From the very first minute, DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ has existed, and solely existed, online. Her remarkable debut album, Makin’ Magick, seemingly ­­titled after a 2003 Sims game, was uploaded to Bandcamp in late 2017. The retro-pop and vintage-culture outfitted album slowly picked up steam, circulating heavily within the underground circuits of outsider and lo-fi house enthusiasts. The album ran 128 minutes and featured instant genre classics like “Starting Over (Makin’ Magick)” and “This Is for the Lovers,” but little to nothing was known about the artist.

“I love how there is literally no trace of who the person behind this project actually is,” read a comment on the album’s Rate Your Music page. There have been a few such secretive artists in the past (the UK’s own cult favorite Burial spent years cultivating, but ultimately revealing, a shrouded persona), but none have been so online and so ubiquitous.

Within 3 years of her debut, DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ released 4 more albums and 7 mixtapes. Her output, prolific already, culminated in the 184-minute opus Charmed (2020), a dizzying constellation of 31 house, disco, future funk, and synthpop tracks—with an incredible consistency throughout its staggering length. Playing like a career’s worth of highlights, the record boasts incredible music, from “Next to Me” to “Charmed” to “Strayed Ocean” to “How Did You Know?” to “Charmed Life.”



Charmed proved to be the DJ’s breakout hit, receiving media attention and adulation thereon from Stereogum, Pitchfork, The Guardian, NPR Music, FADER, Alternative Press, and the like. Last year, The 1975’s Matty Healy, a noted fan, contacted DJ Sabrina to collaborate on what would become 2022’s “Happiness.”

Now, 3 more albums and 12 mixtapes later, the anonymous London artist aims to top her 3-hour masterwork with an even longer, more ambitious record: Destiny (2023). Shortly after the release of the album, DJ Sabrina sat with Small World City, answering questions and correcting rumors regarding her identity (she is not Aphex Twin nor Taylor Swift, as some have speculated) and methodology (in the last few years it has been speculated that the act is either a duo or collective of artists.)

Small World City: First of all, thank you for taking this interview. You just released Destiny, your 4-hour new album, so I picture a very busy, very hectic schedule. Starting off, I wanted to ask what the thought process was of following up what felt like your shortest record with decidedly your longest (yet?)


DJ SABRINA THE TEENAGE DJ: Thank you for having me! It was very tough getting it finished, mixing some of the last bunch of songs, trying to get the flow right, fitting everything in was definitely challenging! I wanted Bewitched to be short enough to fit on a double vinyl really, but there’s more to it than that!

Originally, I wanted to release 3 albums simultaneously in 2022 (Bruce Springsteen had done 2 on the same day as I did with MM2 and TOR) but the heatwave made it really impossible to carry on with that idea, plus I was sick of having a bunch of songs that no one had heard so I broke it up into three albums over three years. It was supposed to be a soulful album, a pop album, and an electro album, but Bewitched just used a mix of whatever I had at the time that would work. “Dance Now” was intended for the pop album but it never made it, even though it was originally finished back in July 2022 (I put it out as a single in October ‘cause I wanted it to be actually heard haha). “The End” was meant to close the soul album, and “My Own” and “HEX” would have gone on the soul and electro albums, respectively.

Destiny was originally going to be much shorter and had a different album name, but after finishing the track “Destiny” in April I decided to use it as the title track and rename the album (it didn’t even start with the dialogue that gave the song and album their name—that came right at the end of mixing the song). I wanted to try and topple Charmed off its perch with this, I had no idea if it was (or is) possible, but I figured going for an even longer album might be a good start. After making the Charmed vinyl box-sets between Bewitched and Destiny, I realized that huge albums could be released on vinyl, so it all made sense to attempt to make Destiny the best album ever :p


SWC: Is there a particular preference you have among the mediums for your music—between vinyl, cassette, digital, and the occasional CD?

