RA Exchange

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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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.

Listen to the episode in full.
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