Kygo talks tropical house, his debut album and living on Cloud Nine - Interview

If you’ve been anywhere near a national radio station in the last 12 months, the chances are you’ve heard one of Kygo’s songs blasting out of it.

Since the release of his breakthrough hit Firestone last year, the Norwegian DJ/producer has dominated the airwaves and introduced a new sound on a global scale: tropical house. “It feels great!” he told us when we phoned him up for a chat. "I feel like I’m in a really good place, and I’m excited to get the music out there and show people what I’ve been up to for the last year and a half.”

Since Firestone’s success – which hit the Top 10 just about everywhere – and follow-ups Stole The Show and Here For You, popstars including Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez have adopted the tropical house sound into their own work, and a number of up and coming producers have jumped on the bandwagon to resounding success (see Jonas Blue's remix of Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car). But Kygo is keen to insist that his debut album, called Cloud Nine, branches into other sounds as well.

“It’s not necessarily easy for a dance act to put together an album,” he explains. “I’ve been working on this for the last year and a half, and I didn’t want to release an album with just the same stuff on it. I wanted to release a proper album that tells a story. There’s a lot of different music on there – the whole mood changes from track to track. I’m really happy with how everything sounds on there and how it works as a whole record.”

One way he’s kept things fresh, he says, is by collaborating with artists who bring their own unique flavour to the table; and it only takes a glance down the album’s tracklist – including Tom Odell, Foxes, Kodaline and James Vincent McMorrow – to realise what he's getting at. As for acts who don’t feature on album that he would have liked to see on there, along with The Weeknd and Coldplay (“they’re big names, so it’s tough to get a session booked in with them”), the one that tops his wish list is Ed Sheeran.

Given it was his remix of Ed’s track I See Fire that brought him to the attention of the world (the audio has over 60 million plays on YouTube), a collaboration seems more than fitting. But as he explains, it’s still a long way off. “I emailed Ed Sheeran about a year ago now and he seemed very up for working on a song. Hopefully he’s on board, but we haven’t discussed it any more than just me asking the question.”

As with any sound of the moment, radio and the charts are now saturated with tropical house; and Kygo is all too aware of it. “It happens to every genre once it becomes popular, and it’s happened with tropical house,” he says. "I feel like it’s happened but no-one is really taking it anywhere. When I’m on Soundcloud or YouTube and see a song is tagged as tropical house, I feel like I know what it’s going to sound like even before I hit play. That’s why I stopped making progressive house three or four years ago – because everything was starting to sound the same there. I really don’t want that to happen with tropical house – it’s really up to me and other good producers to push it into new places and experiment with it."

Does he think he’s succeeded with such a task on Cloud Nine? “Of course!” he laughs, adding: “There’s a lot of people who look at me as just a tropical house producer. With this album, I want to show everyone that I’m a lot more than that. I produce a lot of different types of music. Fragile with Labrinth is a good example of something that sounds completely different to the stuff I’d previously been producing. My favourite songs on the album are when I’ve tried something completely new and it’s worked."

With Cloud Nine out this week, what happens next for Kygo? "Now the album is out, I’ve got to get out there to as many people and promote it! Festival season is starting, so I want to get to as many people as possible around the world and get them listening to it. That's all I really want."

Kygo's debut album Cloud Nine is out now. He headlines Wireless festival in London on July 10.