Just wait, let me explain.
Recently, we posted an article highlighting our Top 10 favorite IDs from Ultra 2016. Being the world’s premier electronic dance music festival, it’s a literal proving ground for branding ideas, unreleased tracks, and unsung artists climbing the ranks.
Sifting through some of the weekend’s most popular sets, it wasn’t too difficult to find 10 unreleased tracks which stood out from the rest and left us frothing for more. However, one track just saw an official release, and it has caught our attention.
Contrary to Martin Garrix’s claim that his set will be “100% Martin Garrix,” the ID at 37:49 of his set has just been released under the alias AREA21, titled “Spaceships.” It’s the only upload under AREA21’s profile, and the track is now a crisp 22 hours old.
Martin Garrix’s trademark sound design and melodies are present in the track, and considering his pre-set statement, and that the AREA21 logo is two aliens chilling in a spaceship, it’s safe to assume that this is indeed a Martin Garrix side project. But now the question looms: with who else?
Cue the speculation.
After a quick investigation, AREA21 has all the requisite social media profiles, and they’re not following anyone… Except for someone named Johnny Shahidi on Instagram. For those who don’t know, Johnny is the CEO of Shots, creators of the Camcorder App. Johnny also happens to be homies with Justin Bieber whose fans make up a large amount of the interaction on their pages.
The plot thickens.
Johnny Shahidi and his brother/Shots Co-Founder Sammy Shahidi, have been going wild over AREA21 via Twitter, and considering that Justin Bieber and Martin Garrix have to be keen as to what’s going on, we’re left wondering what could possibly tie all these guys together… The answer is their manager, Scooter Braun, which leads us to speculate who else this mystery rapper could be. And our next best guess is… Asher Roth.
It’s definitely possible that AREA21 is the combined effort of Martin Garrix and Asher Roth. Martin Garrix has confirmed to us that AREA21 will be something new on his label, STMPD Records, but he won’t say much else. For now, play the now classic hit below and compare the vocals. What do you think?
Furthermore, we have seen speculation that the rapper involved could be Big Sean. When his vocals are pitched up they sound quite similar and the vocalist makes use of his trademark ad-lib “skrtt” at about 40 seconds in. It is also known that he has a good relationship with Bieber.
Still, we probably won’t know for certain who this is for quite some time. But, these are our best guesses…
Martin Garrix’s management has confirmed that AREA21 is a duo that has been signed to STMPD Records, though further information continues to elude. We will continue to update as more information becomes available.
