David Guetta and Afrojack Reunite On ‘Dirty Sexy Money’

It is always a bit exciting when David Guetta and Afrojack reunite on a collaboration. Guetta helped his Dutch house protege gain recognition early in his career by supporting singles and promoting his new ground breaking sound. Soon the student surpassed the teacher as Afrojack’s powerful assertive sound took center stage of dance music.

In their latest collaboration Guetta and Afrojack have brought on Charli XCX and French Montana. Unfortunately the combination of several bold styles leads to a single that suffers from a bit of an identity crisis rather than a successful integration of defined sounds. While we applaud the attempt at infusing several unique artists into one track, this one is simply a bit more bizarre than cohesive. We look forward to the next time Guetta and Afrojack get together as we know it will redeem the failed attempt this go around. Listen below.

The Guetta-Afrojack mentorship story is genuinely a good one

It’s easy to gloss over, but the dynamic here is actually pretty rare in dance music — an already-massive artist like Guetta actively boosting a younger producer early on, only to watch that producer become arguably just as influential a few years later. Afrojack’s rise from Guetta’s protégé to a headliner in his own right, with his own label and his own sound that other artists started copying, is one of the more genuine mentor-to-peer arcs in the genre’s recent history.

Four big names on one track is a lot to balance

Cramming Guetta, Afrojack, Charli XCX, and French Montana onto a single song is basically asking four very different fanbases to all show up at once — pop, house, hip-hop, all expecting the track to lean their direction. That’s an ambitious swing, and honestly a lot of star-stacked collabs like this one struggle for exactly this reason: everyone’s trying to get their moment in, and the song ends up pulled in too many directions to feel like one cohesive idea instead of four separate pitches mashed together.

The video leaned into the chaos with a literal bank heist

Fitting with how over-the-top this whole collab is, the music video doubles down on the chaos — it’s literally Charli XCX and French Montana robbing a bank while Guetta and Afrojack show up as part of the getaway. It’s a fun visual, even if (like the song itself) it feels like a lot of different ideas thrown into one blender. That kind of maximalist, everyone’s-doing-their-own-thing energy is honestly pretty on brand for where pop-EDM crossovers were at in 2017 — labels were pairing massive names together constantly trying to find the next inescapable radio single, and not every swing was going to land clean.