Long before the wider attention, HNTR was paying attention to how a room moved. Not in theory, but in real time, through parties, late nights, and trial and error with No Neon. You quickly see what holds people and what loses them, and that kind of feedback leaves little room for guesswork.
That experience still sits at the center of how he makes music. Even now, the starting point hasn’t really shifted. It’s not about chasing what’s trending or what might take off online. It’s about whether a track actually works when it’s played out loud, in a space full of people who aren’t thinking about algorithms.
His remix of “Stephanie” pushed him into a different sphere, travelling far beyond the scene he came up in. But if anything, it seems to have reinforced what he already knew rather than changing direction. The sound remains dark, driving, and built to hold attention, not just grab it for a moment.
At a time when dance music is moving faster than ever online, HNTR is still measuring things differently. The internet might decide how far a track goes, but the room decides whether it lasts.
You’ve been part of Toronto’s underground for years, not just as an artist but through No Neon. How has building a scene around you shaped the kind of music you make today?
Building No Neon changed how I approach everything. When you’re throwing parties, you see in real time what actually works and what doesn’t. That naturally shapes how you produce. It made me focus more on feeling and energy than trends. My music comes from what I know will translate in a room.
Your Stephanie Remix became a global dance hit; went No.1 on Beatport, certified Gold in Australia and has now amassed 100M streams. Did that moment change how you see your place within the global dance scene?
It was a big moment, especially hitting No. 1 on Beatport and seeing it connect globally. More than anything, it reinforced that staying true to my sound works. It opened doors, but it didn’t really change how I approach music.
Your sound leans dark, heavy, and a bit unpredictable. What draws you to that space, especially when more commercial sounds tend to travel faster?
I’ve always been into music that creates tension and keeps people locked in. Darker records just feel more honest to me. Commercial stuff moves faster, but I’m more focused on what lasts in a club.
You’ve released on labels like Experts Only, Drumcode and Hellbent while also having your own imprint. How do you decide what belongs in your world versus someone else’s?
For the last 2 years, my focus has been solely on working with other labels, but I think it’s about time to get back to releasing on my own brand! Having a place where I can have complete creative control over all aspects of the music and the overall vision feels exciting again.
Dance music is moving faster than ever online, with tracks blowing up before they’re even released. How do you navigate that without losing the club-focused intent of your music?
I still build everything for the club first. If it doesn’t work in a room, it’s not done. Online can push things faster, but it doesn’t really change how I make records.
You were part of the first wave to win a JUNO in the underground dance category. Do you feel like recognition is finally catching up to what’s been happening in that space for years?
Winning a Juno Award was meaningful for the scene. It feels like things are starting to catch up, but there’s still a lot more happening under the surface.
What are your thoughts about the Future of Music in Canada?
Canada’s in a strong place right now. There are a lot of new artists coming up with their own identity. Cities like Toronto are still pushing things forward, but it feels more connected across the country now.
Holzman and Hughes at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.Courtesy of Ekko Astral
Holzman and Hughes in Brooklyn, May 2026.Griffin Lotz for Rolling Stone
There’s no immediate resolution in any of this. There’s no surrender either — and a lot of great escape. White’s slide guitar in “Dollar Bill” sounds like a National Steel on steroids until the solo, when it turns into what seems like a theremin gone postal. “I Can’t Believe What I’m Hearing” has a great pop-wise chorus closer to the Pretty Things than Son House. And don’t miss White’s wry aside to the White Stripes’ old creation myth in the second verse of “G.O.D.,” on the way to the real business at hand. “Well, it’s the beginning of the world now,” he declares at the song’s end. “Let’s do it all over again.”
Jay-Z has turned the 30th anniversary of his classic debut album into a major marketing event
Jay-Z Knows the Past Still Pays
There’s a pleasant absurdity to the advertisements for JAŸ-Z30 that are currently found across New York’s subway tunnels. Their dramatic imagery — a stark black backdrop pierced through the center with a pair of hands, presumably Jay’s, fixed into the famous Roc diamond — invites a kind of religious authority that feels a touch ironic for anyone who’s old enough to remember all types of handwringing over those very hand symbols only a few years ago. And maybe that’s the point. By now, nostalgia’s grip extends layers deep. So much so that you could find yourself waiting for the train, reminiscing on the days when people still made jokes about the so-called Illuminati.
Jay-Z’s months-long campaign commemorating the 30th anniversary of Reasonable Doubt and the 25th anniversary of The Blueprint has indeed resurfaced the rapper-turned-mogul’s success story. Reasonable Doubt, released in 1996, positioned Jay as not only a resonant voice in hip-hop but also in the increasingly lucrative business around it. After major labels passed, the album was released independently through Roc-A-Fella Records and Priority Records, setting the tone for Jay’s career as a business…man.
