This time, I want to have fun.

Stories help me understand what really happens when people enter into a relationship with music. That’s where, every single time, I find the most useful insights, including for what we’re trying to build today.

And when I started reading, watching interviews, digging a bit deeper, and above all enjoying the DJ sets of this 32-year-old guy, it became clear to me that I wasn’t looking at yet another well-told story. There was something different.

This is not the story of a kid discovered on SoundCloud while sleeping on a friend’s couch.

It’s not the now almost predictable arc and yes, I always say this of a teenage talent going viral on the internet.

And it’s not even the romantic narrative of fans arriving before the industry and dragging an artist toward success.

Music is not perfect, and that’s exactly where interesting stories begin.

Fred Again’s story is about this. And that’s exactly why it’s worth stopping and telling it.

Fred Again doesn’t come from the margins of the music system. He comes from the very center of the industry, inside those rooms where hits are written, careers are built, and audiences are treated more like data than real presences. For years, he’s one of the people who makes the machine work without ever stepping into the spotlight, accumulating credits, internal trust, and huge results, while remaining outside the public narrative.

He’s said it himself, very clearly: “When I was making music when I was younger, it always felt a bit anonymous, faceless.”

Everything else starts from that awareness.

At a certain point, instead of looking for further validation from above, Fred makes a different choice. He doesn’t try to go even higher, nor to build a more recognizable persona. He decides to reduce the distance, to expose himself, to put people back at the center. “When I started this project, I wanted it to be the exact opposite. I wanted intimacy and humanity.”

It’s not a theatrical break, nor a rebellion against the system. It’s a quieter change of direction, and for that reason a more radical one. He begins working with fragments of everyday life, conversations, real moments, and turns them into music without trying to make them bigger than they are. In doing so, almost without stating it, he redefines what being a superstar can mean today.

His sets, and especially the Boiler Room ones, don’t become central because they generate impressive numbers or viral moments. They become central because they show something that usually stays in the background: the relationship. It’s not just about watching a DJ set, but about witnessing a shared experience, where the person playing and the people listening seem to move on the same level. As he later explained when reflecting on that period: “I was trying to capture life as it was happening, not write songs about it.”

To really understand Fred Again, you have to go back, before 2020, before Actual Life, before the sold-out shows.

Fred Gibson is born in London in 1993 and grows up immersed in music, but not in a pop sense. He studies piano, choral singing, composition. Early on, he enters environments where music is above all process and daily work, a lot of work.

He doesn’t grow up wanting to be at the front. He grows up wanting to be behind the scenes, producing music. Even today, when talking about himself, Fred still defines himself first and foremost as a composer. “I’ve always seen myself as a composer first,” he would say years later. “That’s how I understand music.”

A fundamental moment happens around 2013–2014, when he comes into contact with Brian Eno. Not so much as a teacher, but as a conceptual influence. From Eno, Fred absorbs an idea of music that is never fully closed, that lives in context, that accepts imperfection and puts people before performance. “Brian taught me that the most interesting things happen when you stop trying to control everything.”

In the years that follow, Fred becomes one of the most in-demand producers in British and international pop. Between 2014 and 2019, he’s behind massive tracks, number ones, global projects. Shotgun by George Ezra. Solo by Clean Bandit with Demi Lovato. Let You Love Me by Rita Ora. A large part of Ed Sheeran’s No.6 Collaborations Project. Own It by Stormzy with Ed Sheeran and Burna Boy.

He wins awards, accumulates credits, builds a rock-solid reputation inside the industry. And remains almost invisible outside of it.

In those years, he learns how the machine really works. Endless sessions, briefs, decisions made far away from the audience, the constant pressure to always arrive with something finished, safe, monetizable. He also learns how little space there is for doubt, for fragility, for saying “I don’t know if this works.” “In pop music you have to show up with something that works,” he said. “You can’t walk in saying that something is fragile.”

Technically, he’s fully inside the system, but creatively he feels separated from it.

When lockdown arrives, Fred finds himself in a strange position.

Professionally, he’s successful. Personally, he’s frustrated. He has access to everything, but he doesn’t feel like he has anything of his own to say.

The forced pause becomes more than just a suspension. It’s a sudden removal of the system. No A&R, no clients, no briefs, no pressure. “For the first time in years, I didn’t have to deliver anything to anyone,” he said. “I could just listen to what was happening around me.”

It’s the first moment in which listening is not functional to a delivery, recording is not a step toward release, and the process can remain just that, without having to turn into performance.

It’s in that void that Actual Life takes shape. Not as an album meant to be released, but as a kind of personal archive, a collection of emotional notes that didn’t necessarily need to become public. Fred starts working with what’s around him, without hierarchies: voice notes from friends, fragments of conversations, audio casually captured on his phone, private moments. Material that would normally stay outside a traditional creative process.

There’s no intention to use these elements as an effect or an aesthetic signature. They’re simply the closest material, the kind that still carries an unfiltered emotion. “I was using anything that had a real emotion inside it,” he explained, “because it was the only thing that felt honest to me.”

