It was a stunningly beautiful day on the California coast, and Stryv was feeling it.
“We’d walked around the trails; we’d looked at the ocean,” the producer recalls of the day in October 2023. “I was like, ‘Man, this feels so good. I need to capture the feeling from today, and maybe this is the right atmosphere and feeling for a record.”
Back at the oceanfront house of his friend Justin Kan, the co-founder of Twitch, Stryv got to work making music, staying up through the night to make the song he was producing emanate the same sense of warmth and sunlight he’d just experienced. By dawn, he was sitting on top of the kitchen table zoned in on the music production software on his laptop.
“I was freaking out,” he recalls. “You can make a bunch of stuff, but, when you’re a creative, it’s very rare that you’re happy with what you’re making. But this was one of those things where I was like, ‘Yo, this is so special. Just trust me. This is crazy.’”
This certainty would eventually prove absolutely correct, but first Stryv had to figure out what to do with the song. He thought the song might be a fit for Keinemusik, given that the extremely hip German trio had — like many other DJs in the scene over the last few years — been playing a lot of Afrobeats and Afrohouse in their sets.
Luckily, a rep for Keinemusik had recently posted a tweet asking who’d produced the song “Paid” from Ye and Ty Dolla $ign’s Vultures 1, released in February of 2024. As it turned out, the song had been co-produced by Stryv, working under his given name, Hamid Bashir. This connection lead to a meeting between Stryv and Keinemusik’s Adam Port in Berlin, where the pair met for coffee and agreed they’d send each other ideas.
Stryv passed the track he’d come up with back in California. “I was like, ‘I have this idea that I think if it’s reworked properly, this can work… You guys are playing a lot of Afrobeat remixes in your sets. It makes sense for the next [thing] to be an original song instead of just doing remixes of other people’s stuff.” Eventually, he and Port got together in the studio, where Port showed Stryv how to turn what the latter artist had first envisioned as a radio single instead into something tailed to the dancefloor.
“And so the song went from being a pitch record into an artist collaboration,” says Stryv. The first official release under the Stryv name, the song became the global smash “Move.” A collaboration with Los Angeles-based singer Malachiii, the song went viral almost immediately after debuting during a Keinemusik set in Melbourne, Australia on March 24, 2024 and — after its release on Keinemusik’s eponymous label on June 7, 2024 — became an international dance world anthem that now has 716.4 million official on-demand global streams, according to Luminate.
“I spoke to Adam the day [after they’d debuted the record] and he was like ‘The reaction from the crowd was something so special, especially from a record [people had] never heard before,” Stryv tells Billboard of the slinky, sexy heater on a recent January afternoon in Los Angeles.
Making dance music wasn’t an obvious path for Stryv, who was born in Pakistan and immigrated to New York with his parents when he was two. Growing up in Queens, family life was very religion-focused, with Stryv going to the local mosque nearly every day after school and spending little time watching TV or movies, or listening to music.
But by middle school, music had caught his ear. He cites Drake’s Nothing Was the Same as particularly impactful, and when he was 12, his cousin played him the 2010 song “This Is My Life” by Romanian DJ Edward Maya. He says it was “unlike anything I had ever heard before,” ultimately leading Stryv to a deep dive into the Dutch and Swedish electronic titans who were then pumping out global hits. This struck an interest in production, with Stryv teaching himself through YouTube tutorials, listening to the sounds he was making through a pair of Beats headphones borrowed from a friend. All the while, he was still getting excellent grades at the science-focused high school he was by then attending.
His parents wanted him to become a doctor, but Stryv was now sending his sounds to music pages on YouTube and Facebook, connecting with other producers and finding traction by uploading his music with copyright free licenses, so YouTubers could use his work in their videos. His songs landed on some videos by a few bigger content creators, which lead people to Stryv’s own online profiles.
This is how Stryv’s current manager, Nicholas Parasram, found him. It was 2015 and Parasram was looking for music by indie artists that could be used on the app he was then working on. Seeing that Stryv’s music was aggregating streams, Parasram reached out. “I had no idea what I was doing” Stryv says of himself at the time, “but my songs were getting millions of streams. One had like, 10 million.”
“It was crazy,” says Parasram. “I was like, ‘Who is this guy?’ I DM’d him and asked ‘Yo, can I use your music for this app? I’ll pay you $1,000. He didn’t answer for a while.”
