Critic’s pick: Haai, the DJ making euphoric electronica with Kylie, Fred Again and Jon Hopkins
Teneil Throssell’s origin story as Haai goes a long way to explaining her dense and tactile club music. Born in Karratha, Western Australia, and spending her formative gig-going years in Sydney, Throssell moved to London in her 20s as part of the psych-rock outfit Dark Bells. Initially turned off by what she saw as the strictures of dance music, her scepticism was undone by a chance trip to Berlin’s Berghain.
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Dancing for hours to the club resident Ben Klock’s hypnotic, tunnelling techno, she realised what she had been missing. Pretty soon, the Haai sound clicked: part rough-hewn and psychedelic, part London bass culture by osmosis, and part sleepless weekend in Berlin. Take, for example, Haai’s 2021 track Keep on Believing, which opens with a bracing kick drum before charging through tempo shifts and skittering, half-submerged vocal snippets.
Haai’s ascension was swift; as she put it to the radio host Tim Sweeney: “I kind of came out of nowhere.” Throssell only learned to use a digital DJ set-up in the first week of what would become a two-year residency at the cult London club Phonox – a dream gig that cemented her bona fides in her adopted home town. She concluded the residency in 2018 just as she came into her own as a producer, leading to her 2020 breakout track, Head Above the Parakeets, which unfurls in a buzzing cacophony over seven mood-shifting minutes.
Haai’s debut album, Baby, We’re Ascending, was one of 2022’s best electronic releases, covering breakbeat, techno and the deep, dubby corners of UK bass music with a streak of sly humour. The album crests with its title track, featuring Jon Hopkins, which reaches out from the murk of the dancefloor in search of transcendence. Throssell has since worked with everyone from Fred Again to Kylie Minogue – whose viral juggernaut Padam Padam she reimagined as a cheeky, hard-charging rave tool.
As her cachet has grown, Throssell has also embraced being a queer artist in dance music. “When you have a lived experience of being queer, you can invite people into a space without feeling so tokenistic,” she told Gay Times in 2023. Last month she hosted Unison, a “community-focused” all day and night party in London featuring surprise back-to-back sets by Romy, Boys Noize and her fellow Australian transplants Surusinghe and DJ Boring. The party represented the Haai experience at its purest: a big, dark room, surrounded by like-minded DJs and dancers, with enough hours to really let loose.
For more: Haai plays the Australian editions of Manchester’s Warehouse Project this month: Melbourne 25 May and Sydney 26 May.
This month Guardian Australia also listened to …
Sia – Reasonable Woman (3 May) The mega-hitmaker’s 10th studio album is not good – but it is an interesting test case of her propensity for creating earworms that “have the cadence (if not the staying power) of chart hits”. Read our review here.
Milan Ring – Mangos (10 May)
Milan Ring’s weapon has always been her harmonies, diaphanous and suspended like a sheet of linen in the breeze. They’re front and centre on the Sydney R&B singer’s second album. Phoebe Go – Marmalade (17 May) Phoebe Go has spent her career in bands: first in Snakadaktal, then as one half of the duo Two People. Marmalade, her debut album as a solo artist, turns inwards to exhume the kind of private sorrows and late-night anxieties favoured by her contemporaries Clairo, Phoebe Bridgers, Snail Mail, et al.
Raave Tapes – Raave Tapes (24 May) A debut from a Newcastle duo who pay homage to everyone from 3OH!3 to 100 Gecs in these brash, bratty tracks pumped full of nervy adrenaline.
Crowded House – Gravity Stairs (31 May)
The name of the eighth album from the beloved jangle juggernauts invokes invokes a Sisyphean struggle: the endless task of hope and ambition weighed down by the cruel force of reality. It’s a sunshower of a record and a brilliant statement of longevity for a band who have weathered tragedies and transmogrifications over their fourdecade career.