Kaytranada: king of the beats

“There was something that told me, ‘This is what I want to do’,” says Kaytranada, reminiscing on his beginnings as a beat-maker. “Music is life to me. But if I didn’t do this, I knew I would end up making art anyway, or films, whatever.” He was right to be confident. Today, Haitian-Canadian DJ and producer Kaytranada (real name: Louis Kevin Celestin) is among the most sought-after producers on the planet. As a solo artist, he released his debut album on XL, has won two Grammys, scooped Canada’s coveted Polaris Music Prize, and collaborated with huge names like Pharrell, Childish Gambino, PinkPantheress, Kali Uchis and Thundercat. His production credits have popped up on records by Mary J Blige, Kelela, Snoop Dogg and Alicia Keys, he’s played countless festivals around the world, DJ’ed at Boiler Room multiple times, and has toured with Madonna and The Weeknd. Most important of all, his trademark swing and uptempo funk have altered the sound of modern music.

DJ Mag is speaking to him over video call, and today he’s in Montreal where he grew up and lived for much of his life before moving to LA. Beyond the balcony and trees behind him, the sky is summery and bright. Its blue hue is dotted with fluffy clouds and brims with possibility, and dressed casually in a grey tee with a necklace chain, a light beard and with AirPods in his ears, Kay is in a similarly sunny mood. As he warms to our conversation, he leans more into the camera and smiles, and when he’s excited by a subject, he begins to gesticulate with his hands, and we glimpse the tattoos on his forearms, and sense his obsession with music.

He’s a brilliant songwriter, of course — but the reason why everyone wants a piece of Kaytranada is his unique sound. Blending the rhythmic thunk, swagger and bump of swung hip-hop beats with the irresistible upbeat club appeal of house music, and a sprinkling of disco magic, he’s arrived at a groove that few others have even thought of. His originality has become the envy of producers around the globe. Listen to R&B, pop and rap now, and you’re bound to hear his influence seeping in: that upbeat house energy, transfigured into mass appeal. But no one does it the same as Kay.

“I’ll be going to get an ice cream, or be in a coffee shop, and my brother will be like, ‘You hear this?’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, I hear this’. It’ll be an uptempo swingy kind of beat. And he’s like, ‘Is that you?’ And I’m like, ‘No, that’s not me!’” Kay grins, laughing at the memory. “I hear that in a lot of music today, and I’m aware of the influence I brought in. It’s not something I actually invented, but I brought people’s attention to it, showed them something that’s been forgotten. I’ve seen a lot of times where I’ve collaborated with an artist or an artist wants to collaborate with me, and we did something completely different, and they wanted me to sound like how I did when I first came out. And because it didn’t sound that way, they get someone else to do that.”

The imitators will have to go back to the drawing board, because Kaytranada’s new album ‘Timeless’ flips the script again. Released in June, and coming five years after his Grammy-winning project ‘Bubba’, ‘Timeless’ is a sprawling, 21-track-deep epic with zero skips. Though his signature bump is much in evidence, the record is also hugely varied, touching on hitherto-unheard influences. Instrumental ‘Dance Dance Dance Dance’ is a gorgeous disco house cut with spine-tingling piano licks, warm electronics and irresistible percussion, bearing traces of French Touch and classic mirrorball funk alike; ‘Spit It Out’, featuring Rochelle Jordan’s mellifluous voice, mixes lush synths and a bittersweet R&B mood, set to tough 4/4 kick-drums; and ‘Wasted Words’ is a psychedelic swirl of Shuggie Otis soul embroidered with the guitar, bass and vocals of Thundercat. On ‘Drip Sweat’, with fellow musical fusionist – and recent DJ Mag North America cover star – Channel Tres, Kaytranada seems to tip his hat to the Jersey and Baltimore club genres, concocting a tough beat with pummelling bass drums, ‘Think’ breakbeats and rowdy horn samples.

“When we made it, ’Drip Sweat’ sounded very aggressive — it wasn’t rock music, but it had that same feeling,” he says. “It makes you want to get in the mosh-pit, get crunk. That’s the energy I got from it, and of course the ‘Think’ sample has the Baltimore element to it.” The track ‘Seemingly’ is a rare instance of Kay harking back to his sampling roots. Taking a loop of boogie classic ‘Holding You, Loving You’ by Don Blackman, he constructs a funked-up house edit that lands somewhere between Detroit innovators Moodymann and J Dilla. “It’s a beautiful song, and I love that album, ‘Don Blackman’. There were mistakes when I looped it, and I just experimented with that, and those sounds. I kind of wanted to make an edit of that song, and that’s the result.”

