walking upstream…
Disco Lines
Disco Lines
Disco Lines is the stage name of Thadeus Labuszewski, a Colorado-raised, Ableton-taught producer who cut his teeth releasing dubstep-indebted remixes on SoundCloud and TikTok before settling into a maximalist strain of tech house built for viral clips as much as club floors. His breakout 2022 single "Baby Girl" and a 2025 remix of Tinashe's "No Broke Boys" (his first Billboard Hot 100 entry) turned him into one of dance music's biggest TikTok-to-festival crossover stories, a run he's parlayed into his own label, Good Good Records.
the sound in question
2022
Baby GirlDisco Lines
walk the tributaries ↓
Avicii2010s · Progressive house / EDM / Folktronica
Disco Lines has described discovering "proper progressive house, like Avicii" as a college freshman and listening to it "every single day walking to class" — a formative, obsessive listening period he cites directly alongside his discovery of deep house. That melodic, pop-structured take on four-on-the-floor (song-first hooks riding a big room build) is a clear ancestor of the vocal-hook-driven, radio-length house singles Disco Lines makes today.
listen: upstream & heresource: UCLA Radio — Disco Lines on discovering Avicii and progressive/deep house as a college freshman ↗
2011
LevelsAvicii
2022
Techno + TequilaDisco Lines
listen for"Levels" builds around a simple, euphoric vocal chop and a widescreen synth lead that resolves the tension of the build into a big, uncomplicated pop payoff — the same melodic-hook-over-house-groove logic drives the drop and vocal chop on "Techno + Tequila."
Skrillex2010s · Dubstep / Brostep / EDM
Labuszewski has said a friend showing him Skrillex's "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" in middle school was the moment he "instantly fell in love" with electronic music, calling piano and guitar "stale" by comparison — it's the record that sent him down the dubstep-blog, self-taught-in-Ableton path that eventually became Disco Lines. The direct sonic line to his house records is looser than the origin story (he doesn't make dubstep), but the appetite for hard-hitting drops and maximalist sound design that Skrillex modeled shows up in how aggressively his tech-house tracks are built for a festival PA.
listen: upstream & heresource: Atwood Magazine — Disco Lines on Skrillex, the Grateful Dead, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and guitar sampling ↗
2010
Scary Monsters and Nice SpritesSkrillex
2022
Baby GirlDisco Lines
listen forOn "Scary Monsters," listen to how the drop detonates with distorted, almost cartoonish bass stabs rather than easing in — that same instinct to hit hard and fast, rather than build patiently, is audible in the blunt, oversized drop on "Baby Girl."
Grateful Dead1970s · Jam band / Psychedelic rock / Folk rock
The Grateful Dead come up in profiles of Disco Lines' formative listening (alongside Sublime, Pretty Lights, and GRiZ) and he's named them specifically as a go-to for long drives, but this reads as personal-taste background rather than a claim he's made about shaping his production directly — worth flagging as the softest link in this trio. Where it plausibly surfaces is in his stated love of live-feeling guitar textures and a looser, jam-adjacent sense of songcraft inside otherwise tightly-sequenced house records.
listen: upstream & heresource: Atwood Magazine — Disco Lines on Skrillex, the Grateful Dead, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and guitar sampling ↗
1970
Truckin'Grateful Dead
2022
Restless BonesDisco Lines
listen for"Truckin'" ambles rather than drops — its groove is carried by an unhurried, guitar-led pocket that breathes and wanders — and that same looser, exploratory feel (versus a rigid club arrangement) turns up in the extended, guitar-tinged breakdown midsection of "Restless Bones."