Bret Easton Ellis recently said if he were to rewrite American Psycho for modern times, he’d change the setting from late-’80s New York to today’s Silicon Valley, and his psychotic anti-hero Patrick Bateman would haunt the offices of a startup. In this updated version, Bateman probably spends his weekends cruising through Northern California in his Tesla Roadster for getaways to Napa, and presumably makes regular trips to Burning Man. As he drives his sports car with wanton abandon, the speakers rumbling with bass, I like to imagine he’s listening to the lite-EDM duo the Chainsmokers. On some balmy day somewhere in the Valley, he has perhaps downloaded their latest release, Collage EP, onto his smartphone to enjoy at his leisure. And he is listening to them not only because everyone in the country is (they’ve dominated the Billboard chart this year with three songs in the top 10, each for multiple weeks on end), but because the DJs Drew Taggart and Alex Pall, on a fundamental level, would be his people: bros in the prime of life, and caricatures of society’s most reviled.
If charts are the most reliable reflection of who the most powerful artists in the country are, the Chainsmokers are without a doubt kings of the hill. Yet, unlike any of their peers, even in the world of festival-ready EDM, Pall and Taggart have lent their full-throated support to the tech-bro lifestyle and all its connotations. They speak in the garbled lingo of “iterating” and “disrupting” culture. They preview bits and pieces of songs on Snapchat, and use Hype Machine as a market research tool to hone in on an audience. They wonder aloud about the “return-on-investment” and “reach” their relationship with the press warrants. When networking with Calvin Harris, they say they “basically brain-raped him” with their inquiries and curiosity.
Yet, they don’t want you to forget they are red-blooded males. As Pall so lovably admits: “Even before success, pussy was number one.” Taggart famously beefed with Lady Gaga and Halsey on Twitter, unleashing a casual flurry of misogyny in his wake (later claiming he was hacked). On their website, a bio provided by them proudly reads the Chainsmokers are “17.34 combined inches” (the measurement of their penises measured from tip to tip). Taggart lists “Entourage”’s manic Ari Gold as an inspiration, but they also want to be seen as “curators,” “creators,” and “nerds.”
All of this is to say, they have painted themselves as hilariously repugnant and horribly fascinating all at once. Moral turpitude and coarse language withstanding, they are still massively popular, and they themselves are not on trial—the music they make is. With Collage, they paint a photorealist portrait of their manspread over the charts.
Collage conveniently collects the group’s biggest from the year, and each of these songs works on a finely tuned algorithm. The recipe for a Chainsmokers song is basically two parts airy hook, one part lilting female vocal, and a few dashes of saccharine melancholy and sugary synths. Aesthetically they are close cousins to Calvin Harris’ poptronica and Kygo’s soporific trop-house, but their song structure borrows from forebears like Deadmau5 and Avicii. They’ll still use drops, but they have softened the edge of that serotonin spike by highlighting choruses and melody in pastel color. It makes their music instantly familiar and malleable, and thus radio-friendly.
Take “Closer,” for example, their biggest song and a duet between Drew Taggart and the alt-pop singer Halsey. The song derives its power from a sleek and simple chord progression that mirrors the song’s chorus (“We ain’t never getting older”), and borrows heavily from the Fray’s mid-2000s soft-banger “Over My Head.” The chord progression reinforces the chorus, as if it were humming behind Taggart in unison. The song’s narrative is relatable and anthemic but intimate-sounding: A man meets an ex at a party, hooks up, but then remembers why he hated her in the first place. The millennial populism of the lyrics (“Stay and play that Blink-182 song/That we beat to death in Tucson, okay”) make the track feel manically personal. Add in a little bit of sneering class resentment and conspicuous consumption (“So, baby, pull me closer/In the backseat of your Rover/That I know you can’t afford”) and you’ve got a giant hit on your hands. It’s undeniable—powerfully catchy and easy to whistle, with a light veneer of sad-boy sweetness covering EDM’s biting aggression.
Elsewhere they are more faceless, feeding off of the energy that a series of female vocalists gives to their tracks. Alex Pall has said that his main function in the group is as A&R, booking guests for individual songs and tailoring each one to fit a different demographic. With Daya, they crudely masquerade as the xx in “Don’t Let Me Down,” and (in their parlance) put forward “LMFAO with better clothes” in “Inside Out” (featuring Charlee). In each case, they find a different route to the reptilian brain, stripping back the McMansion architecture of an EDM song and redecorating with items procured from Anthropologie.
Perhaps, what is most interesting about the Chainsmokers is the cynicism of their approach. Their music is essentially an accretion of trends, a packet of market research. EDM’s boom-and-bust cycle has come to an end, and they’ve weathered the drought, presenting themselves as part of a lovably hateable lifestyle brand that grips the nation’s young and powerful. One thing about cynics is they tend to survive, and Chainsmokers seem engineered above all for survival.
