Who Is Loud Luxury? I Went To Las Vegas To Find Out

Music and travel are two sides of the same coin. There are times when the music is the destination. That’s how I first started to travel back in college, road-tripping to see the Grateful Dead across the Western United States. Music can also be a feature or highlight of a bigger trip. You happen to find yourself in Austin, Texas or St. Tropez, France and let serendipity take over. That’s how I discovered the house music duo Loud Luxury.

On a recent trip to check out The Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas, I noticed that Loud Luxury was Saturday’s headline artist at Omnia Nightclub. This is a coveted DJ spot occupied quite often by the likes of Steve Aoki, Martin Garrix and Alesso. There’s something about this night and place that signals legitimacy in the DJ world. With a bit of Spotify research, though, it was clear I knew several Loud Luxury singles. I just didn’t know who was behind them. That’s the nature of having endless streaming options. As a subscriber to Apple, Amazon, Sirius XM and Spotify, it’s easy to appreciate the music long before knowing the artist. Indeed, serendipity stepped in, as I was able to secure a last-minute table at Omnia right behind the DJ booth.

Andrew Fedyk and Joe DePace met more than a decade ago by way of the DJ club at university in Canada. The duo hail from London, Ontario, and now live in Los Angeles. That’s the Loud Luxury genesis story in a nutshell. Their breakout hit, Body, which is approaching a billion plays on Spotify, was released in 2017 through Armin van Buuren’s label Armada Music. Since then, Fedyk and DePace have been touring the world’s clubs and music festivals while producing original tracks and remixes that have placed them among today’s premier DJ performers.

Loud Luxury’s brand of house music is what you might expect from Canadian artists. At the risk of stereotyping, it’s positive, upbeat and even…friendly. This comes through in remixing the 2022 summer anthem Sunroof by Nicky Youre. The Loud Luxury version dropped in August and has the most plays to date with nearly five million.

I’ve had this remix on repeat since seeing and hearing it played at the Omnia show. DePace climbed onto the platform in front of the decks just before the track’s big crescendo, phone in hand to capture the crowd going bonkers—dancing through the fog machines and the lights of Omnia’s gyroscopic chandelier. It was one of those powerful DJ moments when the artist, the crowd and the music converge with a synchronous explosion of dance energy.

Following the show, I had a chance to catch up with the duo to learn about their careers, travel schedule and how they approach their music.

Rob Reed (RR): So how does the Omnia stack up among all of the venues you’ve played?

Joe DePace (JD): Omnia is literally the best venue I think we’ve performed at yet. As a performer and a DJ, I find myself dazing off and looking at the big chandelier structure in the middle because there’s so much going on. It’s such a crazy atmosphere that the thing’s just spinning around and doing all these crazy stunts. Even as performers, it’s such a cool thing to watch on our end.

RR: Where else do you play in Vegas?

JD: We do Tao Group. So the main places we play are Hakkasan and Wet Republic at the MGM [Grand]. They’re both very crazy. We actually have a show coming up this Sunday. It’s us and Lil Jon going back to back, so that’ll be pretty crazy. Then we also do TAO Beach, which is at the Venetian. It’s cool because we just started playing TAO this year, but I had never actually stayed at the Venetian. That’s a really cool spot, a really good hotel.

RR: How would you describe your music in terms of genre? Is it deep house? Or future house…whatever that might be?

Andrew Fedyk (AF): I definitely wouldn’t put us in the boxes that Wikipedia does, just because they need a genre, just to say what we are. But for a long time, we have been super passionate about anything that’s foot-on-the-floor with that sort of groove of house. So I wouldn’t say all of our music is house, but we’ll always want to stay in that lane of just good music that’s foot-on-the-floor and has a groove to it. Those are the three boxes we’re trying to check with everything we make.

RR: What sparked your interest in doing the Sunroof remix?

JD: We’re very selective in terms of what we’re actually remixing. So at the end of the day, it has to be a song that we resonate with and something we would play in our sets. It has to be artists that we are super excited about. The remix we did before that was for Ed Sheeran and Justin Bieber, and they’re legends. We jumped on remixing that.

But for Nicki Youre, I think he’s got a really good career ahead of him. The song is something we were onto pretty early because of TikTok. So that was something we were sort of debating, whether we wanted to remix or not. Then we were like, “You know what? We should do it.” Ever since then, the response has been amazing. I think it’s the top remix right now. So we’re super grateful for that.

RR: The remainder of your tour this year looks like it’s all domestic. Do you also tour overseas?

AF: We came up touring Canada because that’s where we’re from and then eventually going to the United States because it’s right next door. So inevitably, we’re just always going to have more shows here. But we’ve done Australian tours. We’ve done European tours. We did have an Asia tour that got cancelled by COVID, and it’s been difficult to come back since.

RR: I’m in Park City, which is near Salt Lake City. But I don’t see that on the schedule.

JD: Well, you know what? We are avid winter sports guys, so we might have to just make a stop in Park City and do a little bit of snowboarding.

RR: In fact, there is a small club on Main Street in Park City called Downstairs, and they would flip to have you guys play.

AF: That would be sick. We’ve been meaning to go to Park City because we’ve done all this stuff out in California and a lot in Canada—Whistler and all that. But we still owe Park City a trip. So maybe next time we’re in Vegas, we’ll have to drive down.