In Conversation: HE.SHE.THEY.
Five years, 100 releases and a footprint spanning more than 26 countries and 60 cities: HE.SHE.THEY. has grown from a club night idea into one of dance music's most vital platforms. Founders Steven Braines and Sophia Kearney started it after seeing a disconnect between who was being booked in DJ booths and behind the scenes, and the lack of diversity on the dancefloor. Built to reconnect a new generation with dance music's long-standing roots in Black and queer underground communities, the project champions diversity across gender, sexuality, race, size, class and ability.
With stages at Coachella, Glastonbury and NYC Pride, their own BBC Radio 1 Dance show, a Pioneer Award from the International Music Summit and award nominations for Best Label under their belt, they now mark the milestone with their debut compilation, '5 YEARS OF HE.SHE.THEY.' featuring Maya Jane Coles, TSHA, Cakes Da Killa, Eris Drew, CC!, I. JORDAN and fka.m4a among others.
DMY sat down with Steven and Sophia to talk about the journey so far, how they decide what makes a HE.SHE.THEY. record, and why vibes always come first.
When you launched HE.SHE.THEY. Records in 2020, what did you feel was missing from the labels around you, and how did that shape your first signings?
Sophia: There was a bit of a mix, really. As much as we've got a lot of dancefloor-friendly records, Steven and I are big fans of lots of different labels, like PMR. We felt there could be real diversity in what we were putting out, as well as in the people we wanted to platform. I find some records have a bit more of a soulful element, a garage-y element, a techno element, a house element. One of the things that was really important for me personally was to put across that all different people can make all different types of music, and that all of those things can sit on one platform. We can be a bit of a gateway for people to discover music across genres, and to realise that it's not just certain types of people who make certain types of electronic music. That was a big thing for me.
Steven: Part of the reason the label formed was that when we were doing events, we realised we actually needed to create a whole ecosystem. Just platforming someone for an event was kind of not enough. It's a bit like: give a man a fish, he'll feed himself for a day; give him a net, he'll feed his family for years. If you give people both, like Ryusei, where we were one of the people giving them their first break on the recorded side, plus the event, then they have more to go on. Most of our releases have had premieres with magazines or something like that, so artists are much more inclined to go and get booked elsewhere. A big part of HE.SHE.THEY. is to go and get people who are minorities, or often excluded from the music industry, and vote them back in.
The compilation moves through several genres. When you're listening to a potential signing, what makes something feel like a HE.SHE.THEY. record? And do you always agree?
Sophia: Sometimes there's a unanimous "oh my gosh, yes, we have to put this out", and sometimes there'll be more of a champion between me, Steven or our team. But it'll never be the case that someone really doesn't like something.
Steven: I don't think there's one record where I've gone, "oh no, no, no." There really isn't.
Sophia: There really isn't, thank goodness. Sometimes there'll be a natural champion genre-wise, but that really doesn't matter to us. We wanted the compilation to reflect how the overall label, our events and everything we do is kind of genreless. If we like it, and we like the person and what they're putting across, then that's a platform we want to give. We both like all different types of music, and we wanted the label to feel like an eclectic place where anybody who resonated with HE.SHE.THEY.'s message felt that sending a record to the label was open to them, no matter who they were or what they did. It was really important for us to keep that whole element open, and for the compilation to reflect it as well.
So it's as much about the artist as the music itself?
Sophia: That's been a really huge thing for us. Sometimes we'll meet someone at ADE, or backstage at our show or somebody else's, and think, you're really lovely and you deserve to get those next rungs on the ladder. Maybe it's the first demo they send. Maybe it's the third. But when we really like somebody, a huge thing for us is wanting to help give them some paving stones on their path.
Steven: The music's always there. We like them, but the bar doesn't dip. Sometimes it's the fourth thing they send.
Sophia: Exactly. It's certainly when someone's really lovely and you can see how much they're trying, and how much you want to help them cut through the noise, because you want to see more good people in the industry. You know that they're going to do good and be good to others. That's something we really look for. But as Steven rightly says, it's always the music first. At the same time, no matter how good the track is, if we know the person is not someone we want to platform, it doesn't matter if that record might be a Beatport number one. That's not something that's going to fit with our label and our ethos.
Steven: We're a bit like some of those old labels, like Mute, where it's not a label built entirely on business at all. It's much more built on emotion and feeling.
Many of the releases on the compilation missed their moment on the dancefloor because of the pandemic. Which track have you most wanted to see get its due, and what made you believe in it first time around?
