Teneil Throssell’s origin story as Haai goes a long way to explaining her dense and tactile club music. Born in Karratha, Western Australia, and spending her formative gig-going years in Sydney, Throssell moved to London in her 20s as part of the psych-rock outfit Dark Bells. Initially turned off by what she saw as the strictures of dance music, her scepticism was undone by a chance trip to Berlin’s Berghain.
Dancing for hours to the club resident Ben Klock’s hypnotic, tunnelling techno, she realised what she had been missing. Pretty soon, the Haai sound clicked: part rough-hewn and psychedelic, part London bass culture by osmosis, and part sleepless weekend in Berlin. Take, for example, Haai’s 2021 track Keep on Believing, which opens with a bracing kick drum before charging through tempo shifts and skittering, half-submerged vocal snippets.
