Surf Mesa

Surf Mesa first began circulating buoyant yet relaxed original tracks and dance remixes suited to seaside listening in late 2016. A devoted audience formed around the bedroom EP issued in March 2019 and tracks such as the wistful “Taken Away” featuring Alexa Danielle, yet momentum surged after the November release of “ily (I love you baby)” featuring Emilee. Additional releases soon arrived, among them a 2020 remix of Marshmello and Halsey’s “Be Kind” plus the 2021 cuts “Carried Away” featuring Madison Beer and “Another Life” featuring FLETCHER and Josh Golden.

Powell Aguirre, the producer behind Surf Mesa, grew up in a household steeped in music; his great-grandfather performed with a swing ensemble while his father plays saxophone and sings with a jazz collective. Raised in Seattle, Aguirre gained early access to the family piano and, aided by his older brother, began exploring digital audio workstations during elementary school. By his junior year of high school he devoted every spare moment to production. Under the Surf Mesa name his first dance-oriented pieces carried deliberately disposable titles such as “Really Sh*tty Song But I Tried” and “I Drive a Honda Civic,” though after brief forays into hip-hop he gravitated toward warmer material that included 2017’s “supernova” and the following year’s “time for others” and “long drive.” The last of those appeared on the June 2018 EP Mesa. He completed the bedroom EP in March 2019 while continuing to issue material such as the Alexa Danielle collaboration “Taken Away” and remixes for Louis the Child (“Better Not”) and Chelsea Cutler (“Your Shirt”).

November 2019 brought “ily (I love you baby)” featuring Emilee, a track that directly quotes Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.” The song rapidly became a staple of user-generated social-media videos and was re-released by Astralwerks/Universal in February 2020. It subsequently appeared on charts worldwide, reaching the Top 20 across much of Europe, number 22 in the U.K., and number 72 in the United States, where it also placed inside the Top Five of the Billboard Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart. Remixes by Topic and Arty appeared next, and Surf Mesa supplied his own take on Marshmello and Halsey’s “Be Kind” that June. The standalone “Somewhere” featuring Gus Dapperton surfaced later in 2020, followed a year afterward by “Carried Away” with Madison Beer. In 2021 he joined FLETCHER and Josh Golden for the buoyant “Another Life.”