Chrystal talks The Days' 10 year journey to the Top 10: "It's a long story"

Who is Chrystal?

That's a fair question, since much mystery surrounds the DJ, songwriter, producer and vocalist, who recently scored her first UK Top 10 single with The Days, a hazy electronic tune which recalls the halcyon days of early 2010s dance musc.

But the song's journey to Official Charts glory - it's so far peaked at Number 5 and has spent a total of seven weeks inside the UK Top 40 - is not such an easy tale. The song itself is at least 10 years old, and comes from a time in 2015 when Chrystal was preparing to release music under a previous label deal (she's now signed to Polydor imprint Chaos). 

Never released at the time, it was only upon encouragement from her family and friends that Chrystal uploaded The Days and a whole host of material that had been canned in the last decade. 

Below, we talk to the Bolton-born DJ about her long road to a career breakthrough (it's true what they say, every overnight sensation takes 10 years of hard work) and how it feels to get her flowers in 2025.

Who is Chrystal? Let's find out together.

The Days was originally written in 2015, can you give us the story behind the genesis of the song and what inspired you?

When I made the beat for the song, I wanted it to be something that would go off in the club or at festivals. At the time I was either going to raves or performing at them with my sister so I was paying attention to how the crowd reacted to different parts of a song and took inspiration from that by trying to write a vocal that people could catch on to.

Who are some of your biggest inspirations as a writer and a producer? We can definitely hear Disclosure’s Settle has an influence – would you agree?

I agree with the Disclosure influence, their music was just so fresh at the time, when I first heard White Noise, I felt like I’d never heard anything like that before. I loved Timbaland as a producer growing up, I was obsessed with his choice of sounds and samples & artists like Missy Elliot, Aaliyah. All the 90s/00s RnB & producers really. UK garage & bassline too and being from Bolton I was very heavily influenced by bounce music as a teenager, CDs of live sets always got passed around and copied from clubs like Wigan Pier, Cricketers, Maximes. And Max Martin is probably one of if not my favourite producer and songwriter of all time.

The Days in its original form actually sounds like an interesting precursor to Peggy Gou, too, who didn’t debut until 2016 – you were ahead of the curve!

It felt really freeing to release all of my old music. I had been making music for so long and had made it the main goal in my life for over a decade too but if you looked for me online before you would hardly find anything and I wasn’t happy about that. So when I actually did release everything and saw all the songs there, around 40 tracks, I just felt better and this was before anything even took off.

Now a decade after its initial conception, your family and friends all persuaded you to start uploading your unreleased tracks right? How did it feel to get them out in the world after such a long time?

My family and friends were such a huge part of me releasing this music, they’d been asking me for years to upload this stuff. When they saw that I’d finally done it they were so happy!

My sister kept me updated, when it first got a few thousands views, we were buzzing about it! And it just kept growing. My daughter also told me there were trends happening on Snapchat too and I think that crossed back over to TikTok.

TikTok has been integral to the success of The Days – when did you realise it was first going viral? Social media and streams weren't such a large part of releasing and promoting music as it was when you first started to release music - how are you manging this change?

I think social media was a big part of it back then too but TikTok has really changed the way things work, in an amazing way cause it feels like you can cut through to the people that matter, which is the people who wanna hear your music!

How has it been seeing people all over the world react to your song like this?

It’s been an amazing but emotional journey to be honest. I’d given up being an artist, cause I’d said to myself, you tried your best but know when it’s time to quit. So when I released this music, in my mind I’d retired as an artist and my new goal was to be a songwriter so then for my old music to take off to now hearing my voice being played all over the world, it’s just incredible.

Can you give us a little insight into your journey as an artist?

 It’s feels really hard to give just a little insight because it such a long story but in short I’m just someone who loved making music and wanted to share that with the world.

What are you looking forward to in the immediate future?

Right now I'm sticking to songwriting and production, practicing my live set and being in the studio as much as I can, going with the flow and seeing what happens next!

The Days by Chrystal is out now via Polydor.