FEATURE: Spotlight: Jyoty — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Asafe Ghalib

Jyoty

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THIS incredible D.J…

is currently on a North American tour. Someone who I would love to see and witness one of her sets, I am highlighting her, because I feel like she is one of the best and most inspiring D.J.s in the world. Although I cannot source any interviews from this year, there are some from last year. However, to start out, I am heading back to 2024. NYLON spoke with Jyoty (Jyoty Singh) and her incredible career. They note how “Her friends call her “Little Miss I Played It First” for a reason”. Sets that are so distinct and original, she stands out from her peers. There are sections of the interview I want to drop in:

“If you had an “about me” section on your website, what would it say?

It’s so funny because there is a bio in my press kit, [and] every time I see it, I get so cringey. “She’s built up on a following around the world because of her...” I get it, but no. I would say my “about me” is just, I am a big music fan and a big music consumer. And through the trajectory of what the universe wanted, I have now become a bit of a chaotic human algorithm of putting listeners in touch with artists. That’s the best way I could put it.

You grew up in the Netherlands. What were the club, music, and nightlife scenes there like?

It was amazing. I started clubbing when I was 15, I think. [I was] in a city that is a main stop for many touring artists. We have a lot of smaller venues, and that’s how I got into clubbing. I started going to more hip-hop, rap, dancehall, R&B parties. Around 18, I fell into electronic music through U.K. garage, then fell into two-step and dubstep, and next thing you know, I was going to techno raves.

Does it still feel fun for you to find new stuff?

Every day when I find an actual new banger, [I] get a rush. My friends call me “Little Miss I Played It First.” It’s a rush seeing a crowd react to a song they’ve never heard before, and you know they’ve never heard it before because either it was sent to you or [you] found it on SoundCloud, and it only had 200 or 300 plays.

I’m glad you mentioned TikTok. What are your thoughts about DJing and how it lives on the platform?

I will very honestly say that you can blow up on TikTok, and we’re seeing that with DJs. I went viral on TikTok before I even had a TikTok account; someone posted a clip of my Boiler Room [set], and it went viral. And it’s great until it’s no longer great. Everyone films their sets now. Everyone’s playing drop after drop after drop. The groove is slowly disappearing amongst the TikTok DJs. But I think pre-going-viral, it’s a great way for DJs to experiment, to play, and to get their sound out”.

Let’s move to NOTION and their interview from last August. Speaking with the sensation Jyoty, they sat how “Whether she’s behind the decks or putting together an outfit, Jyoty is all about keeping you guessing. Never playing by the rules, we chat about producing her own music, opening doors for the next generation and finding her own sense of style”. One of the most extensive interviews with Jyoty, last year was a huge one for her:

“Jyoty herself is approaching a decade behind the decks: a milestone she half-jokingly considers the minimum requirement before she can actually call herself a DJ. But don’t let the modesty fool you. Over the last few years, she’s been everywhere, from setting stages alight with genre-hopping sets to launching Homegrown – her own club night where she books the acts, promotes the party, and shuts it down on the decks.

And yet, when we connect on a late afternoon video call, what hits hardest isn’t her resume, it’s her humility. She leans into the screen with the kind of warmth that cuts through WiFi lag. “I think it’s an older generation thing,” she says, musing on the art of DJ etiquette. “My whole heritage is radio. I’m part of a generation that, as a party-goer, you adapt. If the DJ after you plays slower, you meet them at the end of your set.”

But if you’re trying to predict where Jyoty’s set will end, good luck. Her sonic journeys are anything but linear. One moment it’s an Afrobeat-laced dancehall groove, the next it’s 140 BPM mayhem; R&B slides in; grime crashes through. Then, out of nowhere, a Punjabi radio belter flips the switch.

For Jyoty that eclecticism isn’t strategic, it’s instinctual. “I don’t play sounds leading with intentions,” she says. “It’s organic.” Born and raised in west Amsterdam to Punjabi Indian parents, Jyoty’s musical universe was never small. She grew up hustling, waiting tables at her dad’s restaurant at 11, blowing up her mum’s phone bill with MTV request lines before school, sneaking into clubs as a teenager with military precision, and working at a sneaker store, where a parallel love for streetwear was born.