Sophia: There's the Cakes Da Killa remix of Wax Wings. That record came out around 2021 and was just phenomenal from the moment I heard it in my headphones, receiving it from Wax Wings. It got a lot of great feedback at the time, but having it out on the dancefloor has been a really beautiful thing again, for sure.
Steven: I really like 'Bender' by Boy Short. It's one that some people might miss because it's a smaller act, but I absolutely love it. I listen to it a disproportionate amount of times.
What do you enjoy most about giving new artists a platform, and what do more established names bring to the label?
Sophia: I love seeing people get buzzed about something they've not had before, be it a Radio 1 play or coverage in a magazine they've aspired to be in for a long time. That's really special. And in terms of the big acts, regardless of where they've released before, some of the biggest compliments have been about how we run the label. We were music managers before HE.SHE.THEY. ever began, so we've dealt with many different labels of all sizes and genres, and with different artists over the years. That gave us an essence of how we wanted to run the label and how we wanted to communicate with artists, and to give every artist, no matter their size, the same level of service. That was really important to us, and something we were uniquely placed to do, given how much we dealt with other labels: receiving assets in a timely fashion, receiving communication and so on. No one can ever guarantee the coverage any track, artist or release is going to get, but feeling you're in the safe hands of a label, that it's been serviced and pitched, is really important to acts of all levels.
Steven: Someone like Sister Bliss has been in the major label system because of Faithless, and they like the fact that we don't overly interfere. We'll definitely say, "X, Y, Z could maybe be tweaked, if it feels right", but we don't suck the creativity out of a song. So it's quite nice that some of these bigger acts get to just be artists.
Artists can lose some of their identity when a label tries to shape them. How hands-on are you creatively?
Steven: If we felt a record was really off, we probably just wouldn't sign it. If you fundamentally don't think it's good, that's that. But there have been certain records where, especially Sophia, you've gone, "there's a thing here, it just needs to be brought up a bit", and we've got great things out of an artist. It all depends on each record, really. And we've always been very fair on terms, too. Like Sophia says, we were managers first. You can't feel it's morally right to try to help smaller artists and then tie them up in some horrific music industry record deal.
You've taken HE.SHE.THEY. into a whole range of club and festival spaces. What does a meaningful diverse presence look like beyond the lineup?
Steven: Because we're a mix as well – Sophia is straight, I'm queer – our thing is that we want to throw parties for people of all races, genders and sexualities to come together on the dancefloor. That was a bit more of an original dance music mentality: that music can be unifying. In an online world in particular, where everyone is trying to be more and more divided, it's important to have spaces where people can come together and look at the things that unite them rather than the things that divide.
A lot of people focus on the sexuality thing, but it's as much about gender diversification as it is about race. It's more about a night of inclusion in its broader sense. We just want a place where everyone can feel included. You look up at a festival bill and there's a mixture of white, Black and Brown people, of gay and straight people, of cis and trans people. It might be that there's no one who looks exactly like you, a Brown queer woman, say, but one of the DJs will probably be brown, one will at least be a woman, if not more than half, and there will probably be multiple people who are queer. So you get to see yourself up there to some degree.
And to be honest, a lot of straight spaces want to change but don't necessarily know how. So we come along and act as an agent of change, and show them, look, it doesn't need to be scary. I think we did Marcel Dettmann, Gabrielle Kwarteng and BASHKA. That's a mixture of straight white people, trans people, lesbians, Black people, white women. But if you look at it objectively, it's just a great lineup. That's the proof of concept: diversity doesn't need to be something to contend with. If you just stop being lazy and look, it's not hard. We discover people by going to raves, or by typing different DJs into YouTube and going down that rabbit hole.
Sophia: You never really know the ripples you're creating. It's about creating that visibility and representation, so that people can come across our stage at a festival and see something different that they maybe wouldn't have thought to buy a ticket for, something that contrasts with what they might read online about certain communities. They get to challenge their own stereotypes in a medium that isn't "we're here to educate you". It's just a party where everyone is coming together. You never know how that flips a switch in people's heads and gets them to think a little differently, or not judge somebody so quickly when they walk past them in the street, because they've already had a positive experience in a festival tent where that was normal. It's normalising everybody being together.
One of the other things that's really important to me is the body positivity element. For me, our dancers are some of the most important lifeblood of what we do. Seeing anybody who owns what they do and who they are, no matter what they look like – they don't need to be a contortionist – if they're up there giving that incredible energy, I'm incredibly here for that.
