The Coachella lineup sparks discourse every year without fail: it can tell you who might have an album dropping soon or who’s less famous than they may have initially seemed, the sounds that will dominate pop over the coming year and the legacy acts set to re-form. This year, the poster featured a jarring but not unwelcome surprise: on the second line of the Friday lineup, ahead of upstart rappers GloRilla and Latto, below near-mythical figures Frank Ocean and Björk, was Jai Paul – the London producer who sent ripples through the pop landscape with two singles in the early 2010s, before basically disappearing altogether.
Billing on a festival poster might seem inconsequential, but it can mean the world to an artist – just ask Lana Del Rey, who threatened to pull out of Glastonbury this year after not appearing high enough on the lineup. It symbolises a career milestone that some artists spend their entire lives trying to reach. Which is why it’s unheard of for an artist such as Paul, who has never even played a live show, to achieve that status on his first go. Of course, it’s not unwarranted: Paul’s music remains totally singular and goodwill towards him is strong.
Paul first emerged in 2010 with a demo posted to his Myspace page titled BTSTU. It’s a song that manages to feel deathly quiet and overwhelmingly loud at the same time – a blend of melancholy R&B and roiling sub-bass that’s uncanny, ingratiating and extraordinarily beautiful. The track quickly became a sensation on music blogs and eventually crossed over to UK radio, before it had even been officially released; in 2011, a new version of the song was released on halcyon indie label XL Recordings, adding the weight of a heavy-hitting label – which had previously made savvy bets on Adele, MIA and the White Stripes – to an internet sensation.
The same year, BTSTU was sampled by both Drake and Beyoncé, unheard-of cosigns for an artist who, at that point, nobody really knew anything about. He was 22 at the time, and he had only done one piece of press, a short interview with Michael Cragg for Dazed in which he described himself as “kind of a hippie”. He said he had made the demo for BTSTU in under an hour, and that despite the unearthly, futuristic textures of the track, he still mainly listened to classic artists like the Beatles, ELO and Queen.
That interview remains the only piece of press Paul has ever done. His star continued to rise, though: in 2012, he released a new song titled Jasmine (demo) on SoundCloud, to even more rapturous acclaim. It’s as good as, if not better than, BTSTU – sleek and driving, with a funky, distorted guitar line that recalls Daft Punk and weirdo prog in equal measure. If BTSTU announced Paul as a producer to watch, Jasmine confirmed he was a once-in-a-generation talent – an overused phrase, to be sure, but an accurate one given how genuinely groundbreaking both singles are.
Any sense of momentum, though, was torpedoed in early 2013, when someone purporting to be Paul released an album’s worth of unfinished demos on the nascent music marketplace Bandcamp. Music blogs, assuming the casualness of the release was tied into Paul’s relative secrecy around his project, picked up on the release and reported that it was his debut album. Paul, in a rare statement, confirmed the release was not uploaded by him, but music blogs still treated the release like an album, with many suggesting it was a publicity stunt.
The leak was eventually taken down, but fans kept listening, and it found a life on torrent sites, YouTube and internet forums; the Guardian, Pitchfork and numerous other publications listed it as one of the year’s best albums, despite its unfinished state. You’d be hard-pressed to blame them: incorporating warped Bollywood samples, snippets from Harry Potter and Gossip Girl and a gasping cover of Jennifer Paige’s Crush, it felt like a richly rendered survey of 2010s internet culture, rendered as exhilarating indie-pop.
For Paul, the leak – and the assumption that he was lying about it being a leak – was devastating: “It [felt] like I had thousands of people not believing me, not trusting me, and also that in some strange way I was responsible for all of it,” he wrote in a letter to fans years later. “On a personal level, things gradually went south and I had a breakdown of sorts. I was in quite a bad place for some time. I was unable to work and withdrew from life in general.”
For over six years, Paul remained basically silent. But his music, and its impact, remained indelible: a generation of young British artists, including Mura Masa and Nao, sung his praises as a key influence. Ed Sheeran covered Jasmine; Slow Hands, the debut solo single by Niall Horan, sounds like what would happen if you asked an AI bot to generate an Ed Sheeran cover of Jasmine. Beyoncé’s sampling of BTSTU presaged her entry into haunted, wobbly electronic textures. In 2019, Paul finally released the leaked material for real, with the caveat that a lot of the music was, and would remain, unfinished, sullied by the traumatic experience of having it all put on the internet without his permission. Alongside, he released two new songs, He and Do You Love Her Now, which transmuted the subliminal, glitched-out funk of his earlier music into sleeker, more hypnotic packages. The impact of his music hadn’t been dulled whatsoever; if anything, he seemed to be working with an even more finely tuned ear.
Since the release of those two songs, Paul has cautiously increased his public profile: in 2022, he made a brief cameo as himself on Donald Glover’s surreal comedy Atlanta, talking with LaKeith Stanfield’s character Darius about racism’s relationship with capitalism. And ahead of this weekend’s show, he posted on the Jai Paul subreddit to thank fans who have stayed attuned to his career after so long. “I’m gonna be playing my first ever live show and Im not gonna lie I am absolutely shitting it” he wrote. “Just wanted to acknowledge the real heads over here and… let u lot know how much I appreciate you lot sticking it out with me for all this time. Hopefully it’s all gonna be worth it.”
This weekend’s show – 10 years after his material was leaked and his career was upended – represents, in many ways, a relaunch of Paul’s career. Timed alongside the first vinyl release of the leak, the set will be the first time any fans will get to see their idol in the flesh; it’s fitting that he’s playing the same year as Frank Ocean, whose 2016 album Blonde, with its watery guitar textures and rarified, quiet mood, could be described as distinctly post-Jai Paul. He is playing with a full live band, and unlike the 2013 leak, it will be the first time Paul gives his fans a durational experience of his music on his own terms. Never mind line two of the bill: it’s a grand return – or debut, even – that feels worthy of headliner status.
