French maestro Myd has just released his newest album. Mydnight is an incredible piece of work that highlights his various talents. In 2024 alone, he played Printworks, the Greenpeace stage at Glastonbury, and was the sole DJ at the Paralympics Opening Ceremony in Paris. Mydnight is club-focused while staying true to the warm, offbeat energy that defines him. Written and produced between LA and Paris, the album features a handpicked cast of collaborators, including Trueno, Channel Tres, Carlita, Kacy Hill, and more.
We had the opportunity to sit down with Myd, diving into all things Mydnight, his live show and beyond.
Are you excited about the release of Mydnight?
Really excited. You know, the best moment is always in between when you finish the album and when you release it. Because it’s your own thing, no one has heard it. So you have something you really love and it’s… it’s like being pregnant, I guess. I will never be pregnant, and I’ve never been, but I guess it’s like having this thing for yourself and this special relation with your album. You know you will not touch it again; it will change. So yeah, I’m really excited.
What’s the story behind the new album, what inspired it? And what makes it different from your past work?
After my last album, I spent a lot of time in bands and I had all these inspirations I never managed to put into the band and into band music. So I kept that on the side, and then I spent a year in the studio trying to make music using those inspirations and ideas. It was more like a concept I had in mind.
This album was way more spontaneous. I got in the studio after three years of touring between clubs and festivals, playing live and DJing all around the world—from beach parties to crowded festivals. I came back into the studio still sweaty from the club and I started a kind of automatic writing, excited about making music. The music was directly more dance, more club, faster, and way more like club music. More energetic and just focused on high energy.
If someone only hears one song off the record, which would that be and why?
I would say ‘Our Home’. It would be a good introduction as it’s the introduction of the album, and it’s a good bridge between my first album and this album. You can hear my voice, cut and sampled, as I sometimes like to do in my music. I also love the message of introduction. For me, that’s also why I put it almost as an intro for the album—because it totally takes people by the hand and leads them from my last album to this one. So if they are only authorized to listen to one song, that would make them want to listen to the rest of the album.
Your performances are not an average DJ set, with you even singing live. Is that important for you?
That’s important for me, especially because I’m DJing a lot too and people know me for DJing. So it’s important that when I’m doing a live show, I’m showcasing my creative process way more, which is composing, singing, sampling my voice live, and being a bit more me.
What items do you perform with?
Like a studio mixer. I get eight tracks with all my stems going through. For the past 10 years, I did two things: I DJed a lot and I went into the studio a lot. For me, my main instrument—as I’m not a crazy-good instrumentalist—is a desk: a studio desk and a DJ desk. So I was like, what would be the instrument I’m fastest and most creative with? It’s a DJ desk. So I took two rotary mixers that I linked together and tweaked so I can have all my music passing through them, having something closer to the studio workflow and the DJ workflow, but playing it live.
You’ve said before you cherish mistakes and throw things like bird sounds into your mixes. What’s a small, weird, unique studio moment that happened in the process of making this record that really stuck with you?
Interesting… [pauses to think] That’s funny because when I finished the album and was listening to the whole thing, I had this problem with a song named ‘The Wizard’, which was a bit too hard from my perspective, but I really loved it. I tried many versions to sweeten it, like changing the bass sound or sweetening the frequencies. There are many ways to sweeten a song, but the easy way a producer would tell you is to either sweeten all the sounds or sweeten the composition itself—like changing some chords and making it a bit more major and happy. Both didn’t work at all.
So I was like, what could be sweeter? At the time, I was working from a friend’s country house, and I recorded birds again, which was a thing I did on ‘The Sun’. I put these bird sounds in, which you can hear in the song from the beginning to the end, and it totally sweetened the song—weirdly, but in a subtle way. It worked without changing the DNA of the song.
And it’s important to contextualize a song, too. If you’re playing a piano, for example, and you put it in a big cathedral reverb or a hangar reverb, it will make it really ravey. If you put it in a small, wooden room, it will make it really romantic. The context of a song and the way you contextualize your sound is really important in production.
When the world finally hears the new album, what’s the one emotional or memory you hope listeners take from it?
I hope that people will adopt the songs. You know, when you give birth to an album, they’re not your songs anymore. The best things I hear about my songs is when people take them for their own moments. They won’t think, “Oh, it’s MYD’s new track,” but, “Oh, that’s the song that reminds me of that moment, that friend, that helped me in a sad moment, or reminds me of this good moment.” That’s what’s important for me: when the time comes that people definitely adopt the songs into their lives and in their memories.
I think that’s a really beautiful way to put it. When your song becomes a soundtrack to someone’s life…
That’s exactly it. It’s beautiful. That’s why we call it a “hit,” for example. It’s not a hit when it’s on your computer; it’s a hit when lots of people get it in their memories. When there are enough people—I don’t know the number—it becomes a hit. That’s how it works.
Dive into Myd’s incredible new album below.
