It’s an unusually muggy September afternoon in Los Angeles and HAAi (aka Teneil Throssell) is in town for a brief stay in between gigs in Miami and Washington D.C. “This city has been really kind to me with support, with everything,” she says, mentioning that she was planning a free pop-up party in town with her friend, Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa, during her stay. At the moment, though, we’re talking about HUMANiSE, the album that HAAI was readying for release. By now, you might have heard it. HUMANiSE came out on October 10 via Mute.
For her sophomore full-length, HAAi considers the rapidly-evolving connection between humans and machines. She describes her relationship with technology as fickle. “It’s one of those things that I’m fascinated by and terrified by it at the same time, like, I think, most people,” the London-based DJ, producer and singer says as we chat in the lobby of a downtown hotel.
“I’m curious about AI because it’s a given that it will become more a part of our daily lives. The thing that I think I’ve been resisting a lot, that I’m seeing happening, is in the creative sphere,” HAAi explains.
For example, she declined using AI technology for mastering HUMANiSE. “I was very strongly against it because my friends are mastering engineers and they studied so hard and invested so much in their hardware,” she says. “I don’t know, it’s taking jobs away from people who have made that their life. But, you could say that about how it exists in other parts of our lives as well.”
HAAi adds, “The big thing is, obviously, I don’t want to lean all the way in, but I don’t want to be naive to it existing as well.” It’s that push-and-pull that may have prompted her to write HUMANiSE. “It was almost my way of grappling with it,” she says.
Listening to HUMANiSE, it sounds like what HAAi is resisting isn’t machines— this is, after all, electronic music— but the flatness that is a byproduct of making art to suit the needs of the tech. Kyle Chayka writes about this more generally in his book Filterworld, but the very frustrating impact of algorithmic-based music “discovery” platforms and gear that’s capable of doing much of the DJ’s work is an overabundance of music that follows genre or vibe templates with little deviation in tempo or song structure. In other words, it’s all led to music that’s boring af. But, that’s not HAAi’s style. On HUMANiSE she pulls songs into unexpected shapes, loading them with a multitude of emotions as she builds and drops the tempo. It’s not music passive listening or passive DJing.
If you heard HAAi’s 2023 installment in the DJ-Kicks series, which included everything from the rhythmic noise of Pan Sonic to the heavy warehouse rave banger “Plasma” by Radiotrance, you know she doesn’t follow convention and the same holds true for her own music.
HAAi picked up DJing while working at Ridley Road Market Bar in London. At the time, she had been collecting records— a lot of Afrobeat and Turkish funk and psyche— but didn’t have turntables at home. “What happened with me at that place changed my life,” says HAAi, who essentially learned how to DJ on the job.
“I think when you’re so green to playing for people, you kind of want them to experience the song in the same way that you feel it,” she says. “I feel like you’re so engaged or plugged in to what people are liking.”
Even now, when people ask for DJ advice, she says, “I always think that it’s caring about your audience and knowing the tunes is the main thing.”
It’s that sensibility of playing music for a human audience in a physical space that HAAi brings to HUMANiSE. Here, a single song, like “All That Falls Apart, Comes Together,” plays out as if it were multiple songs mixed together in a club set. “Shapeshift,” a standout on the album, lives up to its title.
“A song like ‘Shapeshift’ is a good example,” says HAAi. “It was quite a bipolar track in a way, where I just wanted to have these two completely different personalities.”
In fact, “Shapeshift” unfolds like a roller coaster ride. The song begins as a piano ballad with HAAi on vocals. The tempo gradually builds then, just when you think it’s going to pop off into a 1 a.m. banger, she dials back the energy, maintaining a hip-hop-friendly tempo and introduces guest vocalist Kam-Bu. Then, with a dramatic distortion of his vocals, the song morphs into a house jam right before delivering a doozy of a drop and a breakbeat twist as it winds down to a calm conclusion.
HUMANiSE came to life with a packed roster of collaborators, including Jon Hopkins, Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor and the choir Trans Voices. “There’s a feeling that you get when you hear a choir really come together that I I feel is unlike other things,” she says. “Even hearing them warming up and rehearsing, when we did the Church studio sessions, I joined them for their warm ups and we recorded the whole breathing exercises and meditations. It was something really amazing.”
The inclusion of choral elements on songs like “Satellite” and “New Euphoria” help bring home the theme of humanity. This isn’t just one person, one voice, in the machine, but many.
“One side is talking about us coexisting and keeping up with technology and if we decide to coexist with AI, I was thinking about really how that affects us as artists and just as regular people as well,” says HAAi of the album. She describes the message as “not so much machines vs. humans, but machines and humans.”
“The human side to it is the voices and the storytelling and lyrically speaking about lived experiences, which is something that I feel like the most human that we can kind of get,” says HAAi. “The more I thought about that, I feel like, right now, we need a collective warm hug.”
Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Read her recently published work and check out her upcoming gigs or listen to the latest Beatique Mix. Follow on Instagram or Bluesky for more updates.
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