Disco Lines

Despite making the kind of shimmery, euphoric tracks that inspire total strangers to groove in unison, Disco Lines learned to love music as a solitary pursuit. Growing up outside of Denver, Colorado, the 22-year old producer born Thadeus Labuszewski didn’t have a lot of friends who shared his love for dance music. At the University of Colorado, where he was studying to become a software developer, he’d shut himself in his room for hours, staring at production software, ignoring the pleas of friends for him to get out and party like a normal college kid.

Ironically, the music that’s come from that isolation has forged more connection and community than Labuszewski ever could have imagined. His kaleidoscopic house remix of Taylor Swift’s “Love Story,” recorded in his apartment over a year ago, blew up this summer on TikTok, soundtracking millions of videos of people from all different walks of life dancing with reckless abandon. It was an unexpected reception for a humble song, made in little over an hour by gleefully smashing a colorful bassline and clattering drums into Swift’s hit, but it showed him new potential for the songs he had shut himself away for years to work on. They could bring joy to the world, especially at a time when everyone really needs good vibes.

“We’re locked up inside, everyone’s feeling a little bit depressed,” Labuszewski says of his remix blowing up in the midst of a global pandemic. “I’m not pretending I’m Gandhi or anything, but the song really did spread positive energy—people were vibing out.”

In a way, it’s only fitting that his first song to reach a wider audience found him inching closer to pop—it was his first musical love. His dad was an aerospace engineer with a taste for classic rock. His mom, an artist, encouraged him to undertake creative pursuits like sewing, scrapbooking, and piano and guitar lessons. But young Thadeus had his own interests. He remembers trying to get his music instructors to teach him songs by manic pop acts like 3OH!3, and Soulja Boy’s glitzy “Pretty Boy Swag,” which puzzled them to say the least. The simple infectiousness of late-’00s music shaped his developing ear, but everything changed when a middle-school friend introduced him to Skrillex’s EDM ur-text “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites.” “It was the most insane thing I’d ever heard,” he remembers. “The drops hurt my ears. I physically could not listen to it for more than a few seconds at a time.”

In all his music lessons, Labuszewski had never been exposed to anything so electric, so alien, and he had to learn how to do it himself. He immersed himself in the nascent world of American dubstep destroyers on Soundcloud and downloaded Ableton to attempt to replicate the sound. But it wasn't until he moved to Boulder for college and discovered the house music scene there that he started to figure it out. Hearing dance tracks out at shows, and seeing the way that crowds responded to the optimistic thrum of a song’s insistent kick—the way it united people from different ages and backgrounds—he realized he needed to be a part of it too.

Inspired by futurist house producers like Whethan, Labuszewski started woodshedding his approach, swirling together his love for pop’s plain emotions and dance’s pure ecstasy. Since he started producing, his sound has been constantly evolving, from future-bass experiments and hedonistic trap beats to the more simple, textured pop-house tracks he’s tuned into most recently. He says his “Love Story” remix isn’t 100 percent emblematic of the songs he’s been working on lately, but it does show just how exciting it is to follow along as he explores. “Love Story” is incredibly striking—familiar but blissful, the way it feels to call up a dreamy memory of hearing your favorite song at a club. This is, no doubt, why so many were moved, including Astralwerks, who signed Labuszewski over the summer. Feelings of joy and community are harder than ever to come by, but Disco Lines can help you remember what it’s like to dance.
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