Industry Weekly

[Soundscape]

Borgeous brings fresh sounds from his debut album home to Hakkasan

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Borgeous returns to Hakkasan on August 21.
Photo: Anthony Mair

Like any musician or artist, Borgeous has occasionally been categorized according to his hits. The smash “Tsunami” reached No. 1 on iTunes in 15 different countries and planted the Las Vegas-based producer and DJ among the brightest new stars in the EDM festival world.

But with his debut album 13—just released August 13—the dynamic yet modest DJ is out to prove his genre-spanning versatility. We spoke to Borgeous about his sonic repertoire days before the album dropped.

What has it been like to finally unleash 13? It’s been close to nine months working on this, so to finally have it come to light and see everything about to come out, it’s exciting.

How do you anticipate your fans and the dance-music audience will react to it? There’s definitely a lot more different things than what people have probably heard from me, so they might be thrown off. At the end of the day, I wanted something you can put on in the car and listen to the whole way through. Your traditional banger EDM songs can be pretty aggressive, because they’re made for playing for 80,000 people. This sound and direction was geared toward something you can play driving to the beach, just throw it on and vibe.

There are plenty of guests on the album, too. Yeah. Me and Lil Jon have been talking about working on a song for the longest time, so that one (“Savage”) was easy. TyDi is a friend, and we finally did something together here (“Wanna Lose You”). And TyDi knew Dia Frampton so that’s how that one (“Over the Edge”) got hooked up. Dia has such an amazing voice and is so talented. It was really just people I wanted to work with, and I’ve done that my whole career. I don’t like to be pigeonholed into one specific genre. Music is all about what you’re going through and how you feel.

The genre you’ve been placed in—electronic dance music—is so broad and constantly changing. Right. The dance genre has evolved so much lately, with artists like Calvin Harris and The Chainsmokers and Diplo and Skrillex collaborating with so many huge artists [from other genres]. I think it only helps the scene grow. Borgeous at Hakkasan at MGM Grand, August 21.

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Brock Radke

Brock Radke is an award-winning writer and columnist who currently occupies the role of editor-at-large at Las Vegas Weekly magazine. ...

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