DJ SABRINA THE TEENAGE DJ: I love CDs, it’s my favorite format and it’s wonderful that short-run glass-mastered discs can be produced these days (it used to be a minimum of 1000, which I’d NEVER be able to get rid of), but tape is probably the most sensible for the length these albums are. It’s the best bang-for-buck with huge albums (length, cost, demand, etc.) but vinyl is probably the most fun and surprisingly my music probably sounds best on vinyl... surprising as I do all the masters myself! XD

SWC: There are seldom artists today who are more “online,” or digital, than DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ. I mean, even Burial has a face. With increased media and industry attention, do you see yourself ever unmasking or shedding the Sabrina the Teenage DJ mythos?

DJ SABRINA THE TEENAGE DJ: I originally loved the lo-fi house artists using goofy monikers and visual representations for their decidedly serious and heads-down music. The two styles were at odds with each other, and it was an amazing time compared to the usual alien-generated artist names everyone’s forced to use in an age where albums’ every combination of 26 letters have been used before. After everyone un-masked it just wrecked the whole vibe and I think having emotional music with a very present, very fun persona is really a lot more charming from my experience... I always say a beautiful piece of music that’s also amusing can be 100x more beautiful if done correctly...

SWC: Are you familiar with the parody Twitter account, @Seinfeld2000? The person who runs it has an obvious affection for Seinfeld, a show he nonetheless lampoons. Would you say your art exists in this same sort of post-irony, or does your dialogue with the MJH-show end strictly at an aesthetical level?

DJ SABRINA THE TEENAGE DJ: I love [Sabrina the Teenage Witch] but it was originally just a name that looked even more ridiculous and stand-out from the robot-names than DJ Boring and DJ Seinfeld did on a club flier. It was a name that just leapt off the paper (Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs was also a huge inspiration for it’s immense length) and I took DJ Sabrina from a YouTube comment that has since vanished (The Guardian article came a little later and didn’t use the second “DJ” in the name). I don’t really think there’s a lot of connection with the music and the show. I’ve never sampled it in any of my songs (besides the German version of Sabrina Goes to Rome in one of the Combinisions mixes) and the tone is generally a little more slapstick than my vibe probably goes for... I do love watching it, though, as I’m an extremely avid ‘90s sitcom fan!

SWC: While The Avalanches’ Since I Left You and J Dilla’s Donuts have been apparent influences in your work, I’ve always felt your music is less evidently plunderphonic. I get Eurodance, Eurodisco, hashing things out in a professional studio, as opposed to crate digging in a basement. Is this an intentional effort on your part? I get more “hi-fi” than the “lo-fi” you’re usually labeled with.

DJ SABRINA THE TEENAGE DJ: Thanks! Yeah, I think the first couple of albums were more lo-fi, but I’ve kinda strongly suggested that everything since Spellbound has been “mid-fi”, the sound that people used to have to settle with when they were going for hi-fi but didn’t have the gear for it. I’ve always loved the creepy, almost “post-mortem photography” vibe of [Since I Left You], where it sounds like a live band recording a live album in the ‘60s, but it’s all just stitched-together samples. It was radically different from the sampling of the day, that took old samples and made them sound fresh with modern compression, cutting-up (which introduces subtitles that the ear hears as modern), speeding-up samples which gives them a higher fidelity, huge bass on the kick drums and bass parts, layered drums, etc. I love that place between sleep and awake where you can’t quite tell what is made of what, what is new and what is old, what is recorded for the song and what is sampled...

SWC: One particular feeling your songs captures very accurately is “yes-things-suck-but-let’s-dance-the-night-away-anyway.” There’s this unembellished sincerity to your music that I only really get from soukous or mbaqanga. Would you say there is a degree of central or southern African influence in your music?

DJ SABRINA THE TEENAGE DJ: I ADORE Township Jive/South African music, absolutely love the emotion that comes through, even though it’s very light and danceable. It’s similar to how Country music can use only major chords but use melodies that make you cry without ever touching a minor chord. I’m a huge fan of Mahlathini, The Mahotella Queens, Ratau Mike Makhalemele, and what Paul Simon did with Graceland and Malcolm McLaren’s Duck Rock.

