Billboard
The producer’s sixth album pushes further into house and trance and comes ahead of a Sphere residency designed “like a movie.”
Illenium logs onto Zoom from his Los Angeles home studio in a moment of relative chill, given what his last year has been like.
The producer born Nick Miller released his sixth studio album, Odyssey, today (Feb. 6) and on March 6 will launch a nine-date Sphere residency of the same name that will make him the second electronic artist in history after Anyma to headline the venue.
As such, Illenium and his team have spent the last year creating an entirely new world around the project, with the process starting with the creation of a storyline for the show that then inspired Odyssey. The LP is Illenium’s first with Republic Records, and includes collaborators Ellie Goulding, Kid Cudi, Bring Me the Horizon, Dabin, Alok and Ryan Tedder. Odyssey also finds the producer, whose work pioneered the future bass genre, leaning into house, tech house and trance of the first time.
After the story and the visuals and the album was finished, the work continued, with Illenium spending, he says, “eight to 20 hours per song” to mix the album into spatial audio, a technological component of Sphere that Illenium is employing more than any other artist who’s played a residency there thus far.
