Image via Josh Renaut
Joy Orbison has always been a bit of a reluctant king when it comes to crafting dance floor bangers.
He’s originally earned the title with 2009’s “Hyph Mngo,” which made him a fixture of UK dance culture overnight, followed by the stuttering two-step of “Sicko Cell,” the gurgling, piano-laced drive of “Ellipsis,” and, most recently, last year’s “flight fm,” which I watched erupt an entire room at a Club Rhonda party in Los Angeles at 2 a.m. (One of his contemporaries, James Blake, was behind the decks that night — someone who, Joy tells me, actually recorded a full vocal take for the track at one point).
And yet, Joy O, real name Peter O’Grady, has always sidestepped the narrative of him as some prophet of late-night euphoria. Case in point: As we talk dance music — a genre where drums are historically the focal point — he’s telling me how kicks can actually be, sometimes, kinda annoying.
“You’re missing so much by just focusing on them,” he says over Zoom, speaking from the downstairs of his family home outside London with a soft, charming demeanor. “What’s quite nice with a sample or having a rhythm that’s not focused on the kick…you’re not getting slapped in the head by it all the time.”
It’s a sentiment that speaks to his whole production approach: always leaning toward texture, space, and tension — what’s left out, not just what hits hardest. And it’s part of what made his 2021 full-length debut, Still Slipping Vol. 1, such a departure from expectations. The record wove together voice notes from friends and family with downtempo loops and club-adjacent sketches that never really resolved into bangers but were always interesting. It was intimate and deeply rooted in the rhythms of daily life, not necessarily dance floors.
That same spirit shows up in “bastard,” his recent single with Essex rapper Joe James, a track so skeletal it barely has drums at all. Instead, O’Grady lets Joe drift across a stuttering, atmospheric bed built on a Jai Paul sample: “There would be a point in my career where I wouldn’t have done that…but to me and to Joe, [creating a track with no drums] was the most exciting thing,” he says. “When I made that record, I was like, this is where my head is at. For me, that record is almost a bit like a Griselda record, but from a dance music angle.”
As he begins work on his follow up to Still Slipping, our conversation drifts more toward hip-hop than dance music. Between “bastard” and a recent Fred again.. edit of “flight fm” — which layers verses from Lil Yachty, Future, and Playboi Carti over his instrumental — it became clear he wasn’t just dabbling in hip-hop; he was trying to engage in it.
In fact, that’s exactly how I pitched this interview to his publicist: “I want to talk to Joy Orbison about rap music.”
It turns out hip-hop was one of his earliest musical touchpoints. Growing up in and around South London, O’Grady spent his teenage years listening to Tim Westwood’s Radio 1 Rap Show, tuning in for guest mixes by Philly DJ Cash Money that blended 50 Cent, Dipset, The Neptunes, and other 2000s rap stalwarts. Sometimes he’d catch those broadcasts riding shotgun in the car of his uncle, drum and bass legend Ray Keith, who often had hip-hop on the stereo, he says. What’s more, his first forays into DJing came not through club records, but through cheap 12” rap singles from the local Virgin Megastore, which he’d beat juggle at house parties long before he found his footing as a producer.
All of this informs why O’Grady has never quite fit the box of being just a UK bass music producer (though, again, he’s very good at that). Through our conversation, I learn that he always has an ear to the ground — whether it’s the grime of his teenage years, the latest Griselda tape or the goth music of Northampton, his wife’s hometown and the birthplace of Bauhaus’ Peter Murphy, who O’Grady reveals he’s currently working with. He’s not chasing trends so much as following instincts, constantly searching for sounds that feel new, unfamiliar, or just true to what he’s feeling at the moment. That curiosity, more than any one genre or scene, is what ties his work together. – Reed Jackson