Perhaps the most surprising diversion on ‘Timeless’ is Kay’s absorption of ingredients from 1980s electropop and new wave. While the funkier side of ’80s music has been an ever-present inspiration to Kaytranada, on ‘Timeless’, he’s leaned into synths more than before. The excellent ‘Do 2 Me’ with Anderson .Paak and SiR has emotive pads throughout the track, but its instrumental coda seems to nod to Pet Shop Boys’ ‘West End Girls’, with sweeping chords and a crystalline top-line that could be a whole new track. One of this writer's favourite cuts on the record, ‘Stepped On’, finds Kay pivoting from behind the studio console and showcasing his own vocals to a wicked '80s synthwave cut that’s like SURVIVE’s Stranger Things soundtrack or a piece by John Carpenter set to a snare-snapping drum track. It’s haunting, emotive, anthemic, emitting an eerie emerald glow, sparkling like the evergreen tracks of that decade. According to Kay, the tune came about after he toured with The Weeknd. Inspired by the ’80s vibe of The Weeknd’s recent material, he tried to write a song for Abel, but decided to keep it for himself.

“Seeing his shows in stadiums, it opened my eyes and part of my brain, like, ‘Maybe I should try writing for him’,” Kay says. “To see a way of doing synthpop. It’s very inspired by the new wave era. I don’t have to be the most amazing singer, I’m just trying to hit a note. With the technology today, there’s [pitch-correction software] Melodyne and Auto-Tune. I thought it sounded unique and nostalgic at the same time, and that influenced me to try that type of music. On top of that, I would listen to those J Dilla albums where he would use his vocals and make songs where he sings as well. This is a combination of that ’80s synthpop and J Dilla singing on his beats.”

Kay has been digging into these sounds for a long time, but it’s the first instance of him embracing the colder, more starkly electronic side of '80s records in his own material. What he enjoys most about the era is the sense of adventure present in its music — how the advent of suddenly affordable new technology opened out worlds of possibility for artists. “It was the age when synthesisers and drum machines got really popular,” he says. “I feel like it’s a beautiful sound in all types of music from the time, not only new wave and boogie, but even early hip-hop. Those things were new at the time, and underdeveloped. I think the fact it sounded underdeveloped gave it that unique sound.”

Though he’s happy to draw from the musical past, presenting vintage ideas afresh, Kaytranada is equally inspired by the next generation of talent. UK producer and vocalist PinkPantheress is on the uptempo house cut ‘Snap My Finger’; all airy chords, funky keys and Wham! vocal references, it’s the second time the two have worked together, after Kay produced her solo cut ‘Do You Miss Me?’. More than just a vocal feature, PinkPantheress added her own spin on the production, speeding up the tempo. “I was really into her music, and I came to find out she was a fan of my music too. I was like, ‘Oh really?’ The link-up was easy, ’cause a lot of people that work for her we already knew. We did the first idea in the studio together, but ‘Snap My Finger’ came up two years after that session, and then it was a whole different song. We had to change the drums to it, because she loves to take beats and make them faster. I loved the vision, how she experimented with the production side. She’s a genius, man!”

For Kaytranada, music is a bountiful and endless source of discovery. He doesn’t make a distinction between the new and old records that he finds. Everything he’s hearing for the first time is new to him — and the best songs never really age. It’s the reason he called the latest album ‘Timeless’. This is a suite of songs designed to last, like the vintage classics he uncovers when digging in the digital crates. “Good music doesn’t really have an expiration date,” he says. “I’m still discovering records, and it’s like, ‘Oh, that came out in 1987, oh, that came out in ’73’. It’s still new music to me. A lot of songs and albums out there are timeless, and that’s how I approached it.”

Louis Kevin Celestin was born in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince, moving with his parents to the Montreal suburbs not long after. He was surrounded by music growing up: his mother was in a choir and his dad had a big sound system. Kay had piano lessons for a while, and when he was around 11-years-old, he started to tune into hip-hop. Jay-Z’s ‘The Black Album’ was the first record that really turned his head. “It had all these amazing producers featuring on the album,” he remembers. “Jay-Z made a documentary about it, that had so many studio sessions where you see Pharrell, Just Blaze, Kanye, Rick Rubin, all of them. Seeing how the music was being made, all of those things I wasn’t aware of, that made me so interested in making beats. It got me dialled in to the producer thing, where I was studying album credits.”

