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Tyears ago, Porter Robinson was on top of the world. When he wasn’t playing clubs across continents or headlining festivals, he was behind the decks in Las Vegas, where he had his own residency. While his friends were cracking books and doing keg stands at college, he was on tour with dance music demigods Tiësto and Skrillex. He became the first artist to be signed to the latter’s label, and even cracked the UK Top 10 with “Language” – the blissed-out, fists-up party anthem off his first EP, which got so much traffic upon release that it crashed the popular EDM website Beatport. All this, and he was only 21.
Robinson was on the cusp of having it all. Dance music, once considered a European niche, was finally landing on the shores of mainstream America, and Robinson was among those at its frontier. Then, seemingly overnight, he threw it away. “It sounds dramatic, but it was like a switch,” Robinson, now 31, tells me from his North Carolina home. “I was on stage in Australia, and I began disassociating. I was drunk and feeling zero passion for what I was doing. “I turned to my manager and told him I couldn’t keep doing it, that it had to stop… I had a bit of a meltdown.”
It’s been a long time since Robinson was a DJ, but the prefix has stuck around as prefixes tend to do. Now, he’s hoping to shake it for good with his new album SMILE!
