TYE

Newark, New Jersey, US · b. 2002 · FARA Records

TYE (Tyra Ellison, b. 25 July 2002) grew up in Newark, New Jersey — Brick City — with Jersey club from the crib: the sound that comes out of car windows and roller rinks and phone speakers all over the city, the triplet kick and the bed squeak the background rhythm of growing up. She learned the dances before she learned to make the beats — block parties, the rink, the school hallway, the endless functions where the whole room hits the same move at once. That communal thing — everybody doing the same step together and it feeling amazing — is the thing she's been chasing on record ever since.

She came up in the DIY reality of the scene: no label, no budget, beats made in bedrooms and passed hand to hand, dances that kept kids busy and safe and together when the city around them was hard. She's watched Jersey club go from a purely local Newark thing to a sound the whole world uses — on TikTok, at Coachella, under the biggest events on earth — and she carries a real pride and a real protectiveness about where it came from. Her influences are the lineage itself — the founders and torchbearers the record names as tribute, DJ Tameil and the Brick Bandits generation, UNIIQU3, DJ Sliink, MCVertt, Cookiee Kawaii — and the roller-rink, community-DJ, bedroom-producer tradition that built the whole sound.

On stage she's the girl at the middle of the function calling the moves — direct, joyful, community-first, more block-party host than untouchable star. High energy, eye contact, in the crowd not above it. The bed squeak is her favourite sound in music, and her rule for hooks is that if you can't do the move to it, it isn't finished. She insists Jersey club is Newark's before it's anybody's, and gets loud about crediting the founders. Energetic, warm, proud.