Andrew Fedyk and Joe De Pace met at Western University when De Pace was the president of the student DJ club and Fedyk was hoping to join. They quickly got to chatting, and within a week began making music together.
Today, they’re a globe-trotting, music production and DJ duo, known as Loud Luxury and loved for their vibrant, ricocheting dance hits. But what set the two apart and ultimately drew them together was a shared desire to actually make music.
At the time of their initial meeting, Fedyk was already producing his own material and De Pace had recently chosen to venture down the same path, making for a somewhat serendipitous first encounter.
Their breakthrough song “Body” featuring vocalist Brando was released in 2017, and set the stage for a steady ascendancy.
When “Body” dropped De Pace and Fedyk were living in a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles.
“It was smaller than this room probably,” De Pace said, his eyes darting from the ceiling to the floor as he scanned the compact but comfortable meeting space we were sitting in at Sony Music’s Toronto offices.
But as “Body” built momentum, so did the scope of possibility. At the time, the duo said they would have been elated if the song hit 20 million streams.
“We knew it was special but it was impossible to know where it was gonna go,” Fedyk said.
As of publication, “Body” has over 1.1 billion streams on Spotify.
Hit song in tow, and with a slew of new music in the works, the pair eventually traded in their tightly-packed apartment for a rolling schedule of back-to-back shows, and were soon performing four-to-five times a week, bouncing between countries and continents at astonishing pace.
“We were travelling everywhere, back and forth from Europe and South America and back to the states and Canada. It went from playing shows as favours here and there and stuff like that to then going and playing every week,” De Pace revealed, seemingly fatigued by the recollections alone.
“I don’t think you ever get used to it honestly,” Fedyk added with a smile.
But the success of “Body” didn’t just alter the course of their lives, it changed the way they made music moving forward.
“Everybody was like, okay this is your sound, then we started making songs after with the same kind of vibe,” De Pace said, Fedyk nodding in agreement.
Memorable melodies underpinned by intensifying beats quickly became their modus operandi, with songs like “If Only I,” featuring American pop-singer Bebe Rexha, “These Nights,” and their all-pervading remix of the hit track “Sunroof,” propelling the duo even further.
Despite the career-bending power of their breakthrough single, and the abundance of opportunity that followed, for De Pace and Fedyk, there is nothing quite like coming back to Canada. Just a mention of performing on home soil and their faces light up in unison.
“We headlined Veld last year, that was really fun,” De Pace said, an experience in stark contrast to Loud Luxury’s first Veld show, which was an off-peak slot on one of the smaller stages.
For Fedyk and De Pace, returning to Veld was a good measure of their progress, and the optimal setting in which to reap the rewards of their hard-earned success.
“There’s no better place to play than Canada, hands down,” Fedyk declared with spirited certainty.
Loud Luxury is playing at Toronto’s Rebel nightclub on Friday, Dec. 22.
