Vanic

Vancouver-based electronic dance producer Vanic (aka Jesse Hughes) first caught listeners’ attention with a string of well-received remixes — including his reworking of machineheart’s 2015 track “Circles” — before releasing his own trap- and house-influenced tracks. Following debut “Samurai,” he scored his first chart appearance in 2017 with Top 40 single “Too Soon.”
Hughes began playing piano when he was three but grew bored with the confines of his classical training, and soon dabbled in jazz and ragtime piano while listening to metal and happy hardcore. In high school, he grew more intrigued with electronic music and began making his own productions. He started by remixing well-known tracks, and released his debut as Vanic — a version of Taylor Swift’s “I Knew You Were Trouble” — in 2012. His career gained momentum with remixes of Birdy’s “Skinny Love” and machineheart’s “Circles,” a pair of 2014 tracks that earned him millions of streams. Though Hughes attended business school at Simon Fraser University, he dropped out of the program to focus on music and saved up to build his own studio. More viral remixes of artists such as Lana Del Rey, Chvrches, Major Lazer, and the Chainsmokers followed, and Vanic signed a deal with Sony’s Disruptor Records in 2016. That March, Hughes’ first original track, “Samurai,” was released; Good Things, a collection of some of his most popular remixes, arrived at the end of the year. Vanic began 2017 with a pair of original singles: U.S. Dance chart Top 40 “Too Soon” featuring Maty Noyes was released in January, while “Staring at the Sun” with Clara Mae followed in June.
In 2019, he issued a string of collaborative singles with the likes of Olivia Noelle (“Good on Me”), Saint Sinner and Wifisfuneral (“Forever Down”), Gloria Kim (“Save Yourself”), and Jocelyn Alice (“Cannonball”). ~ Heather Phares