Thomas Jack

Thomas Jack didn’t grow up dreaming of Ibiza booths and festival mainstages — he grew up on a dairy farm in rural New South Wales, surrounded by a couple thousand cows. Not exactly the typical EDM origin story. Born Tom Jack Johnston, he started messing around with music production on, of all things, a PlayStation game called eJay, before his dad gave him a copy of Ableton Live and things got real. Eventually he made his way to Sydney to actually study music, and from there the tracks started coming together.

Jack is the guy who literally coined the term “tropical house” back in 2013 to describe the sound he was making — warm, laid-back, deep house-adjacent productions dressed up with real instruments like saxophone, flute, piano, and guitar, plus the occasional spoken-word sample thrown in for atmosphere. He’s talked about Charlie Chaplin’s closing speech from The Great Dictator as one of those samples that stuck with him and shaped how he thought about using voice in his tracks.

His manager, Myles Shear, found him on SoundCloud and brought him out to Miami, and from there Jack’s remixes of artists like OneRepublic and Of Monsters and Men started making the rounds in EDM circles. His breakout original, “Rivers,” featuring Nico & Vinz, landed in 2015 and cracked the top five in Belgium. He followed it up in 2016 with “Rise Up” alongside Jasmine Thompson, which also charted overseas.

Here’s the thing about tropical house, though — Jack basically invented a genre that got way bigger than he did. Producers like Kygo and Klingande ran with the sound and turned it into one of the defining aesthetics of mid-2010s dance music, while Jack himself started pulling away from the label almost as soon as it stuck. He’s been open about not wanting to be boxed into one sound forever, choosing instead to keep experimenting rather than milking the tropical house wave for as long as it lasted.

Jack also built out a podcast and mix series over the years, bringing in guest sets from producers like Felix Jaehn, Bakermat, and Robin Schulz, which kept him plugged into the wider dance music community even as his own sound kept shifting. He remains one of those artists who’s easy to underrate just because the genre he started got taken over by everyone else — but tropical house doesn’t happen without him.