Seeing one of our dancers, Nix, on a HE.SHE.THEY. flyer that was plastered all over Ibiza one week was probably one of the most important HE.SHE.THEY. moments for me. She openly talks about this on her social media, but she'd felt like she had to be smaller, had to be thinner, and knowing that story, being able to choose to platform her as the flyer girl and getting off the plane in Ibiza and seeing that everywhere, meant so much. At any festival stage I've been to, it was often everybody who fit into a certain box. I'm talking about straight parties in particular, where it's often female dancers, and it was the idealised version of what it looks like to dance on stage. To be able to change that slightly was one of the most important things we've ever done.
You hosted a three-day stage takeover at Lost Village this year and recently returned to ADE for a fourth consecutive year. How has your presence at those events developed over time?
Sophia: With ADE, we've done four years at Dockyards, but before that we also did shows at Shelter and The Loft. So we've done a range of venues, and they've all been very individual in their own way. Some parties have been more techno and underground, and some have been more open to everyone. It's funny, because we do so many different venues, it's almost like throwing a completely different event each time, but without a core thing running through it.
Lost Village in particular started in 2021 as a 400-cap stage, one-day takeover, and it's now grown into us having our own stage for the full three days. We've bonded with those festival promoters and built something together, and they suggest people too. That really feels like a coming-home moment for us every year. It's really special how we build relationships with the promoters and the venues, and the same artist liaisons request that we come back and run our stage every year. It's a bit of a family element. Every country and every city is different. People ask us where we find our dancers in every country, and it's different queer collectives, different people reaching out on Instagram, to the point where you build a little family in every city we go to.
Steven: Like Mama and Adrian, who dance for us all the time. We saw them dance at Ministry for Miss Kitten.
Sophia: At one of our parties.
Steven: Yeah. We were like, "Oh, who are you guys?" Just in the crowd. Now they've danced for us more than anybody else out of all the dancers, and they're family. So again, from the record labels to everything, a lot of it is just vibes. If someone is an arsehole, no matter how good a dancer, artist or DJ they are, we don't platform them. Too often in the music industry, people's moral codes change depending on how many tickets someone sells or how many streams they get. And it's like, no: nice people are nice, dickheads aren't. Like Sophia was saying about the dancers, we platform people with bigger bodies, because people with bigger bodies can still be really fucking hot and really great dancers. It's all about the vibe and how that person makes you feel, because that gives the night its vibe.
I think that's why we can get away with it being house music sometimes and hard techno other times, and we get a lot of the same core crowd coming because they come for the community that's been established, which is also very ethos- and values-based. Which I quite like. People also have different musical palettes, like Sophia was saying, so you don't necessarily always want to hear one sound. That allows us to keep feeling fresh after all these years, because we're not stuck on one sound that peaks for a year, dies away for two years and then comes back. It's quite eclectic.
How do you balance the global events programme with the label, and how much does the dancefloor inform your A&R?
Steven: There's some overlap, and some no overlap, because it's all just done on: do we like stuff?
Sophia: When we're putting on a show in a country, we certainly think, is there a slot here for somebody from close by who could hop on this lineup, or a label spot? At Lost Village, for example, there'll always be at least one label artist on each day. That's happened so far. It's a real mix. As Steven said about the ecosystem, we're constantly thinking about how we can keep giving opportunities to new people, but also refer back to people who've been part of the journey since the beginning or at certain points. I don't know if our gigs influence our A&R, but we're always thinking about how we can cross-pollinate opportunities. That's really important to us, for sure.
Steven: It's a bit more bohemian, I guess. For instance, we're doing Creamfields Chile, which is a 10,000-capacity stage, and the people who like our vibe tend to be more techno-skewed, in a slightly harder techno vibe. In certain countries that music isn't as big as house music, or we'll go to a festival and they've already got an offering in a particular genre, so we think, OK, we can lean more to this side or more to that side. We've platformed everyone from Sarah Landry to Richie Hawtin to Honey Dijon and Maya Jane Coles. It's very, very varied. Same thing for our BBC shows and things like that. Sometimes it depends on the headliner as well. At a summer festival there might be loads of options for big techno acts and the house offerings are kind of slim, or vice versa, and that might skew how we programme something. I think that's the thing. I'd like to think that what we put out, record-wise or on a lineup, is just good.
'5 YEARS OF HE.SHE.THEY.' is out now.
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