Living 5,000 miles away from your creative brethren will have you trying to open portals. After being deported from Sweden and moving to Bangkok in 2015, Drain Gang’s Thaiboy Digital has leaned harder into the cult rap crew’s love for rave electronics than any other member, chasing highs in lucid dreams to compensate for sporadic meetups with the boys. Since 2020’s My Fantasy World, DJ Billybool has been his conceptual side project where he imagines himself touring Andromeda as the planet’s No. 1 DJ, culminating in 2025’s DYR, a fever dream of Swedish-language happy hardcore. On Paradise, he goes all-in on becoming the ultimate clubland avatar.
For Paradise and DYR, Thaiboy enlisted production collective swedm®, whose registered name first caused a stir last year when they littered the credits of Skrillex’s F*CK U SKRILLEX YOU THINK UR ANDY WARHOL BUT UR NOT!! <3. Consisting of jamesjamesjames, Varg²™, Eurohead, and Skarp, the outfit nakedly endeavors to reappraise the richly earnest sounds of 2010s Swedish EDM, known for its pointillistic, high-octave melodies and counterpoints that, at their best, imbue big-room propulsion with butterflies in the stomach. Think Avicii, Alesso, Axwell, and other Swedes beginning with other letters. Oklou shares the same melodic grace in her wandering arpeggios, and the spectral balearic timewarp of Torus’ Summer of Love samples Stockholm’s own Eric Prydz. For all the reheated ’90s rave euphoria in pop and club music, a new generation are recognizing the touching optimism that has remained trapped in Tomorrowland aftermovies until now.
No Swedish EDM producer has worked with a slippery, robo-slurred head voice like Thaiboy’s before. But as understated as he may sound over the aggressively splashing synths, his sincere affection for the genre shines through in the visions of ecstasy, wide skies, and realized dreams he expresses among the superlative cars, brands, and parties in his bars and hooks. The way he rides “Surrendering to the Rhythm” as it builds from ringing piano droplets into a precise trancey tempest manages to whisk up feelings of comfort, longing, juiced-up joy, and above-the-clouds bliss along the way.
To chime with Thaiboy’s love for old-school Tiësto and Basshunter, swedm® split the atom to find Swedish EDM’s roots in Dutch trance and Eurodance. Tracks may start with classy piano, but subtlety is almost never the end product; the group wields sidechains like a bandolier, extracting the maximum possible velocity in every kick while retaining the gooey melodic centre. Thaiboy slips into the million-megawatt production like an old pair of festival shoes, and there are moments where his Eurodance intuition takes over. As soon as airy trance synths introduce “Solitary,” he sees his opportunity to channel Basshunter’s boyish sing-sobbing. The nostalgia trip deepens into adolescent memories of 2000s tech touchpoints. Millennials will get a kick out of hearing the music class icon that is the Yamaha keyboard DJ button echo through “Born Ready,” and closing track “Destiny” grabs a Nokia 3310 for kitschy ringtone pop with a crisp percussive fleck of garage house.
As Thaiboy tunnel-visions on the party, a sadness starts to seep through. The bullet-train techno rager “Zatoichi” has him flush with centre-of-the-dancefloor ego, half-liddedly spouting absurd sells like, “I’m comin’ in like the Eclipse, we can party for days.” This desperation is met with falling piano chimes, and further lines confess to longing for “your embrace.” His quest to keep the high going drives the very structure of “Come True,” taking just four bars after the finishing slope of the first drop to arrive at the summit of the second. As Malibu croons about dreams coming true, Thaiboy is restless to return to fantasy.
There’s a danger of living in paradise for too long. Some songs overstay their welcome and drudge up memories of EDM’s excess. Thaiboy can be lulled into autopiloting CEO-level flexes by the thumping intensity around him, like the labored hook of “Euro Dollar Yen,” which is saved only by the brilliant breakdown in which one of his multi-track voices drops into a Chief Keef-like growl. “Silk Road” has no such saving grace. “Flight to Japan, making lots of bands/Make monеy overseas then I spеnd it in Thailand,” he slathers over a boilerplate electro house beat, and his drawl makes being the boss sound as enthralling as a summer internship. And what of Bladee’s guest verse on “Solitary,” where he name-checks Caesar’s Palace and rhymes it with “triple A, all access”? Instead of tapping into the spirit of the music, it’s a reminder of how plastic and tacky the scene became.
The most profound moment comes when Thaiboy breaks away from the seismic drops and taps into swedm®’s mellow side. “Irish Tears” links up with Bladee once more, this time over Eric Prydz-style progressive house crescendos that sweep so toweringly that they feel like they hold some kind of finality. In response, both artists push their writing to imagine a higher form of paradise. “Is this real? Are we really here?” Where his work up until now as Thaiboy played as prototypical, short ‘n’ sweet Drain Gang trap, here, he grapples with his distance from his community and the time that’s passed since Swedish EDM’s promised transcendence. As he warbles about “running shit” with the boys once again, a ghostly tinge coats his and Bladee’s voices, and the rolling synths blur like a faded memory. You get the sense that Thaiboy is happy to take it as the real thing.
