—and its darker lyrical meditations on drone footage, mediated violence and the surveillance state.

Banks also reveals the version of himself that isn't typically in the press cycle. Outside of Interpol, the singer is an avid beatmaker who hasn't listened to rock music in over twenty years. He DJs hip-hop under the name Fancypants, released a sample-based mixtape featuring US rapper Talib Kweli and has collaborated with everyone from Wu-Tang's RZA to Kool Keith, Ghostface Killah and Method Man. In this conversation, he explains why he thinks hip-hop is the only genre still meaningfully inventing language—and what that means for the band he's been fronting for nearly 30 years. This Mirror Weighs a Ton is out now on Partisan Records. 

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Jorja Smith's career took off in 2016, when "Blue Lights" introduced her voice to a global audience. In the 10 years since that single went stratospheric, the Walsall-born artist has released three albums, collaborated with Drake, Burna Boy, Wizkid and Ezra Collective, and built an international career without ever signing to a major label.

Her third album, What Are The Odds, marks a new chapter, as she turns towards the dance floor. Made entirely with producer P2J, the record draws from a broad palette of sounds, including UK garage, funky and Afro house. Smith has described it as music to make people move, and she'll take the tracks to London's O2 Arena next summer for the first headline show at the venue of her career.

In this Exchange, Smith talks to RA's Antonia Odunlami about growing up in the public eye, moving back to Walsall after London became too much and protecting the parts of herself she wants to keep private. She also discusses remaining independent, learning to set goals and how she curated her recent All Points East set.

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The British jungle star reflects on grief, artistic integrity, bass communities and why slowing down has become central to the next phase of her career.

In 2019, SHERELLE's life changed when a viral Boiler Room set introduced her high-speed blend of jungle, footwork and hardcore to a global audience. This much we know. So what comes after the storm?

In the 2020s, the Londoner has become one of the most recognisable figures in UK dance music: major festival stages, a BBC Radio 6 Music show and even a MOBO award. Yet after putting herself through over 100 shows a year, and turning 30, she began to question the pace of life as a touring DJ. The deaths of two close family members over the past 12 months brought those questions into focus, reshaping how she thinks about DJing, friendship, club culture and what she wants to leave behind.

In this Exchange, SHERELLE speaks with RA Editor Gabe Szatan about learning to take pride in her achievements, resisting the pressure to turn music into social media content and giving UK bass artists their flowers while they're still here.

She also discusses Hooversound—the label she runs with NAINA—racial and class hierarchies that shape dance music, and Rest & Restoration, her new party built around longer sets, affordable tickets and a simple philosophy to slow down, and make time for the people you love.

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