cousin.world is a regular newsletter on streaming and the global music industry.

Each week, I’ll update one of these four playlists with ten ascendant tracks from global markets and provide analysis to explain how they’re breaking:

• run ⇡ — club tracks from euro & UK dancefloors

• cherry soda ⚭ — breaking k/c/p-pop, city pop and indie

• the grid ✚ — sounds of urbano, reggaeton, funk

• magnitude △ — afrobeat, dancehall and amapiano rising

For the third edition of run ⇡, I speak to the PR mastermind behind everyone’s favourite horse-cum-DJ horsegiirL. Plus: Norwegian nostalgia, Belgian techno and two of the UK’s biggest success stories in recent years: PinkPantheress and Fred again.

This playlist is about club music exports from the UK and Europe. Next week, cherry soda ⚭ is back on the Asian pop beat.

Message me back to chat or argue and forward this to please anyone who might be into it 😊🫰

run ⇡ 

1. horsegiirL — ‘f0rbiidden l0ve$tory’ (Germany)

‘f0rbiidden l0ve$tory’ is the latest release from horsegiirL, a Berlin-based producer and DJ who also happens to be a horse.

horsegiirL first came to prominence via a run of single releases in 2022 that led to her debut EP Farm Fatale. This session for HÖR was also widely shared at the time and is currently sitting bang on 700k views.

Fast forward to June of this year and horsegiirL was having her first bonafide TikTok hit with the single ‘My Barn My Rules’ alongside regular collaborator MCR-T. The track has since been used in almost 160k other videos on the platform and has 13m streams on Spotify. horsegiirL releases under the electronic label Live From Earth.

What I love about this project is that it seems like everyone involved is having a lot of fun. Her press has been consistently great, starting with an inspired interview with British country life magazine Horse & Hound before climbing to high tier style titles like Dazed and i-D with horse puns aplenty.

I actually am such a fan of the press campaign that I reached out to her rep at Toast, Ruth Hodder, to get the vibe:

Hey Ruth! What do you love about horsegiirL?

RH: “I guess if I were to dissect what initially drew me to her, I think it's that she revives what the core mission of dance music is: fun! I feel like I'd kind of turned my back on club music/culture after hearing Ben Klock 'Subzero' played by white affluent lads from Dublin more than I'd heard my own mother's voice in college. The whole scene just had this ominous, insecure & largely anti-girl atmosphere tbh. Cue horsegiirL!

Can you tell me a bit about your publicity strategy?

RH: “The thing about this project when it came to press is that it's obviously super mental, my tactic was to come at it with as much delusionality as the artist. horsegiirL's not really the type of artist who needs reviews or a traditional campaign in that sense, it's a campaign that needs a collaborative/ creative approach and most importantly, a fan at the helm. I used Miss Piggy as a blueprint. I thought 'who's non-human, fabulous and has been on the cover of Sports Illustrated?' She has!

In the dance outlets that initially may come to mind for this, you may have your techno purists denying that the music or her presence is legit (thankfully this rhetoric is quickly drowned out by the previously mentioned groups coveting the space she creates!) This is where Horse & Hound came to mind. I hit up every single person I could find who worked at the magazine pitching as hard as I could hahah and somehow someone there thought, fuck it, sounds good.

As far as what's coming next, I really mean that she is just getting started. The main agenda is to just keep having fun and being creative with it!”

Thank you Ruth!! ❤️ 

horsegiirL is playing a sold out night at The Cause in London tonight!

2. Alan Walker, Dash Berlin & Vikkstar — ‘Better Off (Alone, pt III)’ (Norway)

Just when you thought every banger from our youth had already been re-released in the last 2 years, Alan Walker has thought of another one. ‘Better Off Alone Part III’ is a cover of Alice Deejay’s iconic and much better original from 1999.

Pop, rap and electronic music are all in the grips of a years-long nostalgia boom and it’s a bit unclear as to why. Is it less of a risk to release a song that has already proven itself to be successful? Is it just easier to do this than to write and produce a new song? Is nostalgia a society-wide retreat back to the comfort of better times in the face of an uncertain future of pandemics and climate breakdown???

The nostalgia trend has been written about a lot already. Here are some good takes:

• “Our Obsession With Nostalgia is Driving a Trend Revival Spiral” — THE FACE

•  “Amid a rash of cheesy samples, is UK rap running out of ideas?” — GUARDIAN 

• “This is why we’re so obsessed with 90s and 00s nostalgia right now” — STYLIST

Back to Alan Walker. On Spotify alone he has almost 30m monthly streams — for comparison, Steve Aioki has 17m, Skrillex has 20.4m.

6.6m of Alan Walker’s monthly listeners are based in India where EDM is unbelievably massive. The country is home to a bunch of major EDM festivals including Asia’s biggest, Sunburn. Here’s an interview with Alan Walker on Rolling Stone India that explains how it became his top market.

