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From Washington, DC
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It was probably the moment when he was paid $10,000 to DJ a spin fitness class that Alex Young, barely 16 at the time, felt he had lost touch with what music was all about. “At 13, I was like, if I could ever hang out with Skrillex, my life would be complete,” he says, sipping a pilsner on an icy day in Washington DC. “Then by 15, I’m doing it.”
Enticed by the sugar rush of America’s booming EDM scene, and armed with little more than a Soundcloud account, a knack for knocking out zeitgeisty bootlegs and a little teenage bravado, this kid from Bethesda – a comfy suburb north-west of the US capital – was suddenly opening for Diplo. Still underage, he was also getting turfed out of festivals as soon as his set ended. “I’d be in school during the week, and then my mom would take me to open for Skrillex or Flosstradamus on the weekend,” he says. “So I became a cool kid in high school pretty quickly.” His wry laugh fades. “But there’s this really strange disconnect. You kind of expect these things to make you happy.” Cashing $10k for drubbing through an hour of garish EDM for sweaty Lycra-clad grownups will sharpen even the most adolescent perspective. “I had kind of sacrificed a bit of my childhood to be in these adult spaces,” he says.
Young took the first of a series of abrupt left turns in his nascent career. He packed in DJing, relinquished the Alex Young moniker and started listening to Radiohead and Rinse FM. “I was really falling in love with music,” he says. “I got into the UK canon of electronic music, starting to understand it more.” Now 29, he’s enjoying what he’s begun to think of as a second life. The heady, idiosyncratic club music he makes as Villager is about as far from EDM’s dopamine overload as you can get. He ditched a laptop-based approach to writing in favour of recording loops on sequencers and samplers that he works together into full tracks. The organic-feeling results are reminiscent of the early 2010s, when producers such as Blawan, James Blake, Untold, and Pangaea pulled the anything-goes philosophy of early dubstep into fresh, uncanny territory: the transcendent synth lines of Walk Away Now, omnivorous rhythms on Pig, and Dogma’s snappy snares.
His handful of EPs and tracks were praised by tastemakers Ben UFO, Four Tet and Jamie xx, and a freshly inked publishing deal with Fred Again’s manager (not to mention a writing credit on Halsey’s double-platinum album Manic) underscored his inherent pop chops. He says his first show in the UK – in November 2024, at Drumsheds, on a lineup curated by Four Tet – felt like deja vu, after he walked into the green room to find Floating Points, Four Tet and Caribou in conversation: “It’s funny. I black it out in my head, because that was like the new ‘meeting Skrillex’ moment.”
Going to clubs to dance, rather than just perform, was also transformational. As a teenager, music had lacked any real social context. “My entire relationship with dance music had always been from the stage, looking at the crowd,” he says. Experimenting with drugs initially helped. “I took ketamine for the first time and was like: ‘Now I get dubstep!’” he laughs. But his relationship with substances became an issue.
At the end of 2025, he cancelled a support tour with Disclosure to get help for what had accelerated into ketamine addiction. He stopped taking the drug and released an impeccably produced album of alt-pop, Old Friend, that sits somewhere between Thom Yorke, Bruno Mars and The Life of Pablo-era Kanye West, and expunges the dissonant feelings about making a career out of music that have clouded him since those teenage escapades. “I feel weightless now,” he says, exhaling. As if, bit by bit, he’s finally figuring out what this music thing is all about.
