How tropical house’s dreamy escapism took dance music by storm

Since emerging from the bedroom of Kyrre Gørvell-Dahll – AKA Kygo – in 2013, the genre has gone global and made a superstar of its creator. With upbeat tunes and an everyman appeal, perhaps it’s no surprise

In the late spring of 2013, Kyrre Gørvell-Dahll was a 22-year-old student of business and finance at Edinburgh University. He was born in Bergen, Norway, where he studied piano for 10 years and started making electronic music, inspired by the electronic dance music (EDM) giant Avicii. In Edinburgh, armed with a MacBook, Logic software and a Midi keyboard, he experimented with different sounds and posted the results on SoundCloud and Facebook under the name Kygo. He hit the jackpot with his sweet-natured, mid-tempo remix of Passenger’s ballad Let Her Go, debuting the distinctive twinkling keyboard sound that has decorated many of his tracks since.

“I called it Sexy because I felt like it was a sexy sound,” Kygo says with a bashful laugh. “When I saw everybody loved it I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to continue with this style.’ I think people were looking for something new in the EDM scene and found it in my music.” He did not finish his business course.