“I think the difference between a ‘producer album’ and a ‘singer-songwriter album’ in the traditional artist sense is that you’re really trying to bring people into a feeling,” SG Lewis tells Apple Music. On his rapturous third studio album, the DJ/producer invites the audience to share in an emotion he has been experiencing for as long as he has been listening to and making music—albeit one he only recently learned there was a word for, after spending a summer immersed in the history of Ibiza. “In a lot of the music I make, I like to make references to different time periods or different eras of music, and I was kind of like, ‘What is the reason that I feel drawn to these different eras that I wasn’t a part of?’ It’s not nostalgia, because I wasn’t alive for it,” he says. “Is there a term for feeling nostalgia for something you haven’t experienced?” The term Lewis was searching for would became the title of the record: Anemoia. Building on the idea of Ibiza as “a partying promised land, where all the shame and all the shackles of society didn’t exist”, he rendered the concept as a dream-within-a-dream-like reimagining of nightlife on the island during the ’90s. “I was pairing these nostalgic sounds that are very familiar to people, and are classic in a sense, with songwriters and voices and stories that are modern—but then also trying to find a through line in the production that tied those things together into what I interpreted as the sound of anemoia,” he says. Anemoia may keep a longing eye on the past, but the idealised fantasies conjured by tracks like the wistfully haunting “Feelings Gone” or bubbling rave anthem “Devotion” capture just as much of the current cultural moment—something Lewis was conscious of preserving as the record began to take shape. “If there’s any kind of deeper purpose to dance music, to me, it’s escapism,” he says. “Retrospectively, I want this album to create the feeling of anemoia for people who perhaps weren’t around or weren’t old enough to experience clubbing now, and the sound of the album and things I’m drawing on are all very escapist because there’s a lot of reasons to feel scared and worried about the future. I’m trying to create a sonic world people can escape into, or soundtrack their escapism and deliver them from whatever hardship they’re facing. That’s the mission.” Read on to find out more as he takes us through Anemoia, track by track. “Memory” “I knew that the word ‘anemoia’ is not a familiar word. I didn’t know what it meant before I Googled it, and also that no one knows how to pronounce it. So I wanted to build a track that was like a sonic introduction to the world which the album was going to inhabit, but then also be able to put on some audio that would introduce people to the concept of anemoia because it was not self-explanatory. The whole purpose of ‘Memory’ is just to introduce people to the feeling of the album—the euphoria, and this kind of bittersweetness, the chords, the sound—and also the literal concept.” “Feelings Gone” (with London Grammar) “For years I had this instrumental that I’d started in LA with my friend, J Moon. It was something that I was playing in DJ sets, and it had this feeling which was like bittersweet, but also the build of it and the drums having a slightly Balearic feeling to them. It was the first thing I made that I was like, ‘Oh, this is like the sound of the album…’ But the only voice I could hear on it in my head was Hannah’s [Hannah Reid of London Grammar]. There’s a depth to her voice and her songwriting that adds such emotional weight. Sometimes, dance music, especially pop dance music, can feel disposable but I just felt that Hannah and the band would really create a track that had depth. Rather than referencing what was happening in ’90s Ibiza, ‘Feelings Gone’ is my projection. If I was looking at those photos, what’s playing in my head?” “Sugar” (with Shygirl) “Shygirl and I started this song on the same day that we started ‘mr useless’, which was a song that we did for her project [2024’s Club Shy EP]. So we had this other demo and I got Shygirl down and we finished off the song structure and stuff, and then TEED [Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs] added the synth line. We really wanted ‘Sugar’ to feel like one of those 2000s Hedkandi, ’90s trance, super-pop dance records where they’re just like an overflow of serotonin and joy—for every decision to be very bright and very pop.” “Transition” (with RAHH) “The summer that ended up making this album exist, I spent a lot of time in Ibiza and I played Pacha I lot. It’s the oldest club on the island, it has so much history. There’s a sound of Pacha and it’s this 2000s, super-compressed drums, funky basslines, French Touch—I wanted to create a song that is a nod to that. I’d heard RAHH on a couple of records so we got together, and she’s an incredible songwriter. She is able to