Unfortunately, we couldn’t get the credentials to pull off a live interview with the Nordic casanova so instead we slaved away at internet research and put together this rather illegitimate guide to getting to know Kygo…or Kyrre, as it turns out.
Name: Kyrre Gørvell-Dahll | Kygo (Stage name)
Age: 23
Hometown: Bergen, Norway
Career: DJ, music producer
Genre: Electronica, tropical house
How he broke out onto ‘the scene:’
Since around 2008, Kygo had been experimenting with creating electronic music edits and remixes. However, it wasn’t until he was contacted in the fall of 2013 by 22-year-old Myles Shear, co-founder of dance music blog EDM Sauce and co-owner of Golden Hare Group, a Miami-based music management company, that his career really began to take off. Shear, as Kygo’s manager, began pimping the artist out and in July of 2014, the two scored a huge record label deal with Sony Music and Ultra Records. Just two short months later, Shear managed to convince booking organizers at TomorrowWorld that Kygo would be the best candidate to replace Avicii at the Main Stage when Avicii had to pull out last minute due to health concerns. While this moment could probably be used to pinpoint the beginning of Kygo’s ascension, after landing a closing spot at both Coachella and Ultra 2015, it’s clear that his popularity is still very much on the rise.
One of the critical keys to Kygo’s success (in our opinoin, at least):
The kid caters to the ladies a lot more than other electronic dance music artists. While chicks and female taste can often feel margianalized or at least overlooked by DJs who prefer to produce hardhitting sounds and almost angry-aggressive deep house hits, Kygo never fails to deliver something with as much or even more feel-good energy than a hawaiian shirt. It also doesn’t hurt that each EP thus released incorporates a killer set of vocals, and though I could be generalizing and perpetuating a stereotype here, sisters love to sing along.
His squad:
To be honest, we couldn’t find too much info on this, but according to his Instagram, the usual entourage seems to include: Myles Sheer, Thomas Jack, and Olav Stubberud. Myles Sheer: As mentioned earlier, Sheer is Kygo’s 22-year-old manager from Miami, FL. According to Rolling Stone, “At 19, he co-founded popular music publication EDM Sauce – which was named the Number 13 Most Influential Music Blog in the World by Style of Sound last year – and, partly through running that, he became aware of an artist named Thomas Jack, whom he also manages and whom introduced him to Kygo. Thomas Jack: Considered the Australian pioneer of tropical house music and only 20-years-old. Even without Sheer being the obvious connection here, Jack and Kygo have such similar sounds that they’d probably be beer-sipping bros regardless. Olav Stubberud: 22-year-old professional photographer from Bærum, Norway. When he’s not staging glamour shots of Kygo, he’s snapping incredible action shots of athletes like the snowboarding crew, RK1, or goon shots of celebrities like Steve-O. He’s also the photographer of the burger picture featured above.
A Few of His Favorite Things:
We can confidently proclaim that if you ever had to run out last minute to grab Kygo a birthday present, any of these three items would go over VERY well:
1. Denim bermuda shorts
2. Hamburger
3. Snapback
We’ll end this here since we just spent fifteen minutes too long creating Kygo collages…
But now that you know a little more about the guy, hopefully you appreciate him and his music even more. And continuing with his tropical theme, we’re going to remind you that ‘aloha’ means ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye.’ So thank you Barnyard for putting together such an unreal act for Spring Weekend and aloha, Kygo, aloha.