Around 2007, he started listening to J Dilla. Though he says he “didn’t get” the pioneering Detroit rap producer’s instrumental record ‘Donuts’ on first listen, he was still fascinated by the beats. Dilla would quickly become a key influence. “That also opened the whole world of beat-making in LA, and Madlib.”

While Kaytranada’s brother Louis-Philippe (aka MC Lou Phelps) was obsessed with hip-hop too, his sisters were into house music. Kay started to dig into that world also; to start with, it was dance-pop like David Guetta and Calvin Harris, but he soon uncovered stuff that resonated with him more. “I found Daft Punk, Justice, Ed Banger Records,” he says. “Justice was my obsession, that ‘Cross’ album. I bought that album without even thinking, without expecting nothing. I put hip-hop behind me for a year and I was making all this house, flipping samples. I think that’s where I got my four-on-the-floor obsession, thinking, ‘OK, I’ll make dance music’. Later on, I came back to hip-hop. I was really into Dilla, Madlib, The Neptunes, and then Daft Punk and Justice, DJ Mehdi, all these guys — it was a combination of those two worlds.”

Around the age of 14, when his parents divorced, he started to get into making music himself — and DJing. His brother showed him how to use FruityLoops, and he got VirtualDJ on his laptop. Crafting his singular style, combining his influences, Kay began making beats for his brother to rap over, and they teamed up as The Celestics, releasing one album, ‘Supreme Laziness’. Meanwhile, Kay began to gravitate towards a musically-likeminded creative crew in his hometown. Artbeat Montreal became a hub for beat-makers, artists like Shash’U and High Klassified, plus graffiti writers and designers. One producer seemed to shine more brightly than most, though. Going by the name of Kaytradamus at the time, Kay was already making beat tapes, and his stylistic stamp sounded distinctive. Kay realised that perhaps he had created something special that stood out.

“It was showcasing a lot of beat-makers, and it was shocking to see a whole community in Montreal of people making beats. When I showed my beats to people — no disrespect to anyone in Montreal — they had a different reaction,” he says, reminiscing on a pivotal moment in his life. “They had a higher effect. People were like, ‘Wow, where did this kid come from?’ ‘He’s from the suburbs of Montreal.’ I was like, ‘OK, this is gonna be serious’.”

The next-gen rhythms emanating from Artbeat briefly got tagged as “piu piu”. Mirroring somewhat the LA beat scene pioneered by Flying Lotus, Samiyam, Ras G and other artists on the Brainfeeder label, and influenced by the IDM of Warp Records, Montreal had its own thing going on, with Artbeat events allowing upcoming producers to showcase their sounds. Still, Kaytranada, with his house influences, brought something unheard to the table. His big break came when an unofficial remix he’d made of Janet Jackson’s ‘If’ — a parade of infectious house claps, 808 bass booms and wonky rhythms with wiggly funky worm synths — blew up overnight. Getting thousands of likes and plays on his SoundCloud, it was posted to an influential YouTube channel too.

“When I dropped ‘If’ is when I saw worldwide recognition. I was not used to these likes, at the time it was like, ‘Woah!’” he laughs, imitating the expression on his face when he saw the online reaction. “That was like the second confirmation, like ‘OK, this is what I’m gonna do’.” Kay wasn’t doing well in school at the time, and his parents weren’t thrilled that he wanted to focus on music as a career. Still, things stayed on an upwards trajectory.

Soon his unofficial remixes and edits of artists like Jill Scott and Teedra Moses were making a huge noise too. After releasing several singles on Jakarta Records and on Brodinski’s Bromance label, Kaytranada came to the attention of the UK’s pre-eminent independent XL Recordings, who signed him for several EPs and a debut Kaytranada album. In 2016, he released the brilliant ‘99.9%’, a record that over 15 tracks introduced his wide-ranging but distinctive mix of R&B, rap, house and electronica. With mid-tempo house grooves like ‘One Too Many’, featuring Phonte, the tripped-out trap rhythms and ‘Valley Of The Shadows’ synth arps of ‘Drive Me Crazy’ with rapper Vic Mensa, and the infectious disco boogie of ‘You’re The One’, with The Internet’s Syd, it brought Kaytranada widespread acclaim.

As he evolved from an underground beat-tape hero into a producer to the stars, everyone suddenly wanted to know about Kay’s sound, and how he’d come up with this unique combination. Looking back, he credits not only the mix of sounds he’d listened to growing up, but also those rare instances on rap and R&B albums when artists would vocalise over a more uptempo beat. Singling out Missy Elliott’s house tune ‘4 My People’, Tweet’s ‘Make Ur Move’, and Busta Rhymes track ‘Make It Hurt’ (produced by J Dilla), he notes that these tracks had something different which caught his ear, but which few other producers seemed to have picked up on. Despite the brief trend for ‘hip-house' in the early ’90s, the genres had rarely been mixed in such a way.