Later came London: university – a master’s degree in political science and philosophy – then office jobs and executive assistant roles. But everything changed when she found herself at Rinse FM. She pitched her own show, landed a Thursday afternoon slot, and started building a cult following that would soon spill offline. In 2019, the internet caught fire over a chaotic, electric Boiler Room carnival special set and Jyoty became a household name, for a set she’s still unsure about. “I can’t even listen back to it,” she laughs, half-embarrassed. “Technically, I didn’t know how to DJ at that time. It sounded so bad. No one expected it to blow up like it did and suddenly I was having to explain to the world, ‘Hey, that’s not even my real sound.’”

PHOTO CREDIT: Alex Rorison

What remains consistent – regardless of the city or the crowd – is that Jyoty plays music with roots. Her sets aren’t meticulously scripted; instead, she selects tracks based on instinct, mood, and cultural resonance. There’s a reverence in the way she DJs, a deep respect for the sounds and scenes that raised her, always paying homage to the source. That same energy fuels her mission to lift others up. She’s constantly plugging rising talent on her socials, booking them at Homegrown, and now teaming up with us, eBay and All Points East to hand the aux to the next wave. One lucky DJ will share a bill with Chase & Status, Nia Archives and Jyoty herself alongside many more notable names, a chance that could change everything.

However, if you thought Jyoty was settling into her spot at the top, think again. As she gears up to turn 35 this month, she’s charging headfirst into a new frontier: production. After sitting in sessions as an executive producer, she had a revelation: ‘Why direct from the sidelines when I could produce myself?’ So she called up her best friend back in Amsterdam and began learning from scratch, a process she describes as transformative: “It’s made me appreciate music in a totally different way. I’m doing it for the love of it, rather than anything else,” she says.

The result is two self-produced EPs set to release later this summer. One’s a sweaty late-night ode to club culture, the other a more intimate exploration of her love for R&B. She’s candid about the uncertainty that comes with releasing something so personal, but she also recognises the creative growth it brings. “I’m not sure how I feel about it yet, but all my friends who have been making music longer than me say that you don’t really improve until you’ve actually released your work. That’s when you learn the most.”

You’ve picked up gems and influences from cities across the world, but what’s your personal connection to secondhand fashion? How have past jobs, travels, or even growing up shaped your love for pre-loved style?

If you ask any stylists I work with, they would all tell you about my love for particular vintage designer items. I collect a lot of Prada, Tom Ford, Gucci, as well as items from Moschino, [Roberto] Cavalli and Versace all usually from the nineties to early noughties. If you go into my wardrobe, you’ll see that I own more pre-loved items than anything else. Over the years, I’ve been building up my collection of vintage items from around the world. Now, I’d much rather go shopping in a vintage store than a high-street store.

PHOTO CREDIT: Alex Rorison

Of course, authenticity has always been at the core of your artistry. Why is authenticity so central to your journey, and why does it matter now more than ever?

Everyone I look up to who may be described as being “authentic” is just doing what feels natural to them. They’re doing their own thing, changing as the tides change with them and not being swayed in every direction. I think people find me authentic because I never know what I’m doing and I let people know that. I’m figuring out things as I go. I never have the answers and I never pretend to have them. I’m constantly looking back at myself thinking ‘What the fuck was I doing?’ and I share that with people. In my music sometimes there is no deeper story and that is what’s authentic. I’m not romanticising what I do and I’m vocal about that. I have a lot of peers in the industry who are very reserved and let their work speak for themselves as the proof is in the pudding. I find that really authentic.

Your unpredictable sets are what you’re known for, but there’s always something unmistakably you in the mix. What’s the thread that ties every Jyoty set together, no matter where you’re playing?

Over the last few years, I haven’t prepped a single set. I make a folder based on new tracks that have come out in the city that I’m performing in, but that’s it. I don’t prep material as sonically I’ve changed so much over the years. Take my first Boiler Room set in 2019, I was only two years into DJing. Technically, I didn’t know how to DJ at that time. It sounded so bad. No one expected it to blow up like it did and suddenly I was having to explain to the world, ‘Hey, that’s not even my real sound.’

I’ve built an audience that knows my sets are always full of surprises. You never quite know what to expect, and if you want to keep up, you’ll have to follow along to hear the sounds I’m currently into. That said, I always tailor my sets to fit the time and place I’m performing. If I’m on at 3pm at a festival, I’m going to look at the DJs directly before and after me and fit perfectly in the middle. But if you see me in the same city at 10pm that day, I’m going to sound completely different.

