Before seeing them perform alongside Eleven’s older sister Halsey at this year’s VMAs, I didn’t know much of anything about The Chainsmokers apart from the fact that they were responsible for one of my favorite pop songs of the past couple years, “Roses.” Based on that track, I assumed they were a European (I didn’t know!!) band with a female vocalist, but nope, they were just two DJs from the America’s east coast. Writer Chris Martins calls them music’s “tech bros.” I call them a couple of dicks.
In a profile published by Billboard on Thursday, The Chainsmokers’s Drew Taggart and Alex Pall share the path that led them to the top of the charts (Pall “saw an ad in the back of a music magazine for legit mixing gear that blew his mind” at 12 or 13, while Taggart first experienced dance music when he “was 15 and doing a year abroad in Argentina”), delivered with the kind of questionable egotism you’d expect from someone who cites “Jeremy Piven’s Entourage character, Ari Gold” as one of their inspirations. I mean, these dudes are obsessed with themselves:
Here’s Taggart on unseating Adam “Calvin Harris” Wiles “as all-time champ of the Hot Dance Songs chart”:
“Only Justin Bieber and Drake can hold a candle to what we’ve done. Now we’re influencing the industry, putting out songs everyone copies.”
And here he is on plucking themselves from obscurity and delivering smashes: