How Umru Joined the Game

The show was one of the most visible moments yet for their rapidly growing scene, a coronation for a generation of artists who started online, met online, and are now the most exciting in-person acts in electronic music. A yearbook photo taken backstage served as a kind of time capsule: There’s Charli, Kim Petras, Petal Supply, Angel Prost of Frost Children, and filmmaker Aidan Zamiri, with Umru in the back, glasses on, his blonde hair peaking from under the baseball cap he wears almost everywhere, throwing up a peace sign. “It was beautiful,” he said.

Umru has been there for the long arc of the scene—producing, DJing, and making connections. Throughout his career, his songs have always sounded expensive, like “headphone candy” in his words, crafted for a self-aware audience sensitive to the tricks of software, earning the respect of his wide network of friends and collaborators. He’s evolved his sound from the abrasive early days of hyperpop as the genre matured to capture the mass of experimental pop and dance creeping into clubs around the world. Over the last five years, with the growing popularity of his DJ sets, Umru has brought his technical expertise to the dancefloor, playing other artists’ music to crowds coming for his punchy, eclectic mixes that mash together tracks from the most disparate corners of the internet. He’s big in the underground, already a veteran of the scene.

PC Music founder A.G. Cook first reached out to Umru at age 16. He earned his first production credit on a Charli album at 18, “I Got It” from Pop 2. In high school, he was playing shows at New York clubs that wouldn’t have let him past ID check.

But Umru got his start on the internet, where the scene he helped cultivate grew from SoundCloud, Skype, and Minecraft servers. “I’ve become part of a community in New York rather than just being an internet-origin artist,” he said. “But that was by meeting and becoming friends with people that I knew from online.”

So we decided to meet up for our first interview in Minecraft in front of some “speakers”—stacked note blocks—and a “DJ deck”—a crafter between two smokers—in front of a terracotta dancefloor. He reminisced about the game’s influence on his career, how he grew alongside it.

The first time he played, he was in middle school. He sat in the computer lab between other kids in Cold Spring, New York, two hours north of the city in the Hudson Valley, rows of monitors beaming out a stripped, in-browser version of the game. There was only one biome. There was no survival mode. There was no music. They just stacked textured blocks on top of each other like digital Legos. They played for hours on end.

He downloaded the full version of the game in beta. It was one of the only things he could run on his first computer, a Mac laptop handed down from his dad, an experimental jazz musician and philosophy professor. Ableton was installed for his dad’s performances, though Umru didn’t really touch it back then. As a pre-teen, GarageBand was more approachable. “I was always messing around with music, but it didn’t feel like I was taking it seriously,” he said.

Minecraft version 1.0 released on November 18, 2011. There were 16 biomes. Umru turned 12 earlier that year. Credits rolled if you beat the Ender Dragon, right after a long poem. “But what true structure did this player create, in the reality behind the screen?” it read. C418’s songs soundtracked everything. Umru, his real name, was his username from the beginning, and people in the scene first knew him for his unique Estonian American background.

“My name is Estonian but it’s sort of a weird one,” he said under the pink sprites of a cherry blossom tree. “It’s an ancient, pre-Christian sounding name. It’s what Estonians might have been named in like the old times. It’s just a sound, not really a word.”

In high school he moved from GarageBand to Ableton, where he tooled around with synth experiments inspired by the stadium trap of Hudson Mohawke and RL Grime. Songs built from just a sound. Minimal structure. He said people would tell him, “You’re so quiet, but your music is so loud.”

A.G. Cook, one of the godfathers of the scene, heard some of those tracks browsing SoundCloud, including Umru’s edit of “WINALOTO” by fellow Estonian Tommy Cash. Cook sent him a cold email in 2016: subject line “v nice.” Cook thought they could collaborate, saying their styles were different enough to make something interesting.

At that point Umru was really only a fan of SOPHIE, whose alien sound design prefigured the pots-and-pans chaos that would become synonymous with his own style and early hyperpop. He said that even today he isn’t sure what Cook heard in his music, but it set his career in motion. “I didn’t feel like I was very good,” said Umru.

His music came about by experimenting with a program in real time. Unlike many of his peers, he wasn’t researching how to recreate bass growls from Skrillex drops. He taught himself how to manipulate and design synthesizers by trial and error. “Mostly error,” he said.

