When Sammy Virji was DJing in room three of a local nightclub in Newcastle with his uni mates, he didn’t anticipate that the bouncy, bombastic bassline and UK garage sounds he was obsessed with would become so big across the pond. In June, he shut down New York’s Times Square with a set to announce his new album, Same Day Cleaning, followed by headlining his first North American stadium show. “It didn’t feel real, I was freaking out,” says Virji, still in disbelief.
Also real: the tens of thousands singing along as he spliced the dreamy intro of Radiohead’s Everything in Its Right Place with his 2023 track If U Need It at this year’s Coachella. The 28-year-old from the market town of Witney, Oxfordshire, made his debut on the California festival’s second-largest stage in April. It was “the most nervous I’ve ever been,” says Virji, on a phone call from LA ahead of another festival set, “but I converted that into excitement and I was able to enjoy myself.”
This bashful bass star has the demeanour of a nice young chap who is just genuinely gassed to be up there, giving massive grins and thumbs ups during his sets as if he almost can’t believe his luck. “I often don’t say what my aspirations are out loud because then it treats [music] like a business,” he says. “I’ve gone past what I always wanted to achieve – the most unachievable thing to me was doing a tune with [bassline star] Flava D. And then the next most unbelievable thing would be getting in the studio with Skrillex, and then that happened. The whole thing’s very surreal.”
In the past two years, he’s become dance music’s next golden boy off the back of a viral set at DJ Mag’s HQ, setting off the office fire alarm with a selection that called back to the 2010s heyday of UK bass. But beyond the meme-able catchphrases (“it’s Virji, isn’t it”) and technical mastery, he’s most renowned for his well-crafted arsenal of self-made bangers. “Sammy’s tracks are an amazing hybrid of massively heavy-sounding but also catchy, joyous and fun to dance to,” says Dan Snaith, AKA Caribou/Daphni, who often deploys Virji’s big-hitters in his DJ sets, as do fellow dance A-listers Four Tet and Fred Again. “He has a kind of alchemy that makes his tracks bigger and bolder than anyone else’s.”
Virji casts himself as “definitely a producer before I’m a DJ”, spot-welding the swinging drums and chopped-up vocal samples found in the UK garage of the mid-90s onwards to the four-to-the-floor rhythm of its bassline sub-genre, which originated in West Yorkshire and the Midlands. Add in the melodiousness of house music, the cheeky womps of dubstep, the gruff superstyling of a soundsystem MC, elements of grime and speed it all up: you’ve got a formula for bridging the UK club underground with American EDM.
Virji has spent years perfecting his sound. Early on, Virji’s father Fayyaz – a trombonist who played on The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill – introduced his son to production software Logic and Virji started off making “bad dubstep”, an attempt to emulate the classic Rinse compilations he discovered in primary school. By his teenage years, he had gravitated towards bassline, in thrall to Flava D, DJ Q and Dr Cryptic. With his 2020 debut album, Spice Up My Life, Virji cemented his transition to garage, and he’s released an impressive number of tracks since, such as 2023 masterpiece Shella Verse.
There’s a certain irony to his music finding an audience in the US when the original UKG never did. “There seems to be a huge crowd ready to experience UK garage and bassline for the first time,” says Kieran Hebden, AKA Four Tet. “[It’s] the perfect next thing for the tech house and EDM fans.” Virji politely wonders whether it’s because his sound offers “a breath of fresh air” at festivals full of house and EDM, but it could also be the brightly lit positivity of his productions. “Optimism is very important, especially now,” Virji says.
Hebden sees Virji’s real strength as “his musicality, taste and production skills – it’s not like he just picked the right genre and won. The clever stuff is in the sonics, melodies, dynamics, arrangements. He could be doing techno, jungle [or] psytrance and it would probably still be good. It’s exciting to have another UK producer cut through everything and make it all feel alive.”
On Same Day Cleaning, Virji collaborates with UK rap royalty Giggs and Skepta, and Virji was fascinated by the latter MC’s creative process for their track Cops and Robbers. “He created the mood, put a UKG documentary on mute,” says Virji. “We must have sat there for half an hour with the beat on repeat, no one saying anything, until he goes, ‘OK, I’m ready to record.’ He hadn’t written anything down, he had it all in his head.”
Virji also links up with UK garage pioneers of old, namely MJ Cole and returning duo Tuff Jam. “So many people don’t know how important these legends are,” says Virji. “As much as my role is about having fun and making people dance, it’s pointless doing it unless you’re helping to give them some history.”
But while he recently released a 90s-trance-laced summer smash called Nostalgia, Virji would rather focus on what’s new. “There’s so many things that get recycled, everything’s trying to sound old,” he notes. “But if you can make something original that’s going to be used in the future, that’s pretty cool.”
• Same Day Cleaning is released via Capitol on 19 September
