Beloved ILLENIUM Collaborator Annika Wells Ends Solo Digital Options, Pivots to New Artist Alias

After lending her voice to a lot of dance music’s most recognizable tracks of the final decade, Annika Wells is stepping away from the EDM highlight, not less than underneath her personal title.

The voice behind among the style’s most cinematic choruses is altering the station. In a social media put up revamped the weekend, Wells introduced she’s now not releasing digital music options as a solo artist. The Los Angeles native, whose hovering vocals powered ILLENIUM’s “Nightlight,” “Unhappy Songs” and the fan-favorite “Crawl Outta Love,” mentioned the choice in the end got here right down to a quietly potent pressure in fashionable music: the streaming algorithm.

In response to Wells, bouncing between her solo pop materials and her high-profile digital options has left the Spotify algorithm not sure of the way to classify her. It’s an issue that, in her view, limits her visibility on the platform, significantly on genre-based editorial playlists.

“Sadly streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music have this factor the place they need artists to type of match right into a field, and in case your music doesn’t sound like one factor, they don’t know the place to place you,” Wells mentioned. “Proper now Spotify shouldn’t be playlisting me anyplace. So a number of months in the past, I made the onerous determination that I’m by no means gonna be doing one other digital characteristic once more.”

The information landed with followers onerous initially as Wells obtained “a whole bunch” of feedback and messages, she mentioned, prompting her to return to social media to make clear her plan. The singer-songwriter confirmed she’s not abandoning digital options altogether, however quite shifting them to her new artist undertaking, child blue, a duo fashioned along with her boyfriend, James Fast.

“I’ll nonetheless be placing out music underneath the title Annika Wells,” she mentioned. “It simply gained’t be digital music.”

She additionally introduced the tandem’s first digital characteristic, “Monster” with EDM.com Class of 2021 artist William Black, will arrive this Friday.

Within the meantime, you possibly can take heed to child blue’s debut single “u + me” beneath.