Denver, CO · melodic-bass · future-bass

Illenium

3 upcoming festivals ↓

The defining voice of melodic bass — emotional, arena-scaled drops built around real songwriting, sad songs engineered for fireworks.

Illenium is the recording name of Nicholas Daniel Miller, born December 26, 1990, in Downers Grove, Illinois. He spent parts of his childhood in Seattle and France before his family settled in San Francisco, where he attended St. Ignatius College Preparatory. He began producing electronic music at eighteen, and a Bassnectar show at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in 2012 convinced him to pursue it seriously.

In 2013 he moved to Denver, where he still lives, attending the University of Colorado Denver while coaching lacrosse and delivering sushi to get by. That year he released a self-titled debut EP on Prep School Recordings, followed by Risen in 2014, alongside remixes of Florence and the Machine, Lana Del Rey and Odesza that built his early following. Ashes followed in 2016 as a free download.

His albums, among them Ashes, Awake and Ascend, lean on guest vocalists and frequent collaborators from the same melodic bass circle, including Dabin and Said the Sky. The music favors a full topline over a hook fragment, pairing pop and emo-leaning structures with heavy, harmonically dense drops, and his live production has scaled from clubs to arena and stadium shows over the past decade.

Ascend, released in 2019, became his first album to top the Billboard Dance/Electronic Albums chart and reach number 14 on the Billboard 200. That year, "Good Things Fall Apart" with Jon Bellion and "Takeaway" with the Chainsmokers both peaked at number 3, part of 57 Illenium songs to chart on Billboard's Hot Dance/Electronic Songs list.

His remix work includes reworkings of the Chainsmokers' "Don't Let Me Down" and Taylor Swift's "Anti-Hero"; his remix of Flume's "Say It" won Remix of the Year at the inaugural Electronic Music Awards in 2017. Fallen Embers, released in 2021, brought his first Grammy nomination, and he made Forbes' 30 Under 30 list in 2020.

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