Not many DJs would take the time to blend in so thoughtfully, what makes that important to you?

I think it’s a lot of an older thing. My whole heritage is radio. I’m part of a generation that, as a party-goer, you adapt. If the DJ after you plays slower, you meet them at the end of your set. There is always a little courtesy. I only do that because it happened to me when I was younger. But often I go on after a newer DJ who plays super hard. I don’t care if they play super hard. You do you, I’ll just reset the room. It’s not a make or break for me, but it makes me feel more comfortable when I keep it in mind for the next act.

You’ve come such a long way, and it sounds like you’re still just getting started in some ways. What’s keeping you inspired right now, and where do you hope the road takes you next?

I have no clue what next year looks like or the short-term future. But what I do know is that I still love being a DJ. Personally I have to hit the 10-year mark before I decide it’s not for me. I can’t tell you what kind of DJ I am as I’m still figuring that out stylistically. I see myself furthering my work as a producer over the next few years and hopefully returning to my Rinse FM show. I know that I’m not going to be erased from my DJ roots if I keep on creating, advancing and consuming within the scene. As long as I’m on the dancefloor I’m going to be contributing something of value behind the decks”.

In another incredible and deep interview, DJ Mag spent some time with a remarkable D.J., artist and producer. A force of wonder who has been unstoppable over the past few years, her uncategorisable sound and energy-filled sets has made her such a celebrated D.J. Jyoty spoke with DJ Mag about “diversifying dancefloors, the difficulties of internet fame, and her mission to change the accepted narrative of how to be a successful artist in 2025”:

“She’s also been going through the daunting task of putting her producer hat on. She’ll be releasing a double EP towards the end of September, a total of 10 tracks that she’s developing as we speak. It’s not just music for the dancefloor, she says, rather an outline of the styles that have shaped her thus far: five “soulful” tracks, all downtempo and lovey-dovey, matched with another five “club tunes”, all higher BPM, with heavy percussion, featuring hand-picked vocalists, and even some of her own vocals.

The release will not be completely unfamiliar; she’s dropped snippets in her radio shows on Rinse FM and NYC’s the Lot, as well as earlier versions during her club sets. And she isn’t new to the studio by any means, sitting in on sessions, and writing and producing with some of the world’s biggest names (though she wouldn’t dare put them in print).

She’s spent time honing her craft: piano lessons (she is nearing Grade 3), vocal lessons for the snippets of her singing that grace her tracks, and using Logic. “I was actually more interested in the songs that most people wouldn’t play in their DJ sets,” she shares. “I’ve been working on other people’s music for a while now: writing, co-producing, executive producing. Then I started moving more into the direction of music that feels closer to home.

“There are these ways people construct songs, and they all kind of live in different worlds after they get put out. Suddenly you go into the framework of all the songs you used to listen to as a kid, like all the R&B and soul song structures — these toolboxes that people use to approach making them. Like, ‘Oh wait, there’s a pre-chorus — how do I think of a pre-chorus?’ And then, ‘This is where a bridge goes’. I wanted to learn how to make a song in that way; that really took my interest.”

It’s this kind of pure artistic intention that balances out the star bookings and insatiable audience demand. For example, her time in NYC saw her perform all night at Bushwick’s Nowadays — one of her most enjoyable sets to date, she says. Though she’s been through countless venues even prior to her start in music, the tiny 350-cap club remains one of her favourites to spin in.

She’s the type of person to take note of the “feng shui” of the club, she says: where the bar sits in relation to the dancefloor, if the walkways make sense. Her love for Nowadays is in the little things: the club’s impeccable soundsystem, peak-intimacy size, no filming policy — a rarity in our clip-obsessed times — and its community of music-lover staff and attendees, who appreciate the peculiarities of creating a good listening space.

The journey to becoming that person has been a long one. Jyoty’s parents emigrated from Punjab to Amsterdam in the '80s, raising her in Bos en Lommer, in the west of the city. The word she continually uses to describe her upbringing is “diverse”. It was a majority Arab neighbourhood populated by Morroccans and Turks, “very working class, immigrant-heavy. I remember the first school class I was in, there was one white kid in the school picture,” she laughs. “That’s the neighbourhood that I came from.” This in turn bled into her musical upbringing. She’d take in Moroccan and Surinamese music attending the weddings of her neighbours, soak in the Netherlands’ trademark bubbling genre traversing the streets of her area, as well as the Caribbean and West African music popular with the local Black community.

