Will Jones
TroyBoi celebrated the official release of his FT EP by throwing a sold out pop-up event in Los Angeles with no phones. With the EP out now via Ultra Records, the project runs a lean twenty minutes and gives every one of them to a guest, which for a producer who spent a decade making instrumentals that argued against the necessity of a vocalist is less a pivot than a thesis. Named with the flat shorthand of a streaming credit, it is the London producer’s most social record, and the first to measure his style by how much room it can make for someone else’s.
“A lot of my previous releases have been instrumental-driven records, but this time I wanted to build something around featured artists and explore what happens when different voices meet my production,” Troy Henry says of the project. The framing is modest, though the ambition underneath it is not. “My goal is for artists across different genres to hear this project and think, I’d love to create something with TroyBoi.”
“A lot of my previous releases have been instrumental-driven records, but this time I wanted to build something around featured artists and explore what happens when different voices meet my production,” Troy Henry says of the project. The framing is modest, though the ambition underneath it is not. “My goal is for artists across different genres to hear this project and think, I’d love to create something with TroyBoi.”
What keeps FT from reading as a guest-list exercise is how little the production flinches. “Jungle,” born from Henry’s immediate reaction to Shiwa’s talent, drops reggae and dancehall cadence onto electronic basslines heavy enough to swallow them, and neither side gives ground. “HUSH,” the record’s clear centerpiece, is stranger and better: Daya, a pop vocalist most listeners still file under the Chainsmokers era, sings at close range over low-tempo trap that keeps subtracting until only her breath and an 808 remain. It is the sound of two artists agreeing on restraint.
Elsewhere the map widens. Malaysian hip-hop and R&B artist Zamaera brings a cross-cultural charge to “So Much To Say,” her bars landing with a precision that rewards the space Henry leaves her. “La La Land” pairs his wonky, syncopated melodic instinct with Morray’s raw, soulful hook writing, a peak-time summer record where each artist walks fully into the other’s house. “Picante,” cut during a Los Angeles session where Drew Love of THEY. locked into the same wavelength from the first playback, reaches for Spanish guitar and orchestral color, the most texturally adventurous three minutes here.
The back half is built on patience. “BEAR” arrives after years of mutual respect between Henry and Chicago’s Rockie Fresh, a first official release with more already planned. “Way Better” follows their earlier “Dhunga” and hands Toxic Rob a completely fresh backdrop to flex on, evolving a chemistry rather than repeating it.
That approach makes sense given where Henry started. He built his first beats standing up in the kitchen of a London studio flat with a MacBook and a MIDI keyboard, a producer of Indian, Chinese, Portuguese and Nigerian descent whose sound was cross-cultural before the industry had a word for it. The proof is in the catalogue: his 2018 remix of Billie Eilish’s “MyBoi” has passed 111 million Spotify streams, Rihanna placed two of his tracks in the 2019 Savage x Fenty show broadcast globally on Amazon Prime, and “RedEye” with Justin Bieber sits north of 110 million. INFLUENDO in 2022, SAY LESS in 2023 and 4 ON DA FLOOR in 2024 each tested a different border. FT dissolves them.
“The connective tissue throughout the EP is collaboration,” he adds. “Different artists, different backgrounds, different sounds, all connected by authentic collaborations.”
He is taking that thesis directly to rooms small enough to test it. The headline Hear2Move Tour runs across North America in deliberately intimate venues, several configured in a 360-degree, Boiler Room-style setup that puts the crowd around him rather than in front of him, with stops including Royale in Boston and Brooklyn Steel. It is the correct staging for a record like this one. FT is not a producer stepping back from the center of his own music. It is a producer discovering that the center holds better with company.