“I was a fan of that stuff, but I never bothered to learn how to do it,” he added. “Those were new rules—they weren’t even The Rules—but everyone else figured out exactly how to do it. I definitely work differently because of it.”

His songs were atonal, borderline “nonmusical,” he said, devoid of chord progressions, song structure, or anything that required theory more advanced than setting up an Ableton project file. Drops on a song like “flat earth type beat” sounded less like a danceable chorus than falling off the edge of the planet. He had never even worked directly with a vocalist.

Cook visited New York in 2017, and personally invited Umru to the city for Charli XCX’s Number 1 Angel show and afterparty. Umru found himself riding the Metro North an hour-and-a-half from his hometown. He couldn’t stay long, however. It was still school night.

Cold Spring, with a population of 2,000, didn’t offer many outlets for someone interested in niche electronic music. He felt disconnected from most of his peers as a kid. “I didn’t feel like there was much going on for me there,” he said. “I was always online growing up.”

The producer community would often congregate on SoundCloud, where they would leave comments on tracks and use the rudimentary direct message feature to talk. A producer already in the scene would then invite new members to 50-person groups on Facebook Messenger, places to talk shit and send weird music and memes. It was there Umru cultivated his unique and omnivorous taste, picking up influences from Brazil to Korea. Umru also first encountered some of his longtime collaborators and closest friends, people he would remix, produce for, and introduce on their path to fame, including Ninajirachi and Laura Les, one half of 100 gecs.

Of course, a group chat can’t fully simulate a thriving social circle. Before Discord, producers would get on Skype to chat, sometimes to work, sometimes just to hang out. That’s when Minecraft entered their routine. Umru’s first time on multiplayer with music friends was with the producer Quickly, Quickly from Portland, Oregon.

“I remember the people more than the music,” he said. “It was a bunch of producers that lived in different parts of the world, and we were all just friends because of music. You didn’t have to be that good to be accepted.”

Umru kept getting better. At 17, he scored his first official release, a remix of “Citi Bike” by Lido. After high school Umru decided to go to university in New York City, where he attended the Sonic Arts program at City College, balancing his fledgling musical career with a “responsible” education.

One evening in his first semester, Cook was in New York and wanted Umru to join him in the studio. Umru agonized over whether to go to the recording session or the first meeting of his new school’s AV Club. He wanted to make music, but he also wanted to make friends. Splitting the difference, he decided to go to the studio and leave early.

He ended up staying late, which would prove the right decision: Their work that day led to his production credit on “I Got It” from Charli XCX’s Pop 2. Umru, playing himself down, said he didn’t do much, that he only worked on some percussion. But with features from Brooke Candy, CupcakKe, and Pabllo Vittar, the song was a fan favorite, and Umru’s name entered the rarified air of Charli collaborators. It helped, he said, that Charli put so much emphasis on the production, bringing him onstage in New York and shouting him out alongside other producers in interviews.

He officially signed to PC Music in 2019 for the release of search result, his first EP, which featured “Popular,” his first collaboration with Laura Les. Umru clipped a line she sang on that song to become his first producer tag: “Umru said I’m cute.” According to him, he never actually said that. Even as he emailed song files back and forth to collaborators, he was spending less time just hanging out on the internet and more time in person, granted, often with people he had met online. By then, Minecraft had horses, emeralds, jungles, bats, carpets, and blocks of coal—almost unrecognizable from its origins.

In New York just before the release of search result, he had moved in with a childhood friend and two artists he met online, Emil Fortune and underscores, whose real name is Devon Karpf. About a year earlier, she was the first person to recognize Umru in person from the internet. On a campus tour of NYU, before Umru decided where to go to college, Karpf noticed him and decided to say hi: “Are you Umru from SoundCloud?”

“I remember he walked in and I was feeling insanely nervous about coming up to him,” she said. “Just because I had never really met anyone ‘famous’ before.”
Umru became a nexus of this still underground scene, both in person and online. He met his longtime romantic partner Petal Supply online during the pandemic. They were introduced through Les, who was a fan of her music. The couple even worked on music before they met in person, finally becoming official when Umru took the first flight after lockdown to Toronto, where Petal Supply was living at the time.

“It kind of takes a bit to get in stride with Umru on a personal level, but he really opens up,” said underscores. “He’s one of the most positive and community-focused people I know. I aspire to be like him in many ways.”

As far back as 2018, Umru tried to convince underscores to play one of Charli’s afterparties. At the time, underscores demurred, saying their music wasn’t similar enough. He was always trying to connect like-minded people.

