Martin Garrix Ghost-Produced Song And It ‘Became Really Big’

Martin Garrix was recently interviewed by DJ Mag and in the 60 Seconds With Martin Garrix, Martin revealed that he had made a “ghost production for somebody else — I can’t tell you which track I made — but this track got signed to Spinnin’ Records and became really big. They found out that I made it, and so they invited me to their office and I played them my other stuff — and we signed.” Many had speculated that Martin Garrix originally had “Animals” ghost produced, but after uploading a video of him piecing together a track, these claims were discredited.

Martin Garrix continues on to say during the interview that “I was a little bit afraid that it went too fast, cos when I made ‘Animals’ and it became big so quickly I was like, ‘Oh shit, this has happened really fast’, and I didn’t have any other tracks ready to release yet. That was a really shitty feeling, thinking I had to come up with something that was on the same level as ‘Animals’. At that point I was like ‘Oh, shit, I don’t want to be like a one-hit dude’, but now I’ve got five or six new tracks ready. I have some really big collaborations with some of the biggest in the world… I can tell you one, it’s with Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike“

Ghost production has always been one of dance music’s open secrets — plenty of tracks credited to a single headliner actually involve an uncredited co-writer working behind the scenes, and it’s rare for anyone to talk about it as openly as Garrix did here. His willingness to admit it, even without naming the track, was a pretty candid moment for an 18-year-old who was just starting to blow up.

And “blow up” turned out to be an understatement. “Animals” went on to become one of the defining big-room tracks of the era, and the anxiety Garrix described about following it up didn’t hold him back for long — he’d go on to be crowned the world’s number one DJ in DJ Mag’s Top 100 DJs poll in 2016, 2017, and 2018. The collaboration with Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike he teased in this interview was an early sign of just how connected he already was within the scene at such a young age, years before he became one of the biggest names in the genre.