Porter Robinson

The first five years of Porter Robinson’s career had more twists and turns than many of his DJ peers experience in decades behind the decks. The Chapel Hill, North Carolina, resident released his first singles, including “Say My Name,” in 2010, when he was just 18 years old—some six years after the precocious young producer had first begun frequenting the tech forums that helped him hone his chops for jagged, high-energy EDM. In 2011, he signed his Spitfire EP to Skrillex’s OWSLA label, a natural fit for Robinson’s hyperkinetic “complextro” sound, and he introduced an even more emotional dimension with 2012’s melodic “Language.” But his instincts took him away from the familiar terrain of the festival main stage. He cowrote Zedd’s 2012 “Clarity,” heralding a new vulnerability in EDM, and moved sharply away from what he called the “DJ-friendly limits” of the form with 2014’s Worlds, his debut album, slowing the tempo and sinking into billowing synth-pop reveries that had more in common with M83 than Swedish House Mafia. On “Sad Machine,” one of the album’s all-the-feels highlights, he paired his own vocals with Vocaloid software, nodding to his fascination with Japanese pop culture and elegantly closing the distance between humans and machines. Three years later, he doubled down on that passion with his Virtual Self alias, a ’90s-flavored foray into anime and dance-driven video games—and a fitting riposte to any suggestion that he’s changed his tune.