In Conversation with René LaVice

Canada-born drum & bass visionary René LaVice has garnered global recognition for his profound influence on the genre, from his groundbreaking original productions and remix work to his expertly curated track selections. A prominent figure at BBC Radio 1 for nearly five years, LaVice’s impact has left an indelible mark on the international music landscape. As his label, DeVice, celebrates five years of chart-topping releases and the incredible milestone of over one million streams on Spotify, René’s momentum shows no signs of slowing down.

In this conversation, René reflects on the journey that has brought him to this milestone, sharing the story behind The Calling and how it unexpectedly resonated with so many listeners. He also offers a glimpse into his latest projects, from major collaborations to the organic rise of Demons.

With DeVice continuing to push boundaries, René reveals the exciting future of the label, from the launch of DeVice Radio to the highly anticipated five-year anniversary event. This interview provides a rare insight into his creative process, the evolution of DeVice, and what’s next in his ever-expanding musical journey.

Hey, what’s up? Can you hear me?

Hey, I can hear you now, so sorry. Typical music producer. It’s just, yeah, hilarious. Every time we’re on one of these things, it’s like trying to reroute everything and it’s hilarious. It’s a joke that never gets old. How are you doing?

I can’t believe that your RAM release The Calling with Ivy Mairi is celebrating its 10-year anniversary this year! I had no idea you started writing music back in high school. So when I saw your post about the single and noticed the vocalist, I thought, “Wow, they must have been high school friends!”

Yeah, we were high school friends, and we were both really into music. We had a lot of overlapping friends, and we’d hang out every now and then—at school and around town. We’d go to each other’s gigs, and she’d be performing folk music, which was really different from what I was doing or what I was involved in. I was in bands playing different genres, like rock, and I was all over the place. Since I was always in two or three bands, trying to figure out what would take off, I’d go to her gigs, which were quite different from mine. But we were both passionate about making music.

Then, when I got really into electronic music, I was always working and looking for people to collaborate with, and I’d end up working with just about anyone.

So you started pretty early on…

I was doing hip-hop and other stuff, so I had different rappers and singers, R&B artists, that I was working with. She was just someone I knew who sang, and I thought, “Well, let’s just try something.” I’d try things with anyone, really. I figured it would just add something new to the mix. Being friends like we are… I don’t know. Ivy’s always been very well-spoken and opinionated, which makes her great to work with in the studio. You could say something, and she wouldn’t just say, “Yeah, okay.” She’d have her own opinion on it, or say, “No, I think you should do this.” And then you can bounce ideas back and forth, you know what I mean?

Yeah, I totally get what you mean. That kind of back-and-forth is really important, especially when you’re creating something. It pushes you to think differently and try new things, which can lead to something even better in the end.

I remember we wrote that track after high school, but I think we were probably experimenting with ideas during high school, too. I feel like it was at least a year or two later, though—maybe I was still in university at the time, I’m not exactly sure. But I wrote the intro, and I remember the reason it came out the way it did was because I was writing music for myself, just to feed my soul. Some of the stuff I make is word-oriented, specific drum and bass tracks, and it feels right because there’s a clear place for it. But sometimes, I’ll create things that don’t really have a purpose other than just making me feel good. It’s kind of therapy in a way.

One night, I wrote that intro and left it at that, not thinking much of it—it was just a musical theme I felt like writing. A day or two later, I knew Ivy was coming over, and we were going to try making music together. So, I pulled together a few ideas, thinking it might be helpful to have some stuff ready to go. I added a drop to that intro once I realized it was at 174 BPM. When Ivy heard it, she thought it was really cool, and I told her, “Well, I’m going through this big transition right now. I’m about to leave Canada and move to the UK, and it’s such an emotional thing for me—leaving behind relationships, not so much friendships since I’ve kept those, but I was physically leaving people behind. I had to separate from my immediate family, and it was all so unknown. There were so many things I didn’t understand about it.”

It was exciting, but also really scary, and I had all these emotions swirling. When I listen to that track, I imagine someone standing at the edge of the water, watching the waves, thinking about the future—feeling a mix of excitement and a bittersweet sense of leaving things behind. It’s this blend of positive and negative emotions happening all at once.

It captures a snapshot of a moment in time…

It’s not really happy or sad—it’s just this weird entanglement of emotions. Then she started coming up with these poetic, introverted lines, and it all really worked. I thought, “Right, this needs a chorus to really punch through.” So, I sort of sang it to her, and she sang it back. Grammatically, it didn’t even really make sense, but I was like, “It just makes sense to me.” Back then, I was never concerned with making things perfect, I just thought, “This is art, it’s poetic.”

