HNNY

Swedish-born producer HNNY built his initial reputation on sample-heavy house tracks that mirrored the high-energy sets he delivered as a club DJ. Roughly halfway through his first ten years in music, however, he withdrew from nightlife entirely before resurfacing with a body of work shaped by ambient textures.

Born Johan Cederberg in Malmö and raised in Stockholm, the artist first connected with hip-hop as a teenager; the intricate sampling of De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest left a lasting mark, alongside the broader experimental palettes of Four Tet and Steve Reich. In 2011 he began issuing his own remixes and edits under the moniker HNNY, a spelling adapted from Winnie the Pooh’s preferred snack. Original material soon followed on the Local Talk imprint, most notably the 2012 EP For the Very First Time, whose title track centered on a vocal snippet from Leona Lewis’s “Bleeding Love.”

Further singles from 2013 continued the practice of radically reworking American R&B vocals: “No” drew from TLC’s “No Scrubs,” “Boy” from Brandy and Monica’s “The Boy Is Mine,” and “Exactly” from Christina Aguilera’s “What a Girl Wants.” These releases laid the groundwork for his debut album, Sunday, issued in 2015; the title cut and “Cheer Up, My Brother” both achieved strong streaming numbers and frequent club play. By then HNNY’s profile as an engaging live performer was firmly established, leading to dates across Europe and North America until he abruptly withdrew from a scheduled London show in the winter of 2016 and canceled all remaining engagements, later attributing the decision to the mental-health pressures of constant touring.

Following roughly a year away from public view, he returned in 2017 with Ta Paus—the Swedish phrase for “take a break”—an album that marked a decisive turn away from the robust, Chicago-house rhythms of his earlier output and toward the old-school hip-hop he had first admired plus newly embraced downtempo ambient music. Although new material arrived more gradually thereafter, the altered aesthetic sustained interest, as heard on the singles “Hosoi” (2019), “Kindness” (2020), and “Early Birds” (2024), as well as his second full-length, Light Shines Through, released in 2024.