Super Duper

Josh Hawkins, a Nashville-based producer, crafts euphoric electronic music for the 21st century, weaving in motifs from '80s pop atop a hip-hop foundation. He first began tinkering with online music composition tools at age 14, an activity that soon led him to formal studies in theory and audio production. His earliest music employment involved scoring numerous advertisements, a role he held for two years before turning his energies toward a solo project he eventually called Super Duper. Several early tracks surfaced online in 2012, among them remixes of songs by established acts. In the years that followed he produced tracks for various indie pop and hip-hop artists, influences from which gradually seeped into the Super Duper aesthetic. Early summer 2015 marked his first live performance, just before the release of his debut EP, Sessions, Vol. 1. A notable breakthrough arrived with the July 2016 single “Angela,” a song written about Hawkins’ wife that landed on prominent playlists across major streaming services. That placement encouraged a more collaborative recording schedule, yielding a series of mid-2017 singles featuring Daniella Mason, Louis Johnson, REMMI, and Quinn Lewis. Spring brought the VHS EP in 2018 and Vessels in 2019, after which Hawkins ended the decade with the urgent, explosive single “Montage.” By then Super Duper material was being widely licensed for major brand campaigns as well as television and film soundtracks. His remix of Bob Marley’s “Sun Is Shining” later appeared in Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7, though not before Fader issued his first release on the label, the Prelude EP. In November 2020 the label put out the sprawling 20-track debut album Hallelujah!, which had grown from material initially sketched at a March 2019 songwriting workshop and incorporated contributions from numerous Nashville producers and artists plus guest performances by Lonas and Bre Kennedy.