Camden Cox joins the Spotlight Mix Series

Camden Cox makes incredible euphoric dance music driven by her love for trance and deep house. She’s already so immersed in the global club scene that she has recently been working and doing sessions with Tiesto, Gorgon City, 220 Kid, LP Giobbi, Anabel Englund and Meduza. Her 2021 hit ‘Under the Water’ was released on D4 D4NCE, a division of legendary British house music label Defected Records. She also has longtime support from MistaJam, who called her “one of the most prolific songwriters in the dance music world” when he played her 2020 single ‘Healing’ on his Radio 1 show. Cox says this high-profile co-sign was a watershed moment for her “when it just felt like everything fell into place”.

Since then, her reputation has continued to grow exponentially. Cox prides herself on writing “very raw and real” lyrics that are firmly rooted in real life – don’t expect to hear throwaway lines like ‘DJ Turn It Up!” on a Camden Cox banger. Her new single ‘Over’ is a case in point: equally inspired by dance titans Robyn and Deadmau5, it’s an undeniable club anthem that pulses with pure emotion and the haunting beauty of Cox’s voice.

“I wrote this song about that transition phase when you’re going through a breakup but can’t quite let go of each other,” Cox says. “You’ve had ‘the conversation’ and you know things are ending, but at the same time you maybe want to spend one last night together. You’re almost saying: ‘It’s not over ’till you’re gone.’ It’s a pretty messy situation, but I think we’ve all been there at least once in our lives.” – Camden Cox

‘Over’ is Cox’s first single since signing with RCA, but it’s by no means her first floor-filler. The London-based singer-songwriter already has more than 45 million Spotify streams to her name including acclaimed collaborations with Eli & Fur (‘Burning’), Joe Stone (‘Mind Control’) and Just Kiddin’ (‘Stay the Night’), all of which she co-wrote. “As much as I love collaborations and hope to be releasing collaborations forever – it’s such an integral part of being a musician – my aim now is to hold my own as a dance artist in my own right,” she says. “My end goal is to be a female dance icon who makes fully realised solo albums, a bit like Robyn or Ellie Goulding.”

It’s no exaggeration to say that Cox has music in her blood. While she was growing up in Lincoln in the East Midlands, her dad played drums in a band and her mum was a club promoter who loved drum and bass music. “I remember going to watch my dad’s gigs as a kid – it was proper rock music,” she recalls. “But at the same time, my mum would be blasting The Prodigy and garage music around the house. So my own taste in music was probably always going to go one way or the other!”

And sure enough, it was club bangers rather than rock anthems that really caught Cox’s attention. Some of her first albums were Ministry of Sound compilations and as soon as she was old enough, she “skipped off to London” to pursue a music career.  A pivotal moment came when she met Labrinth while singing in a near-empty bar.

“I’d just moved to London and I’d never met anyone who was actually signed and doing it before,” she recalls. “In that moment, Labrinth made me realise this career was actually achievable and he also gave me some great advice. I’d been offered a job singing on a cruise ship, and he advised me not to accept it because he knew that if I said yes, I would probably get stuck singing covers and never make my own music. Turning it down was the best decision I’ve ever made.” – Camden Cox

Instead, Cox focused on her finding her own voice. “Very quickly I realised I wanted to be involved in songwriting as well as singing,” she says, so she began setting poems she had written to beats she found online. In time, she started to compose melodies and grasp the mechanics of chords and song structure. The more Cox collaborated with bedroom producers she met through Twitter and Soundcloud, the more sophisticated her songs became. “I started from nothing and just tried to teach myself until I got better and better,” she says humbly.

Perhaps inevitably, there was the odd false start along the way. Early in her artistic journey, Cox says she “got scammed a little bit” by a dodgy company that targeted wannabe singers with misleading newspaper ads. “They charged me way over the odds to make the worst demo ever,” she recalls with a laugh. “They promised they were going to send my demo to loads of record labels, which obviously they never did, but at least I had something with my vocals on that I could send to people I wanted to work with. So in a way, it still helped me out.”

As Cox’s reputation for writing and singing brilliant dance music continued to grow, she began collaborating with globally renowned producers including Sonny Fodera, Eli & Fur, Vintage Culture and Noizu. Which brings us to where she is today: releasing ‘Over’, the song she has chosen to kickstart her dream of becoming an “iconic female badass in dance music”. “I want to make unique, classy, slightly left-of-centre music that people will sing back to me when I perform for them,” she says. With ‘Over’, there’s no doubt she’s already on the right track.

Today Camden Cox joins us on our Spotlight Mix Series! Check out her mix below and download it for free here!

Tracklist:

Camden Cox – Over

John Summit – Human (ft. Echoes) 

KREAM – Pressure 

Camelphat – Silenced

Jess Bays ft. Poppy Bascomb – Temptation

Obskur ft. Bklava – The Dark

Hayden James – Hold Tight (Kormak Remix)

Maur – Deep Inside

WEISS – Ain’t Me Without You

Camden Cox – Under The Water (Solardo Remix)

Emily Nash – Garden

KC Lights – Fall ft. Tailor

Eli & Fur ft. Camden Cox – Burning

220KID x Jem Cooke – Another Life

Essel – Take You There

Fred again.. x India Jordan – Admit It (U Don’t Want To)