What makes a dance musician? What makes a great dance musician? What makes a hit electronic dance music track? For the past few years these questions have had an almost innate answer with an archetype for each that could be copied and pasted–sounding nearly the same every time but just good enough to get a crowd moving. However, what if an artist could bring new life to a genre known too well for its routine repetitive rhythms? Over the past two years, Fred Again has achieved this and created a renaissance of modern music through his creation.

Fred Again brings humanity back to dance music. EDM, known in part as a distant, detached genre marked by electronic and narcotic escapism, has apparently embraced its portrayal as separate from reality over the past two decades. Fred's music, however, seeks to draw humanity back to “actual life.” His music is raw and evokes the visceral. Fred, too, is an embodiment of the revolution he has started in EDM: he isn't a caricature hidden behind one-way sunglasses and festival pyrotechnics; Fred is humble and real, often seated at a keyboard for sold-out shows of enraptured fans. Fred's breakout song "Marea (we’ve lost dancing)" could serve as an allegory for the way by which dance music lost much of its own soul since its inception. It is a call that dance music pioneers Daft Punk sent into the void on their final 2013 project Random Access Memories with the didactic "Give Life Back to Music." Fred's music answers this decade-long call and brings back that which was lost for too long.

The title of Fred's "We've Lost Dancing" also includes the name of his friend Marea Stamper. In the track, Marea speaks a mantra that calls to the listener in a way that most vapid dance music lyrics cannot. Fred titles many of his tracks with the names of his friends to elucidate the deep connection between the people who shape his life’s work and that work itself. He makes clear that his music is not solely electronic or by machine but also human and by man.

Fred's albums, three of them titled Actual Life, bring the reality of the human experience back to a genre that has seemed to constantly seek an escape from true humanity in exchange for a fabricated facade of the digital, drug-induced sublime. Fred fills songs with melodies that echo the actual life realities his friends live through from track to track. Fred’s instinctual musicality in combination with the reality and the human struggle that fill each song, along with Fred’s own oneness with the music he creates, have allowed Fred Again to give life to a new age of dance music that will surely permeate the sonic world for generations.

-Charlie, July 2023