Yk Koi and Lorenzo Cosi better known as Sondr are two producers on the rise. As individual songwriters and producers, Sondr worked with Lana Del Rey, Meghan Trainor and Ella Eyre before coming together as a duo and making an immediate impact. They have crashed through 100 million streams of their music and aside from collaborating with such luminaries as VIZE, DVBBS, Lenny Kravitz and Felix Jaehn, have also become much in-demand remixers, adding their own unique style to tracks from Ed Sheeran, Chainsmokers, Steve Aoki, Aurora and many more. Now they’ve teamed up with in-demand producer, Love Harder for big new tune ‘I Know What You Did Last Night’ on Ultra Music. We caught up with the guys to get the lowdown for DMCWORLD…
Hi Sondr and welcome to DMC!
For those who don’t know you please can you tell us how you came to be producing together as Sondr?
Hi! Thanks for having us, we are big fans of DMC! We started working together about 5 years ago. We had a chance meeting at a London recording studio when both of our sessions cancelled last minute and we decided to do a track together. That first song got cut by a European artist and ended up charting at number 2 – so we thought it would be a good idea to keep on working together! The 3rd song we wrote was “Surviving” which was what got us signed.
Your first two singles ’Surviving’ and ‘Live Love Learn’ both went Gold certified. You set the bar high! Do you feel a lot of pressure to keep up the same level of success in terms of sales?
Haha, yes is the honest answer. It was such a blessing that Surviving connected immediately as it’s a huge part of the reason we are still able to do this today! We feel super lucky to have achieved that with our first 2 singles so we absolutely try our hardest to put out the best music we can!
Your latest single ‘I Know What You Did Last Night’ is a collaboration with fellow Ultra Music artist, Love Harder. How did this come about and can you give us the lowdown on the track itself?
Yes, we have known Love Harder for many years as he’s a really amazing songwriter and producer. His Love Harder project is relatively new, but he had a huge success with his first single, “Oblivion” and we fell in love with it straight away and knew we had to work together as artists. We wrote IKWYDLN together with Love Harder and the vocalist Guus Mulder at our studio in London last November. There was 1 section of the song we weren’t really feeling which prevented us from releasing it sooner – but over lockdown we sent it to our buddy Hight and he helped re-write that part. It came out about 4 weeks after everyone was happy!
How do you work as a duo? Do you need to be together in the studio or can you work separately? What’s the Sondr process for making music?
Up until the pandemic we have always worked together in the studio 5-6 days per week. We were forced to start working remotely this year and it’s been amazing! We usually start ideas independently, then when we are excited about them we will send clips to our WhatsApp group and start discussing. We then send the project back and forth to each other making changes until we are happy with it. This means we can get a lot more music finished and offers a great perspective from a more outside ear.
When did you each know you wanted to make a career out of music? Was there one special moment?
Honestly, I never could have imagined I’d be able to do this as a career, I feel so lucky every day. I dreamed of it as a kid, but never had a “break” – although I came close a few times. I worked in marketing for a good few years alongside making music and I would use all of my vacation time to go to sessions. I ran out of vacation and got invited to a songwriting camp so I asked my boss if I could take unpaid time off and he said no, so I handed in my notice and moved to London to make it happen. My first year I made practically no money and was worried I would have to find another job but luckily in my second year I started to have some success and that was the same year we signed as Sondr.
Do you have any tips for young artists who are thinking of music as a career?
Yes! Try and find your own unique lane and style musically, make the most of all the amazing resources available to you (video tutorials, artist portals, social media, free software, grants, q&a’s, twitch etc) and most of all have fun!
It’s a difficult time for all artists right now. Do you think we are seeing any permanent changes in the dance music scene?
Yeah it really is, we are watching music venues, promoters, festivals, and road crew suffer tremendously – we feel for these people so much. Live music has been hit the hardest and we think it will take a long time to get back to any normal gigs and festivals due to social distancing. In the live music sector we think we will start seeing ticketed, high production live streams. We hope Governments will start getting more behind this industry and start offering help to those struggling. The upside is that recorded music is performing better than normal on streaming services but the downside is that the market is getting over-saturated with so many songs coming out every day. It’s becoming increasingly hard for smaller or independent artists to get playlists, new music Fridays etc. Hopefully we can find a happy balance between live and recorded music so both sectors of the industry can thrive.
In honour of the latest single tell us what YOU did last night!
Had a very exciting night in playing “House Party” with some friends. That is 2020 for you!
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Sondr & Love Harder ‘I Know What You Did Last Night’ is out now on Ultra Music. Download / Stream here: https://ffm.to/ikwydln
