Vince Staples

EDM Artists >> Vince Staples

Vince Staples doesn’t fit the typical mold of an artist on an EDM site, and that’s kind of the point. The Long Beach rapper has spent his career refusing to stay in one lane, and nowhere is that clearer than on his 2017 album Big Fish Theory — a record that pulled hip-hop straight onto the dance floor.

Staples grew up in Long Beach, California, and started rapping as a teenager before linking up with the Odd Future crew. A run of gritty mixtapes built his reputation, and by 2015 he’d cemented himself as one of rap’s sharpest, most unflinching voices with his debut album Summertime ’06.

But it’s Big Fish Theory where Staples really crossed over into electronic territory. Instead of leaning on traditional rap production, he built the album with a crew of dance and club music heavyweights. Flume produced tracks, GTA (Good Times Ahead) brought Damon Albarn in for a feature, and the late SOPHIE and Jimmy Edgar both contributed beats that leaned hard into techno and footwork. Rolling Stone called it an “avant-garde dance record,” and that’s not an exaggeration — critics pointed to Detroit techno and house influences running through the whole thing, way more Berlin warehouse than Atlanta trap.

The standout for dance fans is “Yeah Right,” a Kendrick Lamar collab built on a beat co-produced by Flume and SOPHIE that sounds like it could’ve come off a club music release. It’s a rare crossover moment where a rap A-lister and an electronic producer’s fingerprints both come through clean, and it’s exactly the kind of connection that puts Staples on our radar.

After Big Fish Theory, Staples kept experimenting, releasing FM! in 2018 and a run of increasingly personal, stripped-down albums through the early 2020s, along with a semi-autobiographical Netflix series. He hasn’t chased another dance-adjacent project quite like Big Fish Theory again, but that album remains a genuine touchstone for how far electronic production bled into mainstream rap during that era. When SOPHIE passed away in 2021, Staples spoke publicly about their work together, remembering the collaboration as one of the more fearless creative partnerships of his career.

For dance fans, Staples is a reminder that some of the most interesting electronic production of the 2010s wasn’t coming from artists marketed as “EDM” at all — it was showing up on rap records, courtesy of producers like Flume and SOPHIE pushing into new spaces.

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