“That mix of sounds was definitely something that I tried, and thought, ‘This sounds so crazy, I’ve never heard anything like it’. A lot of R&B albums in the 2000s would have those interesting upbeat songs. I think those songs are really the blueprint. They’re making four-on-the-floor, but it’s got so much soul to it, it’s not just a sample. I’m such a hip-hop nerd that I wanted to try and approach house music, but through a hip-hop lens, put it through that filter. That created what it is. That was my obsession, and it’s still my obsession to this day. It sounded really good the first time I did it... it was something that I wouldn’t really see people do, and then I think from that point on, I was like, ‘Why didn’t I think of this before?’ It allowed me to start doing that thing.”

Another artist who’s successfully mixed aspects of house and hip-hop is Los Angeles-based rapper and producer Channel Tres. He’s collaborated with Kay several times, and at some point, there’s plans to do an album project together. “Kay is my dude,” Channel says. “I feel lucky to have met so many great people through music, and he’s one of the standouts. He’s the type of person you learn from, often simply through his actions and demeanour versus what he says aloud. You can hear in his music how much he loves and appreciates the art form, and those are the type of people with whom I like to surround myself.”

Just before he released ‘99.9%’, Kaytranada came out as gay in an interview with The Fader. As his renown had grown, so had his unhappiness, and he felt he needed to be outspoken about his sexuality for both himself and for others. “At the time, it was just to confirm to myself and to my brain and to the world that I am indeed gay, because I was gay all my life but I definitely suppressed it,” he told Billboard magazine in 2023. As a hip-hop head, he’d found the homophobic lyrics in some rap troubling, and had wondered how he could reconcile that with his own identity. The answer, he says, was to open up so other queer hip-hop artists and fans would see some representation and feel less isolated.

“I came out partly for that reason, to just push the boundaries of music, to have more variety, because before 2016, around that time there was no representation,” he says. “I was thinking in my teenage years, ‘Am I going to pretend not to be gay for the rest of my life?’ It was for myself and for the kids that looked up to me, and all the other artists in hip-hop or dance music who needed someone to look up to and think, ‘You’re not alone’. When I came out, there were a lot of people who were telling me they were going through the same things, a similar situation.”

When he was growing up, he felt that the dance music world was a kind of escape, but was surprised when he delved into house history and discovered its Black and queer roots in Chicago and New York — as it seemed like that history had been almost erased from the modern iteration. “There seemed to be more acceptance in the dance world, but even there, it was not a main focus. I wouldn’t say it was homophobic, but I didn’t see gay representation in that world either.”

These roots are more widely celebrated today, with huge stars like Beyoncé tapping into house and making a point of acknowledging its Black and queer beginnings, while queer rappers and R&B singers are more visible than they were in 2016. As if to highlight that point, Kaytranada’s sinuously synth-strewn remix of Beyoncé’s ‘Cuff It’ has been a huge hit online, but still remains unofficially released — for now.

After the release of ‘99.9%’, Kaytranada was much in-demand as a producer, making tracks for Anderson .Paak, Mary J. Blige, The Internet, Kelela and Bishop Nehru among many others. His backing vocals appeared on Kendrick Lamar track ‘Lust’, and he remixed Rihanna. Signing to major label RCA, his second album ‘Bubba’ appeared in 2019. Similarly star-studded, it was 17 tracks deep, and found him experimenting again with a variety of styles. While ‘September 21’ harked back to the lo-fi instrumental beats and electro bass of his old days, ‘10%’ with Kali Uchis was a synthy ’80s boogie update, ‘What You Need’ was an irresistible earworm with Charlotte Day Wilson’s effortless soul vox, and ‘Midsection’, featuring Pharrell, was a five-minute funk jam, with scratchy guitar and organic percussion. As a lifelong fan of The Neptunes, Kaytranada says that working with Pharrell was surreal in the extreme.

“He was doing this Apple Music show and was interviewing me, and he was talking about my music,” Kay recalls. “He was saying all these things like, ‘Your sound is unique’. Just praising me, and I was like, ‘This is so him too, to be humble and showing love and giving flowers’. He was like, ‘We need to do a whole project together’, and I’m like, ‘... OK!’ To have songs with him in my discography... he’s one of my gods, that I really studied, him and [Neptunes co-producer] Chad Hugo of course.”

