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Thaiboy Digital
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“All my dreams come true.”
Thaiboy Digital has always aspired for more. Since exhaling these words over a numinous haze on his debut mixtape Tiger (2014), the Khon Kaen-born rapper and fashion designer has made a dream career out of his undeniable confidence and infectious positivity amid the vicissitudes of life. Yet his 2022 album Back 2 Life marked a turning point. While his Drain Gang colleagues were searching for a sunshine that seemed that it would never peek over the horizon, Thaiboy found it in his home country of Thailand: marrying the love of his life, raising his two daughters to play “Deutsche Bank” on piano, and becoming Mr. CEO of his own label Bank of Star Sound System (B.O.S.S.S.). The best Thaiboy Digital tracks have always been victory laps, testaments to the trail of broke haters that he’s left in the dust. Yet Back 2 Life was Thaiboy as sunbeam rather than shadow, a triumphant artist showering his fans with live-giving affirmations: “Thaiboy Digital, true love unconditional / This life is a miracle.”
Last year’s DYR, the first full-length album on B.O.S.S.S. under his trance alias DJ Billybool, summed up his modus operandi while signaling the sounds to come. Meaning “expensive” in Swedish and also standing for “Dream Your Reality,” the title alone evoked two familiar images: one of a cosmopolitan playboy stacking bills, and the other of a dreamer who’s made it, sharing some of the light that brought him this far. DYR was as much a nod to the future as a nostalgic glance to the past. The quadrilingual artist’s first record entirely in Swedish, DYR was an intergalactic saga propelled by hyperspeed supersaws from Woesum and contraband reverb plugins traced back to shadowy collective swedm®.
The partnership with swedm® builds on a shared instinct for maximal feeling. Formed by established figures within Sweden’s electronic underground, swedm® operates as a true supergroup, a convergence of producers whose individual work has already helped preserve the global rave continuum. Notably, members Varg²™ and Eurohead played a pivotal role in shaping Skrillex’s Grammy nominated album F*CK U SKRILLEX, with support from fellow swedm® member jamesjamesjames, underscoring how deeply embedded swedm® are within contemporary EDM’s evolving architecture, channelling a widescreen sound that fuses trance euphoria with forward-facing production muscle.
United by a shared penchant for finding light in the darkness, Thaiboy and swedm®’s freezer-burnt bangers hover between the poles of sorrow and ecstasy much like the vastness of ocean connects Lapland and Queensland. It’s a mission that the Swedish trance conservators have been pursuing since 2024, resisting the business techno police with support from overseas allies like Skrillex and Malibu. Tracks like “STOCKHOLMSVECKAN” are a studied pursuit of their calling: combining balearic dream states with gritty, industrial sound design, they keep the Swedish EDM legacy alive, one euphoric drop at time, as Thaiboy Digital and swedm® meet at the intersection of rap swagger and mainstage transcendence.
Thaiboy’s upcoming album Paradise expands on this high-octane sound. Reuniting with swedm®, Thaiboy switches back to English for a series of transnational club anthems: insouciant bars like “Fly it to Japan / Make money overseas and spend it in Thailand” strut over syncopated synths on “Silk Road.” The looming bass of hard-hitting single “Euro Dollar Yen” evokes dark, smoky basements while “Zatoichi” leverages transcendent arps for a space voyage. “Destiny” keeps things skippy and light with a bit of a French filter house touch; “Born Ready” brings a bit of over-the-top TranceParty gravitas with a cresting tsunami of synths that crashes over an onslaught of kicks. As the rave winds down, “Irish Tears” evokes the sun peeking over the horizon, Bladee’s signature croon floating in a temperate ecosystem of lush chord stabs and unhurried four-on-the-floor kicks.
Thaiboy’s unique draw comes in his ability to combine cold Scandinavian emotionality with a penchant for getting lit baked into his DNA. With roots in the northeastern region of Isan, Thaiboy Digital (born Thanapat Thaothawong) first learned how to party from mor lam concerts in the rural outskirts of his hometown. The traditional Lao storytelling genre, driven by a cowbell-and-bass groove, informed Thaiboy’s earliest sense of rhythm as he hopped into the backs of pick-up trucks with the rest of the town’s children just to get a taste of the party. “It built rhythm into my core personality when it comes to music, or turning up, or dancing,” he says. “I tend to want to go all out.”
This is Thaiboy at his essence: feeling the vibe, going off his gut, expressing himself vocally but also beyond words. Though he speaks the most languages out of his Drain Gang compatriots, Thaiboy eschews lyrical esotericism, opting instead to channel his heart-on-the-sleeve energy with lyrics and delivery that are often more feeling than mystique. It’s no wonder that his go-with-the-flow approach to music mirrors his approach to cooking, his other expressive outlet. “I see music in cooking, same way I see cooking in music, too,” he says. When he cooks his signature fuqi feipian, a Sichuan dish he picked up from local Chinese restaurants, he doesn't measure out quantities. “I do it by heart, by eye. I see it, I feel it. I do the same thing with a song. Before I would overthink a lot, but now I cook the song the same way I do the fuqi feipian salad.”
Thaiboy’s new era has just begun; The dream has become reality. Facing a whole new world of possibility, Bank of Star is investing in the fantasies of the future.
Whitearmor
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