Andy C started testing it out at shows, and it just went off. They were like, “Wait, this actually is a single. We should go with this.” And it just took off, leading to a lot of other amazing things happening as well.

For us, it’s such an emotional record, in the best way possible. We’d made a lot of music before—house tracks, pop songs, R&B, just experimenting with all kinds of styles. But when we made this one, we were like, “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but let’s just make it and express ourselves.” It felt really raw and real, a genuine expression of where we were at.

There’s this sentiment in the industry sometimes that if you create something from the heart, it might not be successful because you’re not fitting the mold. You have to follow the trends, do what’s hot on TikTok, or whatever’s in the charts, and that’s what leads to success—this highly planned, money-driven process. But we didn’t do any of that. We just expressed how we were feeling at the time.

What ended up happening was mind-blowing—it became an anthem for an entire generation of university students. What I didn’t realize was that what I was going through, and what I wrote about, was the exact same experience that every teenager going into adulthood faces when they leave home. It was incredible to see how it resonated with so many people. Even folks in their thirties and forties were like, “Holy shit.”

The subject matter is relatable..

It just makes me reflect on all these things in my life, and it really resonates with me on so many levels. Everyone interprets it in their own way and attaches their own meaning to it. It truly became their song, you know? Fans felt like it was about their lives. I think every time it’s played, it really brings people together. And it’s incredibly special. We feel so lucky to have been a part of whatever magic happened in the universe when that record was made.

It’s incredibly special because it resonates with so many people in such a meaningful way.

You know? And it’s just amazing to celebrate it with everyone. We didn’t really know what to do, so we thought, “Let’s just post and get it out there, saying, ‘Hey, this was fun. Thanks, everyone.'”

It’s incredible to see how far you’ve come—from a decade ago to now, with Demons featuring Genetics and Elle Exxe hitting a million plays. That’s a huge milestone, especially for a drum & bass track, and it happened pretty quickly!

Yeah, that was great. The really funny thing about that—well, maybe “funny” isn’t the right word when written out—but the fun part of that whole experience was when we were finishing Demons. We were doing the final mixdown, and it took a lot of effort to get that record over the line. We kept toying with it, working on it, and then it would kind of go…

Anyway, to cut to the chase, we finally finished it. Then we thought, “Alright, we need to get this out there.” I looked at Harry Genetics and said, “Let’s try to get this one over a million plays, man. It’s been a minute.”

The funny part is, I hadn’t checked the numbers on anything for around four years or more. I literally just didn’t pay attention. I was so focused on the music itself. But then, I realized, shit, a lot of these records are just club tracks—like Are You Ready and others. When I looked at the stream count for Demons, I was like, “Fucking hell, it’s at 400,000.” I didn’t expect it to be that high, honestly, because usually, club music isn’t made to go viral on streams. It’ll sell well on Beatport, DJs will play it, and fans know it, but it’s not the kind of track you’d expect to hear in cafes or gyms. I don’t know, for whatever reason.

But I was like, shit. Yeah, it had been a minute since something went over a million, especially a club record. I was kind of just thinking, you know, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we got this one over a million?”

Then, a few months later—well, actually, back up—since the release, it went straight onto massive drum and bass platforms and all these big outlets. I was like, “This is great.” Then it just started taking off streaming-wise, and we were like, shit.

This is really going! So we threw up a few more TikToks and things, but I don’t think any of them had that much impact. A lot of it was just people finding out about the record, saving it, and listening to it over and over.

And yeah, suddenly we realized it was going to hit a million. Elle, Genetics, and I were all messaging each other, like, “This is great.” I can’t believe it’s happening because, not to get all airy-fairy with the whole self-manifestation thing, but it was a really quirky thing to happen. We had said, “What if we got this one over a million?” and then it happened.

But, you know, I think it’s just people connecting with the record. It’s a really versatile track because it has elements you can vibe with on headphones and lyrically, and it also has things that really go down well in the club. We’re really proud of how it sounds sonically, and overall, I’m just really proud of that record. I think it’s really great.

One thing we’ve noticed with a lot of releases on DeVice is that many labels have something that does well, but then it balloons quickly and drops off just as fast. Then they’re left wondering what to do next, and that’s pretty much it. But with DeVice, the retention doesn’t seem to drop off. The fans who find out about the tracks just keep listening over the course of years. It’s interesting because the stream counts just keep ticking over, and we’ve noticed that the fan base is really engaged with the music. It doesn’t feel like it’s here today, gone tomorrow.

I’m really proud of that because it’s a club music label, and I love releasing bangers. Club bangers aren’t always the kind of tracks that stand the test of time, but for some reason, we’ve captured this sweet spot where they’re not only club bangers, but there’s that little bit extra in them that makes them retain interest. 

