If the internet is to be believed, time is a flat circle and 2016 is everything again. Every week brings another ‘2026 is the new 2016’ post littered with the same nostalgic shorthand—Rio de Janeiro filters, iPhone 5s, and a revolving door of trendy yet historically inaccurate throwback audios (G-Eazy's "Lady Killers II" is from 2013, close enough?)—another playlist reviving hits from the golden year of future bass, another reminder that nostalgia has become music's favorite pastime. It's a fitting full-circle moment for Chicago-bred electronic duo, Louis the Child, who spent that year becoming one of dance music's most exciting acts and, in the process, synonymous with the summery, emotionally-charged future bass sound that had just begun to emerge. Their breakout single "It's Strange" found its way onto the FIFA 16 video game soundtrack, the duo bounced between over a dozen festival stages from Coachella to Electric Forest, and joined Madeon and Porter Robinson on the European leg of their joint tour. But just as the internet yearns for the return of 2016, Louis the Child is doing the exact opposite: teasing yet another new sound beyond the bright-eyed future bass that launched their career, in pursuit of the next sound we’ll spend another decade trying to get back to and swear we were born a generation too late for.

By Katie Li

1st July 2026

That wardrobe, as it turns out, is a lot more crowded than Freddy Kennett, one half of the duo alongside Robby Hauldren, lets us in on. The pair's catalog stretches far beyond the future bass uniform that defined their breakout years: two albums (Here For Now in 2020 and The Sun Comes Up in 2024), five EPs, and an extensive collection of singles that pull from an impossibly star-studded guestlist spanning Kaskade to Death Cab for Cutie. But the clearest evidence of Louis the Child's predisposition to reinvention hides in their least commercially-minded projects, a trio of ‘beat tapes’ comprising Candy, Candy II, and Black Marble. Where mixtapes challenge an album’s rigidity to a singular sound or narrative, beat tapes take it a step further. Purely experimental and purely instrumental (save for a few sparsely placed vocal stabs, “wait” or “drop,” in the case of Candy II).

The Candy anthology arrived at two strange turning points for electronic music: first in 2017, at the tail end of future bass' chokehold on dance music, and again in 2020, as dance music's own chokehold on the pop charts was slipping and giving way to hip-hop's dominance instead. And while the series retains the Louis the Child emotional signature—the feeling you’re in a 2010s Jay Alvarez Ibiza montage, backflipping off yachts at golden hour—the tracklist alone suggests a much less coordinated, more eclectic outfit change with “Dubstep drop that is flames update”, “Sick Electronic Song2,” and “Guitar vibes Beat on the Road.” For all their genre-hopping and some truly inspired track naming choices, Candy and Candy II are united less by genre than by a beautiful whiplash, built on off-kilter rhythms, and moments of sudden silence before cathartic bass-heavy drops. Ibiza edit aside, the Candy tapes’ official visual companions stand in stark contrast to their third beat tape Black Marble’s: the familiar neon, psychedelic palette of the sunset’s colors swapped for a neo-noir world of dancers moving through black-and-white cityscapes and and a colder, more industrial vision. It’s Black Marble that finds Louis the Child swapping their festival wristbands for warehouse rave wristbands, an uncharacteristically darker turn where their sound trades sunset euphoria for something far more industrial. Pulling from acid, techno, electrohouse, and deep bass, the project’s distance from the sunshine-and-synths version of Louis the Child was enough to leave some fans question whether they had wandered into a different artist’s set entirely. Following their Black Marble Chicago set, their comment sections were flooded with people expecting nostalgia trips and accidentally delivering the highest compliment to their innovation: ““unfortunately the worst show I've ever been to, how do you not play one song of your own?”

Which brings us back to the same place as that guy—wondering what exactly we’re listening to and, hopefully, just as clueless about what Louis the Child will do next. They announced a new album to us, but left it at that: no release date, no title, no announced sonic thesis. And their recent run of singles aren’t exactly giving away the answer either. Released last month, “Looking for Someone” with Drew Love taps into an ultra specific corner of 2010s electro-house and festival EDM, immediately calling to mind “Take Me Home” by Cash Cash and that era of impossibly catchy hooks. Then, there’s “i go hard” with BRUX, which swings in the opposite direction entirely, complete with a bass house aggression that borders on dubstep. Or perhaps, we can look towards their own personal listening habits for clues. Their radio show Playground Radio’s annual favorite tracks of the year list is just as chaotic as you’d expect from Louis the Child, jumping from Turnstile to Ninajirachi and from Aminé to Oklou. Two of their picks even earned the Louis the Child remix treatment: Frost Children’s “Falling” and Fcukers’ “I Like It Like That,” hinting at their growing connection to the recent wave of electronic artists that got their breaks deeper in the underground. “A lot of the sound of our next project kind of leans into similar sounds of that style of music,” they tell us, “[those remixes] can help fans understand some of the reference points for what we might be pulling from with our next project.” There’s still the matter of the “super unreleased, no, extra unreleased” rap album, where the duo rapped Chicago-style in a single-stream catharsis they describe as their most personal yet. And whether that album ever sees the light of day, it’s another reminder that Louis the Child’s next move could come from anywhere. Different clothes, same guy. Different year, same future nostalgia in the making.

Watch my full conversation with Louis the Child below.

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