When Stryv eventually got in touch, the guys found that they’d grown up two towns away from each other, and Parasram signed on as manager. Meanwhile, Stryv started college at Binghamton University, going to school on a scholarship and coming up with a system where, he says, “I would try to see how many classes I could not go to so I could stay in my dorm and make music. Then when it came time for finals, I’d calculate exactly what I needed to get so that I could still get an A in the class.” The method worked: “On paper, everything looked good,” he says, “but in my day to day, I got to make music.”
“At the time, he was really experimental,” Parasram of his output in this period. “Every day he would send me these 30 second clips. I’d be like like, ‘F–k this is good’ — but it was never a full song.”
Then, just like the Romanian house track had struck him when he was 12, Dua Lipa’s 2017 song “New Rules” blew Stryv’s mind. “It was unlike anything I’ve ever heard. It was just so different, but so good.” He learned the song had been produced by Ian Kirkpatrick, who he reached out to via DM. Kirkpatrick responded and became a mentor, with Stryv now calling him “the first producer within the pop industry to recognize my talent. Ian’s guidance continues to play a crucial role.” He also spent time in the studio with Brian Lee, the co-writer of songs including Fifth Harmony’s “Work from Home” DJ Snake and Justin Bieber’s “Let Me Love You” and Camila Cabello’s “Havana.”
By this time, he was about to graduate and told his parents he was taking a gap year before med school. He then moved to Los Angeles, have gotten a publishing deal with Mike Caren at APG. (“I didn’t tell my family about any of this maybe until two weeks before moving,” he recalls.) He arrived to L.A. in February 2020, right before the pandemic hit, staying in Los Angeles during this time and honing his skills. A demo he worked on around this time ended up becoming Ty Dolla $ign’s 2023 song “Motion.”
“Ty was the first artist who really put me on,” Stryv says. “He really vibed with me. Ty has also been so exposed to the DJ world. He’s worked with so many DJs and knows how to DJ himself.” Ty brought Stryv on to work on Vultures 1, asking him to create “a dark, Berlin, 3:00 a.m. sort of thing.” Stryv actually played Ty some Keinemusik tracks for inspiration, with the song they made together ultimately being the one that caught the ear of Keinemusik’s team.
This of course lead to “Move.” The song is officially credited to Stryv, Port, Keinemusik, Malachiiii and Orso, a duo made up of Stryv and Justin Kan. (Beyond co-founding Twitch, Kan is the co-founder of music company Thin Ice, which he launched last November with Parasram. Kan and Parasram also recently created Titanic’s End Records, an offshoot of their lauded Burning Man art car Titanic’s End. Stryv — who has a Titanic’s End tattoo on his forearm — calls Kan’s “truly invaluable, his unwavering guidance and the Silicon Valley mindset he embodies has helped me see that anything is possible.”)
“Move” got another huge profile bump last October, when the song got a new remix featuring Camilla Cabello. Now, Stryv is teed up for another big moment with “Position” his second collaboration with Port and Malachiii. (While the song’s label and release date are yet to be announced, an unfinished version has already gone viral.) Stryv has appeared at myriad Keinemusik sets and is now embarking on his own tour club tour, which starts today (Feb. 28) in Portugal and moves around Europe throughout March.
He signed with WME in 2024, with his agent Stefanie LaFera calling him “an exceptionally talented artist who possesses a unique ability to apply different genres to the work he produces. Prior to signing Stryv last year, we were already familiar with his incredible production work; his collaboration with Adam Port on ‘Move’ only reinforced our belief in his talent.” She adds that 2025 is “shaping up to be a big year for him, and we’re excited to support his continued global rise as he takes on major festival stages and headline shows worldwide.” (Stryv, who in fact never went back to medical school, notes that his parents are now “super into” what he’s doing.)
And while he traverses continents this spring and summer, he’ll be in pursuit of that same kind of feeling he got that day on the coast in California, and which has helped deliver him to this point. His goal is to continue translating such vibes into music.
“Feeling is something that can affect people through any culture, any language barrier,” he says. “So if you approach a song based on like the feeling of it, rather than whatever it’s saying, you can impact the most amount of people. That’s what I’ve been doing.”