Most of Jyoty’s future dreams don’t revolve around winning more accolades. She has goals of course: she’s keen to get involved in music supervision, scoring for film and TV, and of course, continuing her journey producing and working on her craft (she has a third EP ready to go, she says). But her main aim is still to recalibrate those opinions that attempt to pin artists and DJs like her down. Much of this is in changing the idea of what it means, feels or looks like to be a DJ — that you don’t have to be the youngest in the room, go viral everyday, be a white man, or release music (unless you want to, of course).

“I just want to keep showing people that you don’t have to subscribe to all these new made-up rules!” she says. “‘Oh, you have to release music to grow as a DJ’. Why? I’ve played with Ben UFO 20 times in the last month, and neither of us have released music. “Whatever I do, I just want to keep proving to people that you can choose to inhabit a lane within music, as long as you accept the consequences. I accepted that if I’m not going to keep posting clips that are going to be viral, [newer people will only discover me] in person and not so much online. That’s fine, and I’m happy with that. I think where things go wrong is where you want something, and you don’t want to also accept the consequences of those decisions. But I think it’s really important to just protect your sanity in this industry. And it’s working. I’m super happy in this moment, and I couldn’t have said that two years ago”.

I am going to end with ELLE Singapore. They interviewed Jyoty about her Asian tour and creative process. The final interview I am bringing in is fantastic. ELLE Singapore highlighted an incredible D.J. who revealed her “pre-show rituals and what she's looking forward to when she returns to Singapore”:

“Radio presenter and all-round cool girl, Jyoty Singh had zero intentions of becoming a DJ—and yet, she's one of the hottest names in music right now. It all started eight years ago when she responded to requests to mix at live shows after building a solid fanbase through her show on Rinse FM. One thing led to another, and then she found herself on the decks. Her first show may have fell flat, but that didn't stop her. Fuelled by this new-found passion, Singh decided to equip herself with the skills and knowledge required to succeed in this field—and she did. Enter JYOTY, the stage name Singh now goes by, a TikTok-viral Boiler Room phenomenon and internationally celebrated DJ whose genre-bending sets break new ground in electronic music and global club culture.

The 35-year-old Dutch-Indian, who grew up in West Amsterdam in the 90s with an appreciation for music of all type, has gone on to perform at renowned nightlife hubs such as Good Room in New York, Music Box in Lisbon, and Razzmatazz in Barcelona. As she jets across the globe, performing her genre-defying sets, she also makes it a point to give back to the community. For instance, she hosted a DJ workshop for women in Calcutta with the British Council and Wild City, an Indian music company, and a six-week course for young British Asian women aspiring to break into the industry.

What’s your creative process like?

Leaving everything to the very last minute, freaking out, having a mini meltdown, not sleeping, flinging it together in panic, handing it in, and never looking at it again. Unfortunately, that’s been the process since forever. I’ve accepted that that’s just how I work, and it’ll never change.

What’s been your biggest ‘pinch me’ moment so far?

Every single week, it’s something new. Whether spinning in a country, meeting a specific individual, a DM, a magazine article, a cover, an invitation, a crowd... the list goes on. This month, it's probably realising that I’ve finally made some songs that I enjoy listening to, and that at almost 35 years old, I still have the freedom to pick up new skills and work on them as part of my job. Unreal.

Your 2025 Asia Tour is bringing you back to Singapore. What are you looking forward to seeing or doing when you arrive on our shores?

Enjoying some chicken rice and fresh juice, please and thank you!

How do you want people to feel after they leave one of your sets?

Like they got whatever it was they needed from that night. For some, that could be the wildest night of their life, while for others, it's just relaxing in a back corner, discovering new sounds and bopping their head. Maybe it was to make an ex jealous, perhaps to escape stress from work, to scream and smile, or to shed a tear and wake up not remembering anything. Whatever you need, I've got you!”.

I shall wrap things up there. I do think that we will get more music and incredible output from Jyoty. She is touring North America right now. I would be interested catching a set if she is playing in the U.K. anytime soon. The buzz around her sets and her sound makes her an understandable modern-day great. A D.J. queen I was eager to spotlight, go and show love and support…