deliver these vocals that have the power and soul of a classic house vocal, but it’s not delivered in a way that feels like pastiche. A lot of the album leans more into that kind of bittersweetness. I love that feeling, but when I sat back and listened to everything, I wanted a record that did the opposite. ‘Transition’ is a call to arms, the kind of dance record that I play out at peak times.” “Devotion” (with Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs) “TEED is one of my best friends in the world, but he still remains a musical hero of mine. He is someone I get a lot of help and advice from, so it only felt right to have him collaborate on the album. This was an instrumental we started together. We tried a bunch of different ideas and vocals, and eventually, I was like, ‘Why don’t you just sing on it?’ It’s very euphoric in a classic ’90s piano house way. When I think of acid house and the UK rave movement scene, I think about those ’90s rave piano tracks. It doesn’t matter where you are or how long you’ve been playing, when you reach that piano breakdown, the sound of those beats coming in provides such a moment of lights-on euphoria.” “Past Life” “This is really a breather in what is otherwise a very dance-oriented album. In any album or extended format like this, I do think that a change in tempo is a relief. So I wrote this hook that induced a sort of dreamlike state. The whole thing is supposed to be from the perspective of someone dreaming about another time in the past and what that might’ve been like. Just creating a moment of reflection and a sonic change from the pace and euphoria of the rest of the album.” “Back of My Mind” “I use my vocal in a way that is a lot more direct and front-on than I have done in the past—there’s less reverb, less effects—and I think that there’s a story and a deep emotion to it. All my favourite club music has that element. Whether it’s Robyn, ‘Dancing on My Own’ or Kings of Tomorrow, ‘Finally’, those songs are designed for the club and an environment that’s very hedonistic and kind of momentary, but they have a depth and a story, and I think that gives them the longevity and the purpose. The initial idea was less dance-y—it came from listening to Radiohead, the verse was very meandering, kind of like Thom Yorke, trying to be cool—and it was like the euphoria got added and it got beefed up. Now that I’m playing it live, I can see people connecting to the lyrics. I hadn’t heard that phrase used in a dance record but it’s a very universal feeling.” “Another Place” (with Frances) “Frances is a long-term collaborator of mine, we went to university together. She’s primarily a songwriter now, and we did some great songs for this record, but she’s so musically gifted and has the most incredible vocal so I asked her if she would feature on this. I really wanted to create the end-of-night, 4 am, sort of slight comedown, emotional breakbeat song. The ‘Think’ break [the much-sampled drum break topped with ‘Woo! Yeah!’ from Lyn Collins’ ‘Think (About It)’] is sampled in this. I wanted to trigger that feeling of anemoia for people who aren’t tuned in to the names of different breaks where they’re like, ‘Where do I know this from?’ and because it’s such an iconic break and so synonymous with rave and dance music, the ‘Think’ break does that for a lot of people. I think that’s a fun emotion to play with.” “Fallen Apart” “I wrote the original six years ago, very quickly, after someone that I worked with really hurt my feelings. It was like a note that I’d written down, just like, ‘I’m not going to forget that’ and it sat on my hard drive for ages but there was never really a home for it. I played it to TEED, and we spent a day working on it, beefing it up and turning it into what it became. It’s funny because it sounds like a romantic breakup song, and I think, eventually, I changed some of the lyrics to allow it to resonate in that way, but it really came from a platonic falling out.” “Baby Blue” (with Oliver Sim) “I met Oliver in LA when I was working on this record and we did two sessions—one for my album, one for his. We didn’t come away with songs we wanted to put out, but we immediately got on well. I had this instrumental I’d worked on with my friend Karma Kid, and we just spent a day trying to make these end-of-night, disco-edit kind of instrumentals. I found this sample, Wess Machine, ‘Hard Luck’ and the intro just had this two-bar loop. I resampled it and added elements to it, made it work in a modern club setting. I sent it to Oliver, and he was out but said, ‘Give me five minutes…’ Five minutes later, he sends a voice note and he’d written the hook. He was like, ‘I just went in the toilet and wrote this.’ I was gobsmacked. So then he came down to my garden and we recorded it. Wrote a little verse and it was done. His voice is so warm and rich and beautiful. He’s a very special human being.”