The similarities were all the more striking given Streten's own dalliances with the ad world. Diplo even publicly called out Zedd for creating a 'fake Flume drop.' Unlike the electro and big-room-leaning of most of Zedd's past work, the new found drop structure led to obvious comparisons to Flume's work. Enter 'Candyman,' the collaboration between EDM nice guy Zedd and Aloe Blacc that was featured in a commercial for the munchie institution in 2016. The crept further into the limelight with the help of an iconic American snack: M&Ms. 'Flume found, or at least popularized, a more multidimensional approach to the drop by using negative space to make his huge ass synths bang rhythmically.' 'Before the Flume Renaissance, pretty much everyone was accomplishing their climactic moments with deep bass sounds and well-timed drums,' Kitty says. Just go to a Flume show and you'll see people sway their bodies when the climax hits, versus the rabid fist bumps that typically accompany a big-room house anthem. But unlike the brash, nasty EDM drops deployed by the likes of Afrojack and Skrillex over the last decade, Flume's drops combine the structural formula of an EDM drop with something that hits softer and is more forgiving. Her take references what's long been attractive to many who produce and find pleasure in rib-cage rattling festival drops. If you have 12 minutes to spare, you can even learn how to replicate the specific drop from his festival-friendly remix for Lorde. Like Prydz, Flume's unique production tactic has its own Reddit thread, as well as dozens of YouTube tutorials that turn you into an effective Flume copycat. Eric Prydz, for example, saw his snare sound become the 'Pryda snare,' which has since been a subject of countless YouTube tutorials and other forms of Ableton appropriation. It's certainly not rare in electronic music for a producer to find a style people enjoy and stick to it, nor is it it uncommon for other artists co-opt that style to their advantage. 'I'm extremely sick of it, but I feel that it objectively rules.' 'When I think of the 'Flume sound', the only way to describe what comes to mind is several very large VVWWUUUM sounds playing a few chords, often interspersed with some big honks, over a heavy but infrequent THOOM,' says Kitty, an electronic producer and songwriter based out of New York City. The style can be tricky to describe with concrete vocabulary, and those that attempt to describe it often do so phonetically.

He's developed the style of his debut album-waves of bombastic synths that sound like gale force winds gusting safely outside your window-into a trademark framework that some refer to as 'the Flume synth' or 'Flume drop.' Eventually the sound became so identifiable it warranted its own handle. In the years since, Streten has gone onto even more worldwide success, helped along the way by even more buzzy reworks and a 2016 sophomore album that spawned international hits (like THUMP's #2 track of the year, 'Never Be Like You' feat. It quickly became clear that the sound was easily reproducible, and popular too. You can see it on display in its earliest form within Flume's remix of Lorde's 'Tennis Court,' when after a slow build up of compressed synth washes, the sounds unravel into punchy halftime drops interspersed with short vocal snippets that pop in short succession. It happens like clockwork at the climax of each of his most well known songs. As showcased on a number of high-profile remixes around that time, like his 2013 flip of Disclosure's 'You and Me,' many of his productions started featuring the same dizzy drop-these piercing flurries of stuttering synths and stomach-churning side-chain compression.

But once I finally caught him live at New York's Terminal 5-where I dodged bros with their partners on their shoulders and guzzled a few $13 well drinks-I realized his success relies on a recipe.

Old flume merch