And in the full-court press campaign around this summer’s anniversaries, culminating in this weekend’s trio of performances at Yankee Stadium, Jay’s business acumen is again at center focus. You’d be forgiven for throwing around buzzwords like “multichannel” or “cross-platform” to describe the slate of festivities. There was a Spotify-backed takeover of the J and Z trains; custom JAŸ-Z30 subway maps and a Google Maps guide; commemorative Brooklyn Public Library cards; and most recently Bowery Station and DUMBO pop-ups with archival footage and merch. (That these Yankee Stadium shows come on the heels of Taylor Swift’s wedding at MSG suggests some sort of mega-rich takeover of cultural institutions, but let’s leave that one for another day.)
The moves come as nostalgia continues to drive a considerable chunk of the music industry’s profits. In an era when old songs can circulate infinitely on streaming platforms, gaining new life in the form of everything from samples to memes, and when superfans are willing to spend on physical goods, limited merch, and live experiences, album anniversaries have become their own product launches. Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt campaign is only the splashiest recent example.
No wonder, then, that Beyoncé already appears to be setting the stage for her own run of commemorations for the upcoming 20th anniversary of her album B’Day in September. Over the weekend, she released her first new song in two years, titled “Morning Dew (Donk),” to tease the upcoming reissue. According to Luminate, older music still dominates attention, with only 43 percent of U.S. on-demand audio streams in 2025 coming from tracks released in the previous five years. This is also one reason why vinyl and physical formats have seen renewed value in recent years, with the RIAA reporting that vinyl sold 46.8 million units in the U.S. in 2025, compared with 29.5 million CDs. Luminate says superfans are 20 percent of U.S. music listeners and spend heavily on live events and physical merchandise; 73 percent of these fans purchase physical merch, versus 26 percent of general music listeners.
In today’s industry, having a major anniversary is like having a new product to promote, a way to participate in an already thriving marketplace for nostalgia. The demand is visible well beyond official artist stores: Vintage concert tees now trade as collectibles, with one 1967 Grateful Dead shirt selling at Sotheby’s for $19,300 and rare rap tees treated as wearable archives of hip-hop history. Anniversary campaigns give artists and labels a way to reclaim that energy, turning the secondary market’s appetite for old symbols into new, officially sanctioned products.
Jay-Z’s official anniversary store turns that logic into a menu of objects: a $1,500 collector’s crate, a $300 cassette box, $400 Yankees jerseys, and four-figure varsity jackets. Of course, Jay is far from alone when it comes to legacy acts cashing in on nostalgia. He’s more like one salient example of a much larger wave of artists and promoters marketing anniversary products that includes the Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness 30th anniversary super-deluxe edition, My Chemical Romance’s Black Parade stadium tour, and the returned Warped Tour, among many others.
Five years before Reasonable Doubt became the occasion for library cards, pop-ups, collector crates, and stadium spectacle, its 25th anniversary was marked by an NFT. In 2021, Sotheby’s and Roc Nation auctioned a one-of-one Derrick Adams artwork tied to the album, billed as the only official Jay-Z-authorized commemoration of the anniversary. Around the same time, Roc-A-Fella was in court over co-founder Damon Dash’s attempted sale of a Reasonable Doubt-related NFT, a dispute that ended with a judgment making clear that no shareholder could sell or dispose of an interest in the album — including through an NFT — without the company’s authorization.
That ownership question is becoming harder to avoid as music enters the AI era, where the archive is not only something to reissue, exhibit, or sell, but something that can be scraped, modeled, and trained on. Last week, SZA took to Twitter to express frustration with AI music company Suno, notably calling out Diplo by name as one of the company’s investors. “DO NOT GIVE AWAY YOUR VIBRANIUM !!! DO NOT TRAIN AI WITH YOUR GENIUS,” she wrote on Twitter. Her complaint was joined by Kenneth Blume, who said Suno’s workers were “stealing from countless struggling musicians.”
For an artist with a legacy as impactful as Jay-Z’s, the current anniversary boom feel like the latest phase of a longer project of deciding who gets to turn hip-hop history into intellectual property. Jay-Z’s legacy deserves preservation; few catalogs have made a stronger case for it. But the more that preservation arrives through limited-edition objects, auction platforms, luxury merch, and authorized experiences, the more it has to answer a harder question: When does protecting the archive become another way of extracting value from it?