PinkPantheress & Kaytranada

Two of dance music's best young artists on avoiding sunlight, weird and having the confidence to work with your heroes collaborations,

- TARA CATHERINE REID

PINKPANTHERESS IS TALKING about the time she produced a beat for a friend and tried to make it "as Kaytranada-inspired as possible". It's a sweet story, especially since the person she's telling it to is Kaytranada himself.

"I want to hear it, I want to see how it turned out," he responds.

PinkPantheress quickly shuts down the idea: "It's fucking terrible." Then they both break into laughter.

The two teamed up for the first time recently for an as-yet-unreleased track. This collaboration is fitting, given they are both known for spinning a panoply of influences into forward-thinking dance music. Kaytranada, 30, has already earned two Grammys and spent the summer opening on The Weeknd's stadium tour, while PinkPantheress, 21, just last year released her excellent debut mixtape, To Hell With It, which piled up house and drum-and-bass samples while charting an emerging generational sensibility.

Right now, the two artists are spending a July evening sipping drinks out of tiny disco balls in a funky watering hole in Montreal. Kaytranada arrived in his hometown fresh off a Weeknd tour date in Detroit, while London-born Pink Pantheress joins us ahead of a Montreal festival gig that same weekend. Their conversation reveals a mutual-admiration society "I was a fan before finding out that you liked my music," Kaytranada tells PinkPantheress and offers a glimpse inside the brains of two of dance music's leading lights.

KAYTRANADA: When we were in LA working on that song, was it your first time over there?

PINKPANTHERESS: That was my first time in LA, for sure. When I'm in London, I write in my bed at 3am. It's raining outside, and it's grey, and it's perfect for what I write. It was a completely different environment in LA, and I was struggling. When we did our session, that was the first song I wrote where I was like, "OK, this actually came out quite freely."