Virtual Self

Virtual Self isn’t a new artist so much as a portal into an alternate universe — one built by Porter Robinson, the producer who was already an EDM household name before he decided to blow it all up and start over under a different flag. When Virtual Self showed up out of nowhere on October 20, 2017 with the track “Eon Break,” nobody was officially told who was behind it. The internet figured it out almost immediately, but that didn’t take away from how much of a swerve this project was.

Where Porter Robinson’s solo work leans emotional and pop-adjacent, Virtual Self goes somewhere else entirely: hard trance, late-90s and early-2000s UK garage, techno, and drum and bass, filtered through a very online, very anime-coded internet aesthetic. It’s nostalgic without being a rehash — Robinson has said the project isn’t really about his own personal nostalgia so much as building a whole world around a sound he loves.

The self-titled Virtual Self EP dropped on November 29, 2017 with five tracks, including “Ghost Voices” and “Eon Break,” and followed it up in July 2018 with “Angel Voices.” Critics were split — some outlets weren’t fully sold on the hyperactive rhythms, while others called it one of the best surprise left turns in dance music that year, comparing it to the soundtrack of a great RPG that never got made. Fans, for what it’s worth, were fully on board from day one.

“Ghost Voices” ended up scoring Virtual Self a Grammy nomination for Best Dance Recording in 2019, putting the project in the same conversation as artists like Diplo and Above & Beyond — a pretty wild outcome for something that started as a low-key side project. That same year, the momentum around Virtual Self helped push Robinson to launch Second Sky, his own music festival, which sold out so fast it had to expand to a second day.

Virtual Self has always felt less like a side hustle and more like Porter Robinson giving himself permission to make exactly what he wanted without any of the baggage of his main project. It’s a full-on world of trance stabs, glitchy visuals, and internet-culture Easter eggs, and even years later it’s still one of the most referenced left-field moments in modern EDM.