3. PinkPantheress — ‘Capable of love’ (UK)

PinkPantheress’ debut album Heaven Knows is out next Friday, Nov 10.

In many ways, it feels like PinkPantheress represents a best case scenario for contemporary artists breaking out of the UK. Since the release of her debut single ‘Break It Off’ a little over 2 years ago, she has collected 3 UK top 40 singles, various award nominations, major co-signs from artists like Skrillex and Ice Spice, and built up 23m monthly streams on Spotify. This has also been irrespective of her label situation — by the time she had signed to Parlophone (later to be quietly relocated to Atlantic) she had already built an audience on TikTok by herself.

Perhaps unbeknownst to her, PinkPantheress also became the blueprint for A&R practices centred around signing directly from TikTok. Today, developing artists and their teams around the world are investing significant time, money and precious new music into the platform lottery hoping they can also win big.

At the same time as a small handful of artists are finding accelerated routes to success on these networks, a conversation has been rumbling about the wider inability of the Industry to break new artists. In this piece for Billboard, Elias Leight outlines that music execs are struggling to build audiences for new artists because the landscape is too saturated — figures suggest 120,000 tracks per day are being added to services. An anonymous exec is quoted in the piece saying: "Each person I talk to in the industry is more depressed [about this] than the person I talked to before them. Nobody knows how to break music right now, everyone is lost”.

A similar discussion over on Reddit suggests that the lean towards signing directly from TikTok has shifted the industry’s focus away from long term artist development and onto cheap hits. In a lot of ways, this is antithetical to PinkPantheress’ approach which seems to have focused primarily on cultivating a lasting connection with her audience. Now that she has transcended the platform she built it with and become one of the most popular new artists on earth both on and offline, it seems like TikTok was probably just one tool in the box after all.

4. Fred again.., Jozzy — ‘ten’ (UK)

I know. I’ve read the takedown pieces, I’ve heard the nepotism accusations and I’ve seen the tweets.

Fred again is still inarguably one of the biggest success stories in British electronic music in recent years and bears writing about on that basis. His latest single ‘ten’, released two weeks ago, is a collaboration with US songwriter Jozzy, responsible for some songs you might have heard of like ‘Old Town Road’ and 21 Savage’s ‘Mr. Right Now’. She was announced in 2022 as the first signee of Diddy’s Love Records.

Despite pockets of the internet turning on Fred again for a variety of reasons — clock how Mixmag, who gave him a cover in 2021, are writing about him this year — he has spent the last four years building an enormous audience together with his team at Atlantic. His set for Boiler Room last year quickly became the third most popular video on the channel with 25m views. One of his crowning achievements this year was a triple-billed party at Madison Square Garden alongside Four Tet and Skrillex. The 20,000 capacity show sold out in just 3 minutes.

5. Charlotte de Witte — ‘Power of Thought’ (Belgium)

Belgian techno producer and DJ Charlotte de Witte released her latest EP a couple of weeks ago. Power of Thought was released under de Witte’s own club night and label brand KNTXT.

Back in 2019, de Witte gave a great keynote interview for IMS where she discusses international touring, her favourite markets to play and some of the challenges she faces while on the road. In that same year, she had played over 130 sets globally alongside the running of her KNTXT label. KNTXT has also been annually hosting its own stage at Tomorrowland in Belgium.

This year, de Witte and KNTXT have brought their show to AMF, Ultra, Parklife, Movement, Junction 2, Rock en Seine, Lovefest, Glitch, Emerge, Portola and the closing party of Amnesia in Ibiza, among others. She will bring the show to London on December 9th for a party at the new 15k capacity venue Drumsheds.

+ Five More…

6. Actress — ‘Its me ( g 8 )’ (UK)

Almost two decades after the debut Actress release on the party and label collective Werkdiscs in 2004, the UK producer’s ninth album LXXXVIII is out today via Ninja Tune. Actress is also on the cover of the latest issue of Mixmag.

7. Maddix, Fēlēs — ‘My Gasoline’ (Netherlands)

Currently topping Spotify’s flagship techno playlist TECHNO BUNKER (2.3m followers) is this track about drugs from Dutch producers Maddix and Fēlēs.

8. Sevdaliza, Grimes — ‘Nothing Lasts Forever’ (Netherlands/Canada)

Read more about this collab between heavyweight electronic artists Grimes and Sevdaliza over on Pitchfork. This is the second single out this year from Sevdaliza following the release of ‘Ride or Die’ in June.

9. TSHA, Ellie Goulding, Gregory Porter — ‘Somebody’ (UK)

TSHA was Beatportal’s cover artist for the month of October. Her latest release is this collab with Ellie Goulding and Gregory Porter, released last month on Ninja Tune.

10. Hodge — ‘Voice Crash’ (UK)

A Bristol affair. Hodge’s new single ‘Voice Crash’ is the first taken from an EP of the same name due for release on Nov 17th via the Bristol label TIMEDANCE.

The Playlists