The new release ‘Big Boy’ from Sleeveless Records just dropped, a collaboration between Stylust and Torbjørn. This first came to Sleeveless as the standout track on an EP submitted by Torbjørn. Stylust heard some hidden potential in one of the tunes, and a submission quickly turned into a collaboration as he added the deep dub spin and west coast bass twist.
The project started on Torbjørn’s laptop about a year prior, while on a US tour with Dark Time Sunshine. And almost exactly a year later, it debuted in front of thousands at Shambhala festival with the Stylust and Sleeveless stamps on it, ‘Big Boy’ may be a late addition to the 2022 list of releases, but for dubstep fans it’s an instant classic and possible front runner.
Sound design wise, the track features a rollercoaster big epic synth fanfare to deep bass lines. The main melody, played by a big distorted FM synth lead, gives the song an eastern and modal feeling off top. “Every song I make needs to feel some sense of story,” Torbjørn says. “It needs to have a clear person / place / thing that identifies it. The big synth lead was like my ‘establishing shot,’ trying to place the listener in a desert or someplace sandy, hot, and dry.”
After a big upgrade to the sound design, thanks to Stylust’s tasteful dubstep wobbles, the two producers met for one final session at Stylust’s studio in Oregon. “We tried adding and inflating and stacking sounds,” says Torbjørn, “but ultimately in the end we found that just dubbing out the bassline with lazers and echo effects, and incorporating this vocal chop was all the tune really needed. Sometimes as a tune progresses, less is more, especially when the initial drop is so stylized like this one!”
Stylust titled the song ‘Big Boy’, a name that fell in his lap during his initial session with the tune. Torbjørn recalls, “Stylust asked me, ‘if there were some kind of big stoned character that represents this tune, what animal would it be,’ and after we deliberated the most fitting desert animal to be a big stoney dubstep guy… we landed on the armadillo and just thought it was so funny and fitting!”
Los Angeles’ Stylust founded Sleeveless in 2015 and has played alongside Zeds Dead, Slander, Seven Lions, Ganja White Knight and Ill Gates while recently performing at Shambhala and Interstellar Festival. This year on Spotify he racked up over 1 million listens, across 353k listeners.
Following this release, Sleeveless Records released Stylust’s EP, which includes the title track ‘Big Boy’ and three others that you can listen to among other Sleeveless Records selects in the Sleeveless Records Slappers Spotify Playlist. In the future we can except more collaboartions with from Stylust and Torbjørn.
You can learn more about Torbjørn who has made appearances at Untz Festival, Bass Oasis Festival, Santa Cruz Music Festival and Burning Man (opening for Skrillex into Diplo) during our interview around his specially curated Shadows tour.
