Quix is one of Aotearoa's talented and well-respected DJs, having been making incredible tunes for the better part of a decade.
He's just dropped his highly anticipated new track with The Chainsmokers, ‘Grenade’. It’s actually been in the works for five years and has been on a hell of a journey in that time.
We debuted it on air this morning, if ya missed that, it's live on Spotify now.
Quix gave us the rundown of the track and went a bit deeper in an interview with Sin & Brook. From being in the crowd when Chainsmokers played it live in 2018, to accepting it would never see the light of day, and then taking a chance to try get it out again, it really is an inspiring tale.
"So Grenade will be my oldest track that is actually getting released, it’s been circling the internet as 'The Chainsmokers x QUIX - ID' for the last 5 years," he said. "Initially, the boys DM’d me on Twitter in early 2018, just as I was finishing up mowing my parents' lawn. I remember distinctly as it was a massive milestone in my career."
“I got working on a fresh track to send them as a WIP (work in progress) and they said to me they’d try to play it at Ultra Miami 2018 if we got the drop to a good place. I struggled to come up with something 'cool' and kept getting writer's block until a week before Ultra I came up with what is now the first drop of the song.”
“I remember thinking to myself that I had rushed the production of the drop and I didn’t think they’d like it… quite the opposite! An amazing moment in my life was watching them drop it at Ultra and being in the crowd to experience it - it was an amazing moment."
From there, The Chainsmokers kept on playing it at their live shows and it went pretty viral on the EDM realms of the internet. Quix then got to visit The Chainsmokers' luxurious LA studio.
"Fast forward to the end of the year and the boys invited me to their INSANE studio in LA and we got working on the rest of the track, Drew recorded some vocals and we worked on the 2nd drop. The song was probably 80% finished, it just needed that extra fiddling around with the arrangement and mixing etc."
”As time went on, Drew and Alex prepared to launch their next album and understandably their focus went away from finishing our track, and thus the idea of releasing the song slowly fell away. I’m like ‘hey I don’t think this is going to come out’. It’s gonna live on the shelf as a sick ID that never came out. And sometimes those are GREAT tunes'."
"End of the day I wasn’t that gutted or sad, because the experience I had been given until this point was beyond anything I could have asked for, but still wished we could have released it."
On a whim, with nothing to lose, Quix decided to hit the fellas up to see if he could get an official release.
"I was 100% expecting a gentle decline and “sorry bro probably not” but they came back super positive and keen!" he said. "They just said go ahead, get it to a place you want and send it back to us and we’ll take a look at it and see if it’s good."
"Straight away I got to work, got on it. Then I sent it back to them. They approved it immediately and just were stoked".
And now, it's here.
It's part of an upcoming EP Quix has been working on. It's a project he’s “so happy with at the moment.
"I will not care if it doesn’t do well - I will be stoked that THAT music is out in the world, Im ridiculously pumped with this music," he added.
We obviously cannot wait for the project as well, stay tuned.
