Cloonee Designed His Debut Album to Prove ‘I’m Still Me’
Categoria: Musica
The English producer's Are You Still You? is today (Oct. 6).
Por Billboard | 06/10/2026
A few weeks ago, Cloonee called a plumber to come look at a broken pipe at his house on the Westside of Los Angeles, a decidedly unglamorous activity for a jet-setting DJ. After the sink was fixed, Cloonee says, “I was signing the invoice, and the plumber was like, ‘I’ve just got to say, man, I really enjoyed your set.’” This wasn’t long after Cloonee, in a more jet-setting move, hired a company to come over and clean one of his cars. One of the service people showed up in a hat emblazoned with the word “Prospa,” the fellow U.K. artist with whom Cloonee made “Free Your Mind,” one of the biggest dance tracks of the summer. When the guy in the hat saw who was answering the door, his eyes got wide. These days, these moments are happening more and more. “I get stopped all over the place,” Cloonee says from his light-filled living room, which is decorated with skateboard decks and framed concert posters. The real Cloonee sits in a chair across from me, while another stares at me from the coffee table, where there’s a copy of Cloonee’s recent DJ Mag cover. He is, in fact, one of the moment’s main dance guys, a status further cemented today (Oct. 6) with the release of his debut album, Are You Still You? A 16-track project made to smash dancefloors, the LP is out on Cloonee’s own Hellbent Records and was created upstairs in an extra bedroom he turned into a studio. He wasn’t even really trying to make an album, but was just pumping out tunes this past December and January. “I had a folder with loads of music, and when we looked at it, I remember saying to [my manager] James like, ‘I think this might be the album. I don’t know what else I’m supposed to do.’” And so it was. While he and his team — which includes manager James Ahearn, who’s also here with us in the living room — initially planned to release the album early next year to add momentum to some as-yet-unannounced 2027 shows, the momentum was actually already so big that they decided to just drop it now. “I think when ‘Free Your Mind’ started going, we all kind of thought like, “Oh, this is going to be a moment,’” says Cloonee. “It would be stupid to not capitalize on it now.” Indeed, “Free Your Mind” has 208.5 million on-demand official streams globally to date, according to Luminate, and is in its 27th week on Hot Dance/Electronic Songs, where it peaked at No. 4 and is currently at No. 7. Released in March, the track is centered around the hooks from Sybil’s 1993 heater “Oh, How I Love You,” a sample that gives the song a ‘90s feel that also runs throughout Are You Still You? . The sample from the O’Jays’ “Now That We Found Love” — recognizable to most as the sample that forms basis of the 1991 song of the same name by Heavy D & The Boys — made it into Cloonee’s “Get Up and Dance” after he heard Heavy D in a taxi while cruising across Ibiza to Franky Rizardo’s place. “I Shazamed it on the way to his house then sat down and started making the song in his kitchen.R