DJ Snake, the French producer who builds his hits around other people’s voices

DJ Snake

Photo: Arno Partissimo / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 13, 1986 Paris
Occupation	Record Producer
Awards	MTV Video Music Award for Best Direction · Billboard Music Award for Top Dance/Electronic Song · NRJ DJ Awards

When DJ Snake launched his third album, he stepped out of a private jet parked inside a hangar at Paris–Le Bourget, the word NOMAD painted on its fuselage, and played for more than two thousand fans until well past the scheduled end. It was the entrance of an artist presenting himself as an author. Months later, the record that put his name back in French headlines was someone else’s: a dance single he built for Mylène Farmer, the most private star in French pop.

That back-and-forth is the whole career of the French producer born William Grigahcine. He grew up in Ermont, a suburb north of Paris, and before music there was graffiti; friends called him Snake because the police could never catch him. He started DJing as a teenager in hip-hop sets and kept the nickname out of inertia. “The name sucks, but it’s too late now,” he once said. Les Bains Douches, the Paris club, was among the rooms where he played early on, and during those club years he met Steve Goncalves, the manager who pushed him to make his own tracks.

Born in Paris on 13 June 1986, he holds French and Algerian passports, and his Algerian roots would later become the most personal thread in his work. The first real door opened through someone else’s album. He co-produced tracks on Lady Gaga‘s Born This Way, which earned him a share of a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year in 2012, and a year later he worked with DJ White Shadow on Applause and Do What U Want for Artpop. He was a credit in small print on the biggest pop records of the moment.

Then came Turn Down for What. Released at the end of 2013 with Lil Jon shouting the hook, the track climbed to number four on the Billboard Hot 100, was certified eight times platinum in the United States and won Top Dance/Electronic Song at the 2015 Billboard Music Awards. Its absurdist video, directed by the duo Daniels, was nominated for a Grammy. In 2015 he and Major Lazer released Lean On, sung by the Danish singer MØ; by November that year it had become the most-streamed song in Spotify’s history, and its video, shot in India, has since passed three billion views on YouTube.

The albums followed the singles rather than the other way around. Encore, released in 2016, reached number eight on the Billboard 200, carried by Let Me Love You with Justin Bieber, a top-five hit in the United States. Carte Blanche arrived in 2019 with Taki Taki, a reggaeton crossover with Selena Gomez, Ozuna and Cardi B, and Loco Contigo with J Balvin and Tyga.

Here the commercial story turns less flattering. Carte Blanche peaked at number 48 on the Billboard 200, forty places below its predecessor, and both records read in places like a guest list: famous voices, each stamped with the DJ’s sound but hard to hear as chapters of one argument. It is the familiar knock on stadium-sized dance music, the producer as a supplier of hits rather than the author of records. He frames it differently. “I’ve always been a chameleon,” he told Rolling Stone UK, adding that this is “weird to say” for someone called Snake: one week a techno record, two weeks later a baile funk edit from Brazil. The tension is real either way. The man whose name sold out a stadium has rarely had a song of his own that is remembered for his own voice.

His answer has been geography. Disco Maghreb, in 2022, was a tribute to Algerian raï, named after the Oran label and record shop of the same name, with a video shot in Oran and Algiers and directed by Elias Belkeddar under Romain Gavras’s supervision; the voice of Cheb Khaled closes it. That June he headlined the Parc des Princes in Paris, inviting Omar Sy, David Guetta, Stromae and Khaled onto the stage. A year later he released Topline with the K-pop group Stray Kids. In 2024 he introduced The Outlaw, an alter ego in a black balaclava who plays bass music, dubstep and hard techno, first at the Lost Lands festival in Ohio.

The peak of that self-assertion came on 10 May 2025, at the Stade de France. Billed as The Final Show, the concert for 80,000 people had sold out within minutes of going on sale in December 2023, and it ended with an after-party at the Accor Arena. On that stage he announced Nomad, which arrived on 7 November 2025 through Interscope: seventeen tracks with J Balvin, Peso Pluma, Travis Scott, Future, Stray Kids and the Malian duo Amadou & Mariam, whose Sabali he reworked into Patience. “When the stakes become enormous and the expectations stack up, my biggest challenge has been staying grounded and true to my artistic vision,” he said at the time.

Outside the studio he runs the Pardon My French collective with fellow French DJs Tchami, Malaa and Mercer, founded the label Premiere Classe in 2018, and has played a long-running Las Vegas residency at Zouk. He is a long-standing supporter of Paris Saint-Germain.

The current year has kept him in the producer’s chair. In March 2026 he produced Worship for the Nigerian singer Asake, a fusion of Afrobeats, fújì and electronic music released for Eid al-Fitr, which entered the US Afrobeats chart at number five. Then came Farmer. She had joined him on stage at the Arènes de Nîmes in July 2025, when he introduced her as “The Queen”, and in October 2026 he announced the collaboration as a “very honoured” fan. He co-composed two songs on her thirteenth album, Égrégore, released on 30 October: the club single Combien pour la nuit, whose video was directed by Gilles Lellouche, and the darker ballad Sans amarres.

After a set at Amsterdam Dance Event in October, he heads into the winter with club and festival dates rather than a new album on the calendar. The open question is the one he keeps raising himself: whether the next DJ Snake record will be another meeting point for other people’s voices, or the album in which the producer’s own name is the reason to listen.

Selected Discography

• Encore (2016)
• Carte Blanche (2019)
• Nomad (2025)

Tags: singers, Lady Gaga, electronic music, Mylène Farmer, DJ Snake, Lean On

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