Kungs, the electro DJ with a dazzling career

Like every summer, DJs spend their lives between airports and sunny beaches playing their music. Kungs, 25, is no exception to the rule. He will be flying all August for Spain, Italy, Poland… As he is about to embark for Cannes (Alpes-Maritimes) where he will play as the opening act for the Electronic Beaches, Valentin Brunel, his real name in the city, takes the time to tell his story from his tube This Girl (2016), which made him famous at 19 and whose first album layers made him one of the essentials of the French electro scene. His elders, David Guetta, Bob Sinclar and Pedro Winter see in him one of their worthy heirs, capable of both popular hits and more underground titles for club purists.

For his second album, Club Azure, released in March, he worked with another master of international electronic music, the Berliner Boys Noize. Kungs is still amazed by his stay in Germany, spent in the studio with his idol: “I was a fan before I met him, I came back a groupie, summarizes the DJ. He is requested by everyone: Kanye West, Ariana Grande, Lady Gaga… I spent fifteen nights sitting behind him, watching his every move, his way of listening to music… ” On his album, Club Azurethey sign besides one of the most pointed titles of the disc, Fashion, while Than Clap Your Hands, Never Going Home with Martin Solveig is a hymn to the reopening of nightclubs after two years of forced closure due to the pandemic.

Virtual disco

During the confinements, Kungs and his childhood friend Victor Flash privatized a Parisian box in the third arrondissement of Paris, and invited around twenty people there to come and record TV shows every Saturday from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. DJ broadcast in live streaming on social networks. This virtual discotheque, they had nicknamed it the Club Azur in homage to the French Riviera of their childhood. Title that Kungs kept for his record: “I really got tired of the confinements very quickly, does he remember. Before, it’s true that I wasn’t aware of how lucky I was to do this job. It was when I was deprived of it that I realized my privilege. »

Even though success came early in his life, Kungs was not one to explode mid-air. Born in Toulon to a doctor father and an accountant mother, the teenager has the support of his parents who see him abandoning his studies for his computer: “My parents never saw me happier than when I was making music in my bedroom, he says. It wasn’t just a dream. I was releasing a song a day. They gave me a chance by saying to me: “Pass your baccalaureate, and then we give you three years to succeed in what you want to do.” » It will take less time than that.

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