Taken from this week’s Future Pop mailer. Click here to subscribe.
We’ve recently seen music producers come out from behind the scenes and take credit for their work. Where once they’d be happy with a mention in the album sleeve, now their name comes first, and the vocalist is no more than a featured artist. It makes sense for a DJ or dance artist, but as dance and pop music meet in the middle, we end up with producers releasing songs under their own names that would normally have been pitched to the pop stars of the day. We saw this with Tiesto’s Red Lights, Duke Dumont’s Ocean Drive, and now Gryffin’s new single Whole Heart. With each of these songs, I find myself dreaming of the pop star or group whose career they could have launched, but now will never exist. Gryffin is the stage name of Dan Griffith, a DJ from New York who became known for his remixes of acts like Ellie Goulding and Maroon 5, and is now (or perhaps always was?) signed to their label Interscope. Despite my reservations about the trend he represents, his melodic electro-pop tunes show great promise. I’m not sure Whole Heart is his big moment, but I can believe he’ll have one.