Skilah’s latest track, Dance MF, lets listeners believe they know exactly where it is headed. Rooted in tech house, the track builds toward a familiar release before unexpectedly swerving into a bass drop, catching the crowd off guard in the best possible way. In a beautifully artistic sense, that switch-up feels like a microcosm of Skilah’s journey: guided less by what she is expected to make and more by wherever her creative instincts take her.
“I want to keep creating genre bending tracks, I combine so many different genres into my sets, so why not do the same for my music?”
There is a certain irony in how obsessively electronic music fans debate what belongs where. C’mon, we all know at least one person who says, “that’s not dubstep,” or, “that’s not even real 140 bass.” Genre can help us understand a sound, honor its history, and find the dance floors that feel like home. But when did those descriptions become restrictions?
If art is an expression of the self, and the self rarely fits inside one perfectly labeled box, why should we expect music to?
Skilah describes herself primarily as a tech house artist, but she has always loved playing bass music at the peak of her sets. When it came time to create “Dance MF,” she did not force herself to choose between the two. She followed the far more interesting question: Why not both?
That question sits at the heart of the Skilah project. She loves too many corners of electronic music to confine herself to one, and with every set, edit, and release, she is discovering a sound that increasingly feels her own.
“It’s so hard for me to just pick one genre to play out, considering how much I love all genres of electronic music… I want my music to really sound like me. And I feel with each release, and testing it out to crowds, each song is starting to really fit into a pocket of my own.”
For Skilah, finding that pocket has not meant choosing one lane and remaining there. Her SoundCloud catalog of mixes and edits has given her space to experiment across the electronic spectrum, allowing each new idea to reveal another piece of what the Skilah sound could become.
And the more Skilah discovers what sounds like her, the more of herself she allows into the music, sometimes quite literally.
Long before she was playing in front of festival crowds, Skilah was singing in choir from elementary school through high school and posting covers of Rihanna’s “Stay” on YouTube. Although tech house does not always leave much room for traditional singing, she found her own way in. She began with spoken vocals, then experimented with yelling and eventually returned to the singing voice that had been part of her creative life all along.
“I was actually in choir from elementary school, up until high school. I’ve been singing my entire life. I was the girl posting “Stay” by Rihanna covers on YouTube hahah, so I really wanted to find a way to incorporate my voice into my music.”
In that sense, the Skilah sound is not one fixed combination of genres. It is the accumulation of everything that already lives within her: the singer, the DJ, the bass lover, the tech house artist, and the curious creator still figuring out what else she can become. Her artistry expands each time she gives another part of herself permission to be heard.
“It’s so hard for me to just pick one genre to play out, considering how much I love all genres of electronic music. I feel the more shows I play, the more I find myself gravitating towards a certain sound.”
Of course, sounding like yourself does not mean creating inside a vacuum. Electronic music has always felt like a sacred interaction between the person behind the decks and the people moving in front of them. For Skilah, the dance floor is where instinct meets response.
“Seeing how a crowd reacts to a drop really helps me decide what kind of music I want to make in the studio. Not all tracks have to be bangers for the crowd, but mine happen to all be as of lately. I love surprising the crowd with every song I mix in.”
She has learned that every crowd is different, which is why she prefers to freestyle rather than force the same predetermined set onto every room. She keeps a few trusted tracks close, but allows the energy in front of her to shape what happens between them. One crowd may respond to a song that falls flat with another, and learning to read those differences has made her more adaptable behind the decks and more intentional in the studio.
“I believe freestyling is the best way to mix. It’s hard to play a certain set every time, because one crowd might love it, and the next might hate it. I always have my go to tracks I play, but I try to switch up the tracks in between for every single set.”
The unexpected bass drop in “Dance MF” works because Skilah understands what the crowd thinks is coming next, then playfully chooses another direction. Touring has taught her how people move, but it has also given her the confidence to keep challenging how they expect her music to move.
Perhaps that is why defining the Skilah sound does not require every track to follow the same formula. Consistency does not have to mean repetition. The connecting thread is her perspective: curious, responsive, genre-fluid, and always willing to follow the energy somewhere unexpected.
Following her instincts wherever they lead may sound like pure creative freedom, but for Skilah, that freedom has carried a very real cost. The Skilah project is fully self-funded, meaning every release, performance, and creative risk requires her to invest in the vision before anyone can guarantee where it will take her. Long before festival crowds could affirm that people connected with her sound, she had to decide that the project was worth believing in anyway.
For someone who describes herself as hypercritical, continuing to invest in the project becomes a repeated act of self-trust. Skilah admits that she still questions herself and her music, but each show has helped her grow more confident both behind the decks and beyond them. Every crowd she learns to read, every unexpected drop that lands, and every new release that finds its audience offers another small piece of evidence that the instincts she followed were leading somewhere real.
“I’ve always been very hyper critical of myself and my music. I still am. But the more shows I play, the more confident I get behind the decks… and the more music I create, just helps to spark new ideas in my head.”
The audience is not separate from Skilah’s creative compass. The dance floor has become one of the places where she learns how to read it. She arrives with her own instincts and the music she loves, then allows the crowd’s energy to challenge, refine, and expand what comes next. That exchange does not make her artistry any less authentic. It is part of what makes the music hers. Perhaps confidence is built within that loop: believing in an idea enough to fund it, being vulnerable enough to test it in front of a crowd, listening closely to the response, and trusting herself to decide where it should lead her next.
“I’ve always made the music that I love, so it’s been really awesome to see other people starting to love it as well.”
Maybe true artistry is not about fitting perfectly inside a genre. Maybe it is about knowing yourself well enough to recognize when the music feels like yours, even when it pulls from several worlds at once. The labels can wait. For now, Dance MF.
