Big Gigantic operate mainly as a dance outfit whose buoyant tracks are crafted for and road-tested at gatherings like Coachella, Lollapalooza, and Bonnaroo. The Boulder-born, Denver-based pair blend electronic programming with live playing and apply the same cross-pollinating method to styles and guests, pulling most often from modern hip-hop while also drawing on house, dubstep, jazz, and funk. After forming in 2009, the duo notched their first charting project five years later with The Night Is Young, whose ecstatic title track spotlighted Cherub. Their follow-up LP, Brighter Future, climbed to number two on Billboard’s dance/electronic chart in 2016, aided by the Logic and Rozes collaboration “All of Me.” Since then they have issued their sixth and seventh albums, Free Your Mind in 2020 and Brighter Future 2 in 2022.
Dominic Lalli and Jeremy Salken first connected while playing around Boulder and soon became roommates. During the MySpace period, Lalli—who holds a master’s degree from the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied saxophone with David Liebman and Bob Mintzer—began producing on his computer and invited Salken, a drummer since age three, to flesh out the tracks. They adopted the name Big Gigantic and released the full-length Fire It Up in 2009, quickly followed by the Wide Awake EP; both self-released sets leaned toward dubstep and left-field hip-hop, with Lalli’s saxophone sometimes taking the lead role. After A Place Behind the Moon in 2010 and Nocturnal in 2012, the pair expanded their reach on 2014’s The Night Is Young by giving Cherub a central vocal part on the title song—their first prominent use of singing.
The Night Is Young reached number ten on the Top Dance/Electronic Albums chart and prompted Lalli and Salken to keep enlisting vocalists. Nearly every track on the 2016 album Brighter Future included a singer or rapper, many of them high-profile. Two singles charted on Hot Dance/Electronic Songs: “The Little Things,” fronted by Angela McCluskey, and “All of Me,” which featured Rozes on the hook and Logic on a verse. Additional guests included Waka Flocka Flame, Pell, Naaz, and returning Cherub, helping Brighter Future peak at number two on the dance/electronic tally. Brighter Future Remixed and a deluxe edition appeared in 2017, the same year the duo guested on Steve Aoki and Bad Royale’s “$4,000,000.” Several standalone singles in 2018 and 2019 preceded the breezier 2020 set Free Your Mind, led by the Ashe collaboration “Friends,” which soon passed ten million streams. In 2021 the pair issued the EP Leisure Season, Vol. 1, then began rolling out Brighter Future 2 in early 2022 with advance tracks featuring GRiZ, Kota the Friend, Aloe Blacc, and both Vic Mensa and Mick Jenkins.
