Evan Campbell, aka KETTAMA, is the stuff of Irish legend. A few years ago he was living at his mum’s house in Galway, mixing tunes on a tiny Bluetooth speaker given to him by an ex-girlfriend. Now he’s on the global stage, pumping his distinctive, hard-hitting style of house-adjacent dance into enthralled crowds. With a carefree and genre-bending attitude, he’s an artist pioneering new directions for electronic music.

KETTAMA attributes his rapid ascent to dumb luck. “It only takes one person to play your song”, he says—and in his case, that person was Mall Grab. Now best friends, KETTAMA gave him a USB when he was touring Ireland, hardly expecting a response. But shortly after, Mall Grab started playing one of KETTAMA’s tracks, ‘B O D Y’, during his sets. The internet loved it, and the rest is history.

Or so KETTAMA says: that’s a simplified narrative of success which embodies the 26-year-old’s low-key attitude. Sat with me in a London café, he’s dressed in a FedEx cap and Stella Artois polo shirt (he loves Guinness just as much, he says, but their merch is “dogshit—all crap vinyl prints and crap colours”). Plus, he’s always true to his Galway roots. KETTAMA’s own label, G-Town Records, was named after his and his friends’ ironic nickname for their hometown, and he’s excited to go back and play there for the first time in four years this month.

Much beyond that, though, and KETTAMA’s not sure what he’ll be up to. “I genuinely take it week by week”, he says. With a studio under London’s Fold nightclub, a week off from performing, and a new MacBook that he doesn’t yet know how to use (he was, up until yesterday, a Windows person), he has no idea what he wants to produce next. Catching him in his rest period, I chat with KETTAMA to get to grips with the spontaneous, dynamic world of this exciting rising artist.