Speaking of it being a banger, can you tell us about how you linked the Gino Remix?

That’s wicked. Yeah, that’s really cool. I think that was a really great result with that remix as well. The Gino remix was something special. I think we were basically on the same page. I saw a window in the schedule where I thought, “I’ve always really loved remixes.”

If anyone’s noticed, I’ve done a ton of remixes over the years, and I’ve always really liked them. I don’t think it’s about making it better or worse; I think it’s fun to reinterpret them. I was talking with Liam Howllet about this about a year ago, and we were discussing fans’ expectations when it came to remixing—maybe it was “Mindfields” or something. We were talking about whether fans would think it was faithful enough to the original or not.

We both agreed it should be really different. The way he put it was this: It’s not about saying that this remix version or the new version is better or the ultimate version, or that it takes it up a notch. It’s just a different version. And it sounds really oversimplified, but let it sink in—it’s a different version of the record. You’ve got these different versions, and it’s like flicking through different dimensions in the universe and saying, “This is a different take on it. This is a different way of looking at it.” It’s a remix.

It’s like taking a painting, flipping it upside down, adding a bunch of new colors to it, or taking away colors, and just seeing what happens to the record. It’s part of the culture, really. It’s a big part of dance music because dance music is all about taking ideas and flipping them on their head, trying them a different way.

I knew Gino would have a different spin on the record, and that’s what I wanted. I didn’t want someone who would basically make a very similar record with a few tweaks—that’s more of a VIP in my opinion.

I’d love to ask about your track with Felix Samuel, “Count on You.” It’s such an incredible and emotive piece. Is there any interesting backstory behind it?

Yeah, to be honest, that one is probably one of the fastest records I’ve ever made. Felix hit me up about writing a track together, and it just came together extremely quickly.

It was really cool, and I’m really happy with the result. I mean, I know what you mean—many of the records have a lot of melody and lyrics. I guess I just can’t help gravitating toward that kind of stuff; I really like it.

But a lot of my music is quite instrumental too. I like both, really. I kind of bounce back and forth depending on how I’m feeling.

So, is there more in that style on the way?

There’s more… there’s definitely more to come as well. The record that just dropped with Spor is primarily, I would say, instrumental. It was just in my original sketch of the tune, and I just thought it was kind of funny and a bit cheeky. It almost felt like, sometimes, the harder and more clubby sides of the scene can be a bit too self-serious.

‘Freak Out’ does have a fun vibe to it…

It’s funny to put something in that’s just sort of like this… I don’t know, it just sounds like a Valley girl, kind of almost sarcastically saying, “Let the freaks come out and play,” and then having a really massively heavy drop right after that—it’s just kind of funny to me. It got me amped up!

And then that sort of spurred on the whole thing. I mean, sometimes it’s just something really small that becomes the centerpiece for the whole track, or something to base the entire theme around. But I think as long as the track has a theme, that’s kind of what I’m after most.

Do you typically prefer to record the vocals in-house?

With “Vibe Check,” we actually worked remotely on that one, because sometimes it’s just about time constraints. I really like being in the studio with people. When I did “Fall From The Dark” with RAIGN, there were a lot of Zoom calls, and it was almost like going through every single bar, every phrase of that track—just churning through it and working through it. Whereas with “Vibe Check”…

I mean, it’s so hard to be in the same spot sometimes because we all have so much going on, we have to travel, and there are all these different constraints. But RAIGN is in LA, and I’m in London.

What about ‘Vibe Check” with Jasmine Knight?

I know for a fact that I wanted to end with, “I think you need a vibe check” or “a vibe check” at the end, and then slam into the drop. Jasmine’s just so switched on that the first things she sent me back just knocked it out of the park.

We did work back and forth on a few elements, but it’s funny how certain tracks can just come together so quickly. I would definitely put that in the category of things that happened extremely fast.

So we did it remotely, didn’t actually meet up in person to do anything for the record until we linked up for some content but initially we were just talking over DMs on Instagram.

To be honest, that’s a really great way of connecting with other artists. I mean, in Jasmine’s case we knew of each other for a while, and I wanted to work with her for a long time, then finally had this moment where I was like, yeah, this could be the one.

It worked out great. I just had a really good gut feeling about it. It was almost like it was such a perfect fit that I couldn’t believe it. But you know, with a lot of people, I think it’s really fun trying to connect with people who don’t even have a clue who you are.

Some people DM me when they’re vocalists, just kind of fishing for people to work with. And then sometimes it’s the other way around. I’ll think someone’s really cool, and I’ll be like, “Hey, I’m really into what you do. Do you want to chat about working on something or whatever?”