This is where, in my view, something decisive happens. Music is already born as a relationship, because it’s born from real relationships, not from an abstract idea of an audience. There’s no distance to bridge, no stage to conquer. There’s a life that enters the music almost without asking permission.

When Fred decides to release that material, he does so without building a frame around it. SoundCloud, YouTube, Spotify. No official narrative, no positioning designed at a table. Even the name, Fred Again, with those two dots, feels more like an idea of continuity than the birth of a character.

Listeners don’t receive a closed story. They have to enter it, recognize themselves in some fragments, leave others behind. In a way, the story only takes shape when it’s shared. And I often say this: it’s almost always there, in that open space, that the most interesting relationships around music are born.

Between 2020 and 2021, a first nucleus of deeply involved fans forms, coming from spaces where music is still raw, like SoundCloud, YouTube, and Instagram. Fred replies to messages, exchanges voice notes, shares unfinished versions, admits doubts. “Showing unfinished things is scary,” he said, “but it’s the only way to understand whether what you’re doing is real.”

In some cases, the relationship goes further. During lockdown, Fred often talks on calls with friends and fans. In one of these conversations, a girl, describing those suspended months, says a simple sentence: “We lost dancing.” It’s not meant to become a song, but Fred records that moment and brings it into the music.

The result is that those who follow Fred don’t feel like an audience, but present. Involved early, because they recognize in the music something they’ve lived through themselves.

In 2021, when he returns to playing live in small clubs, the sets remain fluid and the tracks change over time. Fred observes reactions, energy, and silence. “Playing live teaches me more than anything else,” he would later say. “You immediately understand whether you’re doing something for the right reasons or for the wrong ones.”

The tracks often evolve in front of the same people who heard them being born. Live stops being just a moment of exposure and becomes a continuous testing space. And it’s on this foundation that, the following year, everything will change scale.

In April 2022, the London Boiler Room happens. A set destined to become one of the most watched in the history of the format, but not just because of the music.

At a certain point, about twenty-three minutes into the set, something unexpected happens. One of the fans closest to the decks, a guy in a yellow shirt, moves too much and accidentally hits pause. The music stops abruptly.

In another context, it would have been a disaster. Here, it becomes a suspended moment. Fred smiles, looks at the guy, greets him, and then starts the music again. The crowd reacts as if nothing happened, maybe even more involved than before.

That moment becomes one of the most replayed and commented sections of the video. Not because the accident is spectacular, but because it shows something that usually remains invisible: the real proximity between the person playing and the people listening, and the possibility of crossing that barrier, even by mistake.

A few months later, when Fred Again wins the Best Live Act award at the DJ Mag Awards, he invites that same fan to come on stage and accept the award on his behalf. A simple gesture, almost obvious if you look at the whole journey, that makes explicit something already clear to those who followed him: without those people, without that closeness, that music wouldn’t exist in the same way.

After Boiler Room, the scale changes, but not the logic. Fred announces shows with very little notice, often only via Instagram, and the response is immediate. Fans activate, go to the shows, film, share. Each concert generates a wave of videos that start circulating organically. TikTok amplifies, Spotify reacts, and distribution happens without a traditional campaign or a recognizable rollout.

At the same time, Fred keeps playing unreleased tracks, letting them circulate before officially existing. “I like it when people know the songs before they come out,” he explained. “So when they’re released, they don’t feel new. They feel familiar.” The tracks are recognized, sung, anticipated, and when they finally come out, they’re already part of the listener’s experience.

Around this way of operating, memes, recurring phrases, and shared references emerge, never formally codified but enough for the community to recognize itself. Gradually, those who follow Fred stop behaving like a traditional audience and begin functioning like a microculture, with its own language and memory.

This is where the most delicate point of the story emerges. Fred doesn’t push aggressive calls to action, doesn’t monetize fans directly, and doesn’t turn the relationship into a funnel. This keeps the relationship authentic and non-instrumental, because interaction is never explicitly translated into a request. The fan doesn’t feel used, but part of something real, and for that very reason acts, supports, amplifies.

At the same time, the contribution of the community remains economically invisible. It produces attention, content, algorithmic pressure, and real value, which turns into ticket sales, higher fees, festivals, and streaming, without ever flowing back to the people who made it possible. Not out of malice, but because there’s no structure capable of recognizing it.

Fred Again’s story clearly shows that community is now the most powerful engine in contemporary music, and that candor and emotional transparency have become the most effective lever for building cultural value, not as a declared strategy but as the consequence of a different way of being in the relationship.

It’s impossible not to close with a personal reflection. Reading and observing Fred’s journey made me think about how creative processes, when allowed to flow naturally, generate connections far stronger than any forced mechanism. Today more than ever, creating spaces where people can share music, sound, discover artists, and feel part of something doesn’t just seem interesting to me. It feels necessary.

At this point, there’s only one thing left to do.
Watch the Boiler Room set. Turn the volume up.
And enjoy it, for f*** sake.