Living 5,000 miles away from your creative brethren will have you trying to open portals. After being deported from Sweden and moving to Bangkok in 2015, Drain Gang’s Thaiboy Digital has leaned harder into the cult rap crew’s love for rave electronics than any other member, chasing highs in lucid dreams to compensate for sporadic meetups with the boys. Since 2020’s My Fantasy World, DJ Billybool has been his conceptual side project where he imagines himself touring Andromeda as the planet’s No. 1 DJ, culminating in 2025’s DYR, a fever dream of Swedish-language happy hardcore. On Paradise, he goes all-in on becoming the ultimate clubland avatar.
For Paradise and DYR, Thaiboy enlisted production collective swedm®, whose registered name first caused a stir last year when they littered the credits of Skrillex’s F*CK U SKRILLEX YOU THINK UR ANDY WARHOL BUT UR NOT!! <3. Consisting of jamesjamesjames, Varg²™, Eurohead, and Skarp, the outfit nakedly endeavors to reappraise the richly earnest sounds of 2010s Swedish EDM, known for its pointillistic, high-octave melodies and counterpoints that, at their best, imbue big-room propulsion with butterflies in the stomach. Think Avicii, Alesso, Axwell, and other Swedes beginning with other letters. Oklou shares the same melodic grace in her wandering arpeggios, and the spectral balearic timewarp of Torus’ Summer of Love samples Stockholm’s own Eric Prydz. For all the reheated ’90s rave euphoria in pop and club music, a new generation are recognizing the touching optimism that has remained trapped in Tomorrowland aftermovies until now.
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No Swedish EDM producer has worked with a slippery, robo-slurred head voice like Thaiboy’s before. But as understated as he may sound over the aggressively splashing synths, his sincere affection for the genre shines through in the visions of ecstasy, wide skies, and realized dreams he expresses among the superlative cars, brands, and parties in his bars and hooks. The way he rides “Surrendering to the Rhythm” as it builds from ringing piano droplets into a precise trancey tempest manages to whisk up feelings of comfort, longing, juiced-up joy, and above-the-clouds bliss along the way.
To chime with Thaiboy’s love for old-school Tiësto and Basshunter, swedm® split the atom to find Swedish EDM’s roots in Dutch trance and Eurodance. Tracks may start with classy piano, but subtlety is almost never the end product; the group wields sidechains like a bandolier, extracting the maximum possible velocity in every kick while retaining the gooey melodic centre. Thaiboy slips into the million-megawatt production like an old pair of festival shoes, and there are moments where his Eurodance intuition takes over. As soon as airy trance synths introduce “Solitary,” he sees his opportunity to channel Basshunter’s boyish sing-sobbing. The nostalgia trip deepens into adolescent memories of 2000s tech touchpoints. Millennials will get a kick out of hearing the music class icon that is the Yamaha keyboard DJ button echo through “Born Ready,” and closing track “Destiny” grabs a Nokia 3310 for kitschy ringtone pop with a crisp percussive fleck of garage house.
