‘Iris’ by Friendzone featuring the Eden Project (Free Download)
Morgan and Chris make up “Friendzone,” a Canadian dance music duo that is producing some special progressive house music lately. This song, “Iris,” recently gained support from Hardwell as a “demo of the week” after being played on Hardwell Live and is making a name for the up and coming team. There are beautiful vocals on this track as well from Eden Project AKA Jonathan Ng from Dublin, Ireland.
NoCopyrightSounds had already built a solid reputation by 2014 as one of the go-to channels for creators who needed music they could legally drop into videos without worrying about copyright strikes, and “Iris” fit right into that catalog as a genuinely well-produced, radio-ready progressive house cut rather than just functional background music. (Editor’s note: in the years since this post was originally published, this duo has released music under the name “Exit Friendzone” rather than “Friendzone,” likely to avoid confusion with the unrelated R&B group of the same name — we’re leaving the credit exactly as it originally appeared above.) Getting cosigned by Hardwell as a “demo of the week” was a legitimately big deal for a newer act trying to get noticed in an already crowded progressive house scene, especially back before playlist culture had fully taken over as the main way fans discovered new music.
Check out the free download below and was released on NoCopyrightSounds on March 23rd. NoCopyrightSounds is based in the UK and uses Soundcloud and YouTube to promote tracks through mutual social media support. Here is the link to this track on Youtube or check out Friendzone’s Youtube channel.
Check out Eden Project on Facebook and Twitter. Lurk Friendzone on Facebook and Twitter as well and check out their Soundcloud page.
It’s always fun going back to tracks like this one, because free-download culture on SoundCloud and NCS in the mid-2010s ended up launching a lot of careers that are still going strong today. Plenty of producers used exactly this playbook — get a free release out through a trusted channel like NCS, pick up a cosign from a name artist, and let word of mouth do the rest — and it clearly worked here, given how far this track traveled on the strength of a single Hardwell shoutout. It’s also a nice snapshot of how much smaller and more community-driven the dance music blog and SoundCloud ecosystem was back in 2014, before streaming algorithms became the dominant way most listeners found new artists. Give “Iris” a listen below, and if the vocals grab you, it’s worth digging through more of Eden Project’s catalog, since that voice went on to show up on plenty of other dance tracks in the years that followed.
https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/141023901