Around the same time, Umru stumbled into the biggest digital project of his early career: Minecraft musical festivals. It started as a bit in 2018, when Umru’s friends in the design collective Parent Company, Robin Boehlen, Eden Segal-Grossman, and Max Schramp joked about throwing a birthday party for Schramp in Minecraft. Umru and his roommates could DJ it. Only, the joke snowballed into something bigger.

The birthday party became _Coal_chella—the first festival in the Open Pit charity series, where artists from across the underground scene performed together online years before an animated Travis Scott stomped into Fortnite. The Coalchella lineup featured performances from headliner Anamanaguchi, underscores, Umru with future Food House member Fraxiom, and Les and Dylan Brady—their first performance ever as 100 gecs, where they debuted songs like “ringtone.” Some 30,000 people watched it in-game and on Twitch. Both underscores and 100 gecs have since played the actual Coachella.

Umru helped organize eight total Minecraft festivals, including Fire Fest, Lavapalooza, Mine Gala, and Square Garden. Three happened before Covid, before a “url show” became a hot item. But once pandemic restrictions loosened and his niche world became increasingly popular, Umru didn’t have time to put on digital shows—or play Minecraft at all. “It became a full-time job,” he said. “The demand was crazy. We said no to so many people. We said no to Yungblud. We put an absurd amount of work into something that was so silly and fun.”

Things moved into the real world, where Umru acted as a connective tissue between artists under the hyperpop umbrella. He functioned as a Gen Z bridge between the PC Music forebearers and the new crop of young artists, variously described as digicore, post-hyperpop, hyperclash, or just pop. He has put on events in New York under the Capacity series since 2022, taking over clubs like Market Hotel and Elsewhere. He described the curation process like putting on a dinner party, mixing guests with overlapping and distinct interests. “I haven’t seen him make anyone feel excluded,” said Fraxiom, who has worked with Umru as a producer and DJ and considers him a friend. “He’s always down to listen to any music. He’s always down to give a track a play or let someone say a sentence.”

DJing allowed Umru’s taste for strange connections between songs and for who’s next in the scene to become his calling card. He honed his skills over the past five years and turned his artistic focus to becoming a live act, especially when opening for underscores’ Galleria Tour. “I slowly, slowly got better,” he said. “It wasn’t like a moment, but it definitely became a big part of my project. It became just as important as producing. I started getting booked because of my style of DJing.”

That style is anything-goes, ADHD—where tracks from ML Buch can lead into Natasha Bedingfield, or oklou’s “obvious” can be a Brazilian funk song that leads into Lil Jon, or “Poplife,” his song with underscores, can play over the “Sexyback” instrumental. He also wears a visual signature, a reading light clipped to the brim of a baseball cap, orienting the attention down to the decks themselves. He has used it at almost all of his sets, in clubs, concert halls, and the back of U-Hauls.

“I have a lot more fun playing other people’s music,” he said.

Critics also took more notice of artists like him, after the pandemic forced them to take thriving online scenes more seriously. More young people than ever connected with the music’s catchiness, the perversion of traditional structure, and the distillation of familiar songwriting styles into pure sound. Even more so, they related to the artists’ sense of humor and their willingness to try anything, in DJ sets or at Minecraft festivals.

“I think there’s a theme that prevails—that music is made up of sounds,” said Fraxiom of Umru’s style and the scene’s ethos. “Music has always been just audio files since we’ve been able to record it, literally just .mp3s and .wavs, and we knew this but hadn’t internalized it artistically. It’s what makes [Umru’s music] feel special to me. We’re all literally just playing with our favorite sounds.”

And there’s constantly more. Slayyyter name-dropped Umru in an interview with Nardwuar. In the past month, he’s put out an original song with Bianca Oblivion, produced for AKRIILA and B0YG1RL, and remixed the title track on Tinashe’s Popstar. In a rare flash of unabashed confidence, he now uses his second producer tag on most songs, a passing line from Miranda Cosgrove in the second season of the iCarly reboot: “He’s the best producer I’ve ever worked with.” He was watching the show with underscores at their apartment together, and when he heard it he knew it would be a perfect sample.

While he doesn’t play Minecraft much anymore, he tries to keep up with updates and is excited about “The Sift,” an upcoming new dimension that should be released in 2027. For the moment, Umru has outgrown the digital. He lives more in the real.