From jazz to garage, to drum & bass and back again, Lockerz’ trajectory is not a standard one. He was trained on jazz piano, later on went to discover garage through the BBC series People Just Do Nothing, and eventually fell in love with drum & bass. During lockdown, he took a long break, but after traveling with friends through Asia and Australia, he found himself in love with electronic music again.
A Lockerz tune is a fun tune. He takes inspiration from artists like Sammy Virji, DJ EZ, Oppidan, and more. “They’ve all got that melodic, housy UKG vibe going on,” he explains. Combine this energetic vibe with a jazzy piano, and you’ve got tunes that do immensely well on the dancefloor. He proved this last year at Gemfest and Boomtown, and this year he’s already got Love Saves on the calendar. With his album coming out soon, who knows what other festivals might follow.
We had a chat with Lockerz and talked about his upcoming album, his inspirations, and his love for garage.
You’re releasing an album soon, congratulations! You’ve released a few of the songs on there already, and ‘Burning’ blew up quite hard. How did that feel?
That felt really good. It was my second single of 2026, and I’m really happy with it. That’s one of my favourite recent productions. It’s a crowd pleaser, and it definitely gets people moving. I think people recognise the vocals and that gets them moving on the dance floor. I put a Lolita Holiday sample in there which has been used in a lot of dance tracks that I’ve liked over the years. It’s nice to put something that influenced me so much in a track of my own. The support that I got for ‘Burning’ was crazy to see as well. Sammy Virji and DJ EZ downloaded it, and both of them are big idols to me, so it was really nice to see their support.
How did you make the track?
I usually start with the drums to get a really nice loop going, then chords and then I found a sample on Splice that was imitating that Lolita Holiday sample. I was playing around with that but it wasn’t quite doing it. In the end, I decided to get the sample from the original track and that ended up working really well. I mostly use Splice for drums and other instruments, but another website I’ve found incredibly useful is Samplette. It basically shuffles music on YouTube, and it’s a really efficient way to find good samples.
Earlier you were saying how Sammy Virji and DJ EZ were some of your biggest idols. Who or what else inspires you?
My favorite producers are definitely Sammy Virji, Hans Glader, Oppidan… They’ve all got that melodic, housy UKG vibe going on, and that’s definitely my favourite. In terms of songwriting I’m trained in jazz piano so that plays a lot into how I write my music as well. I like incorporating jazzy chords and garage drums.
How did you go from jazz to garage?
My parents sent me to piano lessons, they sent me to do classical music and I just hated it. My teacher noticed this, and they asked me, why don’t we try jazz? And I fell in love with it. As a kid and young teenager, I really liked jazz and I loved playing jazz piano. I went to study music in college and all the computers at college had a copy of Logic on it. At the time I was watching this show on BBC called People Just Do Nothing. It’s a mockumentary of a pirate radio station, it’s a comedy and they’re all really into garage. They’re all garage MCs and DJs and it was all a bit of a joke, but I really liked the music in the series. That’s how I actually got into garage, and then I started producing it on the computers at school. I got into garage music through comedy.
Going out, was garage the genre that you went for as well?
When I turned 18, I put garage on the backburner because I was making drum & bass. I was really into my jump up. When I was going out to raves and festivals, I was drum & bass obsessed, and made only that for three to four years. Then I took three years out where I wasn’t making any music, and I came back in 2023, 2024, just garage obsessed. It felt like I was reconnected with my first love.
How did you find your way back to garage?
I guess garage was a bit more niche in 2016, 2017. When it came to bass music and dance music I was mostly surrounded by drum & bass at college, and I ended up making that for years. I didn’t get back into listening to garage until I was traveling around Australia and Asia and I stumbled across the Interplanetary Criminal remix of a Conducta tune. I became obsessed with the vibe and the feel of it. During all my travels for the next seven or eight months, I was constantly trawling through SoundCloud, looking for new songs to add to my playlist.I would arrange all my songs in the playlist like a DJ set. Obviously, I was traveling, so I couldn’t DJ, so I was just really hungry to get in the studio and try and make some garage, or get on some decks and play some garage. But I couldn’t. So, when I did finally get home the music became all-encompassing.
Did taking those three years out reset you a little bit then?
I was definitely struggling with my mental health a lot and that was probably partly why I wasn’t making music. Traveling with my best friends definitely gave me a lot of life experience, a lot of inspiration and lust for life. I realised that music is what I want to do with my life. It’s a bit cliché, maybe, but I did find myself again and again through traveling.
Some clichés are definitely true. You’ve mentioned an album on your socials a couple of times. Is there anything more you can say about that?
Yes, I’ve got an album coming out on my birthday, on the 27th of June this year. Right now I’m sitting on 17 tracks but that might change. All the singles I’m releasing this year will be going onto the album, with probably about 10 plus more. I’m even putting a bit of dubstep and drum & bass on there. I’m really looking forward to getting that out. There’s no consistent theme on the album. It’s just going to be a collection of tunes I had fun making. And I got fed up with releasing one song a month. I’m sitting on a lot of music and I really want to show my fans and anyone else all the music that I’m sitting on. I think an album is the best way to get a lot of it out. It’s the usual Lockerz sound but there’s also a few curveballs in there that I’m excited to show people. Just letting the whole world know that these are the tracks that define me.
Let’s throw it back to the start of your garage career. What are some of the highlights you’ve experienced so far?
Definitely Gemfest and Boomtown. Gemfest was amazing. I got to play the main stage on Sunday in 2025 and I was so nervous. I thought I wasn’t gonna be able to do it, and I was also really ill at the time and I thought I was gonna have to call it off. I managed to pull myself up by the bootstraps, and it ended up being really fun. It was recorded too, which I’m really really happy about. Playing Boomtown was another dream coming true for me, as it was the second festival I ever went to. I didn’t think that I’d ever get to play there, but it was amazing. A lot of people from my hometown and from my school came, people that I hadn’t seen for years. When I started my set the floor was quite empty and then suddenly there were a lot of familiar faces that started appearing, and before you know it, the crowd was full. It felt a bit like a full circle moment.
That sounds great! Anything you’re looking forward to at the moment?
Yeah, I’m really looking forward to my album and I don’t want to name drop, but I’ve also got a few collabs that I’m sitting on for separate releases with some artists that other people will definitely be aware of. I’m really looking forward to those coming out but my lips are sealed. I can’t spill the beans on that just yet.
Any final thoughts?
27th of June, 2026, Lockerz debut album.