SWC: Did you ever read how Markus Popp categorizes his own music? He said it wasn’t “capital-M music,” because his form of sampling is more akin to “file management.” Despite making very beautiful music, he said, “I’m not a composer. I’m just beta-testing software.” Do you ever feel the same way about sampling?

DJ SABRINA THE TEENAGE DJ: I think sampling is a valid musical art-form as much as writing chords and melodies, writing lyrics, composing a score, arranging a song for a singer, bringing together the musician’s individual parts on tape via production... there’s many different ways of being creative and they’re all considered very valid and deserved roles in making music, but sampling still has a stigma with being treated as valid as any of those roles (it’s actually probably a lot harder to do consistently well than some of those). I would maybe say I started as a sample-artist, then became a songwriter, and finally went back to sampling as a songwriter.

SWC: I’m really enjoying Destiny and how you’ve sequenced it. “Something New” is already one of my favorite tracks of 2023, and it’s amazing how certain songs can stand out throughout the long playing time. I’m curious as to how one goes about sequencing a 41-track album. Was there a bit of “file management”—with spreadsheets keeping track of feels and genres and BPMs?

DJ SABRINA THE TEENAGE DJ: Thank you, I’m glad you like it! I’ve never actually used a vibe-sheet, I just have a text-file with the tracks, their different mastering settings, and a rough idea of how I want certain songs to fit in. I haven’t listened to Charmed since it came out ‘cause I know I’d find nothing but faults with it, but after releasing MM2 and TOR, I’ve listened to Charmed almost every day for the last year or so, trying to figure out what made it work so well, and that influenced the structure of Destiny.

So, I had some idea of what tone and vibe the tracks should have. It’s mostly sequenced by taking the promo versions and sorting them until I find a structure that works, but this took weeks for Destiny as I had to keep going back and mixing more songs to fill in the gaps that wouldn’t work! (“Bewitched” was originally intended to open the previous album, but I wanted to open with “Under Your Spell”, and I didn’t think [“Bewitched”] worked very well as an opener, so it was left until earlier this year and only mixed right at the very end when I needed one more track for the album). Until the day of Destiny’s release, I still didn’t have a good final suite for the album (it dragged soooo badly) and I spent 4 hours trying everything I could, going nuts until something finally clicked and the album structure was done. It was super, super hard work and I originally wanted it to be over 4 hours, but with trimming and removal of a couple of tracks, it ended up being just under... which is pretty cool ‘cause some people say it’s 3 hours, some say 4 hours...

SWC: In the last few years, you have dispelled rumors of being Richard D. James or Taylor Swift (your collaboration with Matty Healy certainly doesn’t help.) Meanwhile both Google and Wikipedia lists DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ as a duo. While letting the mystery be, I’d like to ask if DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ identifies as a solo or duo act.

DJ SABRINA THE TEENAGE DJ: Well, the album sleeves have always said “Written, produced, composed, played, engineered and mastered by Two From The Witches Council”, which was a joke on Prince’s famous sleeve credits (“Vocals by DJ Sabrina” was both a joke on the vocal sampling and a reference to the “Written by Genesis” credit the band used, but instead a collective credit for the organic vocals), and the bio has always mentioned Sabrina and Salem, but I like the idea of it being a mystery like Steinvord (RDJ and Squarepusher, or?), or is it RDJ and TS collaborating?

SWC: Thank you again for your time! If there’s anything else you’d like to add, please do. Just wanted to leave this Rate Your Music comment I found: “Still convinced DJ Sabrina is a collective of artists. No way one individual could be this consistent and productive.” :)

DJ SABRINA THE TEENAGE DJ: I LOVE that comment, it’s one of my favorites and reminds me of how people thought Jai Paul and Anup Paul were a huge team of London producers... it’s incredibly flattering :’)

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