I think that whole collaborative process is really great. I’m really into collaborating these days. I’ve spent so much of my career working completely isolated and alone. And I think, while I’m very hands-on, there’s something magical that happens when you’re sharing ideas and collaborating with other people.

It can enhance the fun side of things too, because you have someone else to share the joy with. It’s just fun, you know?

I totally get that. Collaborating with others can bring a whole new energy to the creative process, and it’s awesome when you find that perfect fit, like you did with Jasmine. It really makes the whole experience more enjoyable, and you get to share the excitement of creating something new together.

I really like that team kind of element of things.

I agree, there’s something really special about sharing your successes with others—it makes the achievement even more meaningful.

Yeah, it’s great. I mean, it’s just a different perspective on things, you know? I’m really into it these days, so I want to do a lot more of it.

And yeah, there’s a lot more to come as well. I’ve got another collaboration with Eskei83 & UCee, which will be coming up soon, and it’s going to be really interesting. Again, two artists with slightly different styles, but that’s what makes it exciting.

UCee style is a bit different from mine, which already makes it pretty interesting. I guess you’d have to ask him how he’d describe his sound, but I’d put it more in the live music category. Last time I checked, anyway, it seemed more on the dancehall side. I was going to say dancehall and reggae, but I don’t want to get it wrong, as it might be a slightly different style of that kind of music.

But yeah, it’s definitely a very different style. I think blending that kind of sound is really exciting to me. I’ve always loved that.

Yeah, that’s definitely going to add some extra character to the record.

Yeah, musically, just blend it all and just see what happens, you know?

What is your ultimate goal for the DeVice Records?

I think “open-ended” is a good way of putting it. DeVice, started out as just a really great way to release music and connect with the audience and fans.

It’s grown into this incredible platform—it’s developed its own community and roster of artists, becoming a fantastic space for artists to release music and grow.

And that’s why I have a really special announcement, which is a bit of a surprise. You’re actually the first person to hear about this: we’re starting a DeVice podcast, hosted by me, and it’s launching today.

How exciting, it’s going to be a whole new chapter…

Which is really exciting. It’s essentially another way to add to the label’s platform, giving us a chance to showcase the music and celebrate what everyone’s doing, as well as highlight other music from the scene.

It’s a way of creating a little hub around everything happening in the world of DeVice, because there’s always so much going on, it can be tough to keep track. I think it’s a great way to encapsulate all of that.

I really believe it’s going to be enjoyable and a great thing for people to follow. So, stay tuned and locked into the podcast—it’s called DeVice Radio. You won’t want to miss it; it’s going to be a wild ride.

It’s good to hear you’re hosting again, back in your element.. 

Yeah, it’s going to be really fun. I’ve been quite quiet lately because I personally wanted a bit of a break from presenting things and doing it intensely. I’ve been a bit quiet in terms of that for a few months now, but then this concept came to me, and I suddenly got really excited about it. I thought, “Yeah, you know what? I think it’s time to bring something like this back and offer it to everyone.”

It should be really enjoyable and a great opportunity to provide more of a platform to the artists around me and those affiliated with the label. It’s also a chance to celebrate other people in the scene. We want to give our own spin on things. It’s not there to represent the be-all and end-all of drum and bass; it’s just drum and bass through the DeVice perspective, in a fun way.

We’ll mix things up and celebrate what’s currently going on at the label.

Another thing going on with the record label is we’ve had quite a lot of interest surrounding live events, and I keep getting asked a lot about it. It’s something that, whenever I do it, I get really excited about and very obsessive. So, I knew that if I was going to do it, I wanted to do it right.

We’re actually going to have our first DeVice Club event on the 23rd of May. We were asked to do a Rampage showcase at the Sports Palace in Belgium, which was incredible. There have been a few showcases here and there done by other promoters, but this is the first time it’s going to be a solo DeVice event.

I’m not announcing the lineup yet, but basically, it’s celebrating five years of DeVice. The birthday of DeVice just passed on the 6th of March, and I can’t believe it. It feels like a blink of an eye. But yeah, so much has happened in five years, and we decided it was a good time to throw a celebration.

So a DeVice Records event is on the horizon?

Yes, a five-year celebration event. So this will be the big five-year anniversary bash.

We’ve basically got this really incredible club in Soho, London, and yeah, the sound system’s going to be amazing. It’s going to be really clear, and I’m really happy with so many elements of this event. I truly feel like it’s going to be one that people will remember, and they’re really going to thoroughly enjoy.

And it’s something that people have been asking for a long time, so it’s exciting to finally just do it—to rip the band-aid off and make it happen.