JOYRYDE

JOYRYDE doesn’t really do subtle. The English producer, born John Ford, grew up practically inside a studio — his dad, John Phantasm, founded Phantasm Records, and John was making music by age nine and DJing internationally by thirteen. That’s not a typo. Before he was old enough to drive, he was already touring.

His first act, Eskimo, ran through the 2000s in the psytrance lane, and he actually built a real following there — an unofficial remix of The Prodigy’s “Voodoo People” got passed around psytrance DJ sets worldwide and put his name on the map early. But psytrance wasn’t where he’d end up leaving his mark.

In 2015, Ford rebranded as JOYRYDE and flipped the script completely, trading psy-trance arpeggios for bass-heavy, hip-hop-inflected house music that hits like it’s got something to prove. The sound is aggressive, groove-first, and built for a system that can actually handle it — think trap drums fused with house structure and a whole lot of low end. Tracks like “Hot Drum” became instant festival staples, and he wasn’t shy about pulling in outside talent either: “Damn” with Freddie Gibbs and “Windows” with Rick Ross showed he could bridge the gap between rap and rave without either side feeling like a gimmick. He’s also worked with Candi Staton, proof his ear reaches further than just bass drops.

2020 brought his debut studio album, Brave — a full statement of what JOYRYDE the artist is about after years of build-up as JOYRYDE the DJ. It pulled together the bassline house influences, the hip-hop swagger, and the festival-ready chaos into one body of work, cementing him as one of the more distinct voices in bass music rather than just another guy behind a laptop dropping the same trap-house loop everyone else is playing.

What makes JOYRYDE stand out in a crowded bass scene is that he’s never been interested in blending in. From the psytrance origins to the genre-crossing collabs with rap heavyweights, his catalog reads like someone who treats genre lines as suggestions rather than rules. Live, his sets are chaos in the best way — relentless low end, unpredictable transitions, and a crowd that’s fully along for the ride. Two decades into making music under one name or another, he’s still one of the few producers in dance music whose sound is instantly recognizable within the first four bars.