Two years ago next month, Hayla stood on the side of the stage at the Los Angeles Coliseum, observing the 46,000 people assembled before her. There in the shadows, she kept repeating to herself that everything was going to be alright. Then, it was her cue.
She maneuvered through the dark, onto the stage and into the spotlight. Suddenly, the voice booming out of the stadium’s speakers was her own.
The British artist was closing the set with “Escape,” the 2022 hit by deadmau5 and Kaskade’s collaborative project Kx5 which she co-wrote and contributed vocals on, forging the track’s emotional core. The album that the song came from was nominated for a 2024 Grammy for best dance/electronic album, and the Coliseum show was the year’s biggest ticketed global headliner dance event. The spotlight Hayla stepped into that night wasn’t just a literal one.
“It changed the trajectory of my career completely,” she says of the song while speaking to Billboard over Zoom from her place in London, cozied up in a black sweater and black horn rimmed glasses. “It’s been an interesting few years.”
Born Hayley Williams, the artist has since sang on charting hits by producers including Sub Focus, Kygo and John Summit. The track with Summit, “Where You Are” landed on both Hot Dance/Electronic Songs and Barack Obama’s list of favorite music from 2023. “I thought it was a joke,” she says. “Blew my mind.”
Hayla co-wrote this song with the same group of collaborators with whom she wrote “Escape,” with the idea to get it to Summit after he did the “Escape” remix. “We thought that it might be nice to see if he would like something in a similar sound,” she says. He did, with the pair forging a working relationship that would contribute to the “domino effect” of Hayla collaborations with marquee producers over the last two years.
Now, after establishing herself as one of the defining voices of the current dance music moment, Hayla is releasing her own solo project — her debut album, Dusk. Out through Believe Music, the 10-track collection has already generated millions of streams, with singles like “Fall Again,” “Treading Water” and “Embers,” and finds Hayla fusing her love of ambient and electronica with the more progressive mainstream sounds that have helped make her a star.
She started writing the tracks that would become Dusk in 2021, in that moment leaning into the sounds of influences like Portishead, Bonobo and Massive Attack. During one writing session, she and a few collaborators came up with the topline of “Escape”, an exercise that was done “just for the love of writing,” she says. The song eventually found its way to deadmau5 and Kaskade, who decided to keep the voice on the demo, Hayla’s, on the final product. And as her singular voice became increasingly interwoven into chart hits, she found the writing on her own work shifted more towards those sounds.
“I started writing in this sort of more EDM/house way for some of the album,” she says, “I think it’s got a really nice ebb and flow of what I’ve been influenced by and what I’ve been listening to along the way.
Dusk is named for Hayla’s favorite time of day, with this vibe enhanced her X-Men meets haute couture aesthetic, which she calls “dopamine dressing” because it makes her feel good. The album amalgamates this twilight mood into a cohesive, moody, sometimes melancholic, often achingly pretty 34 minutes of music. songs were produced by a group of collaborators, although the album-closing title track was produced solely by Hayla. It’s the only album song she doesn’t actually sing on, although her signature is all over it in the lush, emotive vibe it conjures.
“I’ve always produced at a level where I can put an idea across,” she says, “but I’ve never had the confidence to be able to put it out there and show off my own skill set. ‘Dusk’ was definitely a feel-the-fear-and-do-it-anyway kind of track, because I had a huge amount of anxiety in putting this on the album initially, because it’s quite exposing.”
Many components of Dusk are examples of finding such self-assurance. While Hayla’s rich timbre is enviable, it took her a long time to get over her “incredible” shyness about singing in front of people.
That shifted “when I started noticing that singing was a healer,” she says. “I realized that I felt amazing when I sang, because it was a form of therapy for me. I realized that it may resonate with other people in the same way, and if I can make people feel the way I feel when I sing, I’ve sort of done my job.”
This same type of vulnerability exists in the album’s subject matter. “Treading Water” is about a breakup that “rocked my foundations of who I was as a person.” While “quite a heartbreaking one to write,” the song’s effect is soothing, like the hand of a knowing friend on your shoulder.
She says success for the album for her is simply the fact that it exists, with particular pride coming from having it in a tangible form on vinyl. She’ll perform her first-ever headlining show at the Roxy in Los Angeles on December 4, and while she’s coy about 2025 performances, she doesn’t deny that some big and stuff is on the calendar, with a few other collaborations also incoming. She’s also well into the writing of her second album.
Now, after once being too terrified to sing publicly and having to hype herself up in order to step onstage at the Coliseum, two years, many hits and one album later, she says singing live “is definitely where I feel most myself.”
