Wolfgang Gartner

One of the key figures in America’s EDM renaissance, Wolfgang Gartner makes boldly oversized festival anthems infused with hip-hop swagger. But he got his start making much subtler sounds: born Joey Youngman in 1982 in San Luis Obispo, California, he began producing funky house tracks under aliases like Count Funkula and Mario Fabriani in the mid-2000s. When he first introduced the more jagged textures of Wolfgang Gartner’s 2007 debut EP, he kept the project anonymous at first. But his shift proved prescient, coinciding with a growing appetite for big, brash electro-house that sparked collaborations with deadmau5 and got him signed to Ultra Records. As EDM’s ambitions grew, so did Gartner’s: his 2011 debut LP, Weekend in America, featured collaborations with rappers like will.i.am, Cam’ron and Jim Jones, and he kept up the collaborations on 2016’s 10 Ways to Steal Home Plate, widening his reach to include grime pioneer Wiley and Bay Area legend E-40. Moving into the 2020s, he hasn’t lessened the intensity: tracks like 2021’s “The Original” and 2022’s “Higher” find the distortion settings on high and the drums more concussive than ever.