‘Bubba’ netted Kaytranada two prestigious Grammy awards in 2021: one for Best Dance Recording (for ‘10%’), and the other for Best Dance/Electronic Album (for ‘Bubba’). He was the first Black and openly gay artist to win in these categories. As the event occurred in March 2021, pandemic restrictions were still enforced, and the awards took place virtually. Still, Kay remembers being bowled over by the experience. “I didn’t expect to win, ’cause there was such a crazy list of nominees, like Disclosure, Baauer, Diplo I think was in it,” he says. “It was a list of all giants in one nomination. It was like, ‘What the hell? This can’t be real life.’ It felt amazing, something unexplainable.”

Around the same time, he moved to Los Angeles. Partly, it was to escape being recognised constantly, which he found uncomfortable in Montreal, as LA had famous people by the dozen. Also, it was to be closer to the beating heart of the music industry. “In terms of my musical career, it was the best thing I could have done. As a musician to be taken seriously, that’s what I had to do.” In 2023, he released ‘Kaytraminé’, an album-length collab with rapper Aminé, which had another Pharrell featuring track, ‘4EVA’, a song that Kay says drew some influences from the Haitian genre he’d hear growing up — compas.

Though a more overtly hip-hop project than Kaytranada’s solo material, there was plenty of experimentation too, with the samba rhythms of ‘Sossaup’ and synthwave touches of ‘EYE’ with Snoop Dogg proving that every album is an opportunity for him to try fresh ideas. Kay claims there’s plenty of unreleased material in the archives that is more experimental still. There’s other genres he wants to try, but he wants to make sure he gives 100% and masters a style before revealing it to the public. “I always was experimental, I always wanted to try new things. There’s a lot of unreleased stuff that I’m like... maybe people aren’t gonna like it, ’cause it’s so different. Amapiano stuff, stuff like that.”

Dance music is a constant influence, French house in particular, and Kay singles out artists like Alan Braxe, Fred Falke and Siriusmo, as well as Detroit dons Moodymann and Theo Parrish and Atlanta’s hazy house hero Moon B. Though he’s known for collaborative tracks these days, Kay acknowledges that working with other artists is a process of compromise — and isn’t always easy. As a producer who first made an impression with his experimental hip-hop beats and sample-heavy grooves, he concedes there’s always a balance to be struck between accessibility and self- expression. “I do feel like I need vocals on my songs. It’s bittersweet for me, I think my beat sounds nice and it’s just a four-bar loop, but damn... I need a vocal!” he says. “Of course I’ve taken influence from producer albums, and as a producer who is a main artist, I have to reach out to vocalists to make a complete album.”

Nowadays, Kay makes his music with Native Instruments software and especially its Maschine groovebox controller. Talking about his production process, Kay gets animated, and you can sense how much he loves the process of meticulously constructing his tracks. “When I got into Maschine, I feel like things really expanded for me. I just think there was a lot of limitation before. I’m really self-taught — since I was 14, I was using my ear to come up with nice chords. I would never actually pick up an instrument and play, I would just draw in stuff [on the software], do automation and all that. That was me being uneducated and underdeveloped. With Maschine, there was more touch, more hands-on, more expansions. I could play synth solos and all that. That was really an eye-opening experience.”

Though known best as a producer, Kay has also DJed since his teens. Starting out on laptop programs, he moved on to Traktor with hardware controllers. When he plays live, he sequences his tracks in a continuous mix, and considers it more like a DJ set than a typical live performance. When he’s deep in the mix (or when he’s creating a beat in the studio), Kay says that he loses himself and goes into a hypnotic state. “DJing was always a passion for me as well, and even if I don’t scratch and cut, I always try to sound good, like I’m having a good time,” he comments. “When you’re in a trance and you realise you’re DJing right now, at that very moment, it goes hand-in-hand with when I make music and everything just happens. It’s like a spiritual experience. It’s crazy, it’s hard to explain. Where you zone out, and then you come back, and when it ends you realise, ‘Oh my god, I’m still here’.”

Looking ahead, Kaytranada has plenty of other projects to keep busy with. He’s producing the new album by his brother Lou Phelps, which will be something of a reunion of their old Celestics duo. There’s something with Mick Jenkins, Larry June has asked to collaborate, and there’s the possibility of the much-mooted Channel Tres / Kaytranada album, plus other records he can’t talk about yet. He promises there’ll be a lot more material coming, and fewer gaps between releases. Eventually, he wants to do a full vocal album on his own. “It’s pressure on me too, ’cause I’ve got to make all these beats, man!” he smiles. “But it’s cool all these people want to collab.”