TroyBoi rarely repeats himself, and yet his catalog keeps proving that his sound can hold almost anyone’s voice without losing its shape. “La La Land,” his new single with North Carolina’s Morray, out July 31 across streaming platforms, is the newest test case, and it works because the pairing feels less like a feature and more like two artists trading fluencies. The track slots into TroyBoi’s upcoming FT EP, due August 21, a project built entirely around that same premise, his production as the constant while the voices around it shift.
The bass community will clock the sound immediately. “La La Land” leans on the wonky, syncopated low end that has defined TroyBoi’s output since he was producing out of a London kitchen with nothing but a MacBook and a MIDI keyboard, the kind of rhythmic instinct that reads as instantly recognizable no matter who is riding it. What Morray brings is a melodic counterweight, his voice carrying the gospel phrasing he developed leading his church choir in Fayetteville, giving the track a soul inflected hook that keeps the low end from swallowing the song whole.
“La La Land” continues a run that has already included “Jungle” with Shiwa, “Way Better” with Toxic Rob, and “HUSH” with Daya, four collaborations in a single year that read less like a scattershot rollout and more like a deliberate thesis. “I’ve been a fan of Morray for a while,” TroyBoi says.
I sent him the instrumental and he immediately connected with it. We both saw it as an opportunity to step into each other’s worlds. That’s exactly what this EP is about, bringing together different artists, influences, and styles, while keeping my production as the common thread that ties everything together”
That thread has stretched far beyond bass music before. TroyBoi’s 2018 remix of Billie Eilish’s “my boy” now sits close to 110 million Spotify streams, and Rihanna built two of her Savage X Fenty show segments around his productions in 2019, a booking that pushed his sound into fashion and pop spaces most producers in his lane never reach. Morray’s own numbers back up the pairing, his single “Quicksand” has climbed past 260 million YouTube views, evidence that his melodic style already has crossover pull of its own.
Timed for peak festival season, “La La Land” is built for mainstage rotation as much as it is for streaming numbers, and it sets up FT as TroyBoi’s most ambitious collaborative statement yet, a collection spanning hip-hop, electronic, and R&B while his production keeps every version of the project sounding unmistakably like him. He’ll carry the songs into the fall with his Hear2Move Tour series across North America, giving festival crowds the chance to hear how these pairings translate live. If “La La Land” is the preview, FT looks positioned to be TroyBoi’s fullest argument yet for why his name still gets chanted at every show he plays.
