TWOFACED: From Dunedin to Dancefloors Across the World

When TWOFACED debuted their track ‘I Need You’ at Dunedin’s Baseline festival last year, the electronic duo had no idea of the life it would take on outside of Aotearoa/New Zealand’s deep south. Originally created as a sample-based edit to play out in their live sets, today the track sits at over 10 million streams, played by some of the world's most renowned DJs, including Kettama, Calvin Harris, DJ Heartstring, X CLUB, and more.

The brainchild of Daniel Sherriff and Bodie Duncan, TWOFACED’s rise to the peak of club culture has been nothing short of an untraditional trajectory. The pair met in Dunedin during their first year at the University of Otago in 2020, where Daniel and Bodie were studying construction management and product design, respectively. Historically famous for its indie-rock roots and producing the “Dunedin sound” era of the 1980’s (pioneered by Flying Nun Records-associated acts like Look Blue Go Purple, The Chills, and The Bats), today it’s evolved into a breeding ground for dance music, propelled by the city's infamous student party culture.

Over the last decade, Dunedin has experienced a significant loss of live music venues and student bars. Foundational spaces for upcoming artists like Starters and Dive have closed their doors due to a number of factors, including the cost of living crisis, noise complaints, earthquake risks, the economic consequences of Covid-19, and more, leaving youth without regulated places to party and artists lacking stepping stone spaces to get their start. With its shortage of infrastructure around bars and venues, student flat and block parties on Castle and Hyde Street have become Dunedin’s destination for dance music - driven by ingenuity, DIY ethos, and grassroots community curation. Powered by the next generation of artists, the people are now the promoters, refusing to accept the idea that Dunedin nightlife is being displaced. Immersed in the creative culture of like-minded Dunedin youth, Daniel and Bodie both knew they wanted to contribute to the scene.

“Everyone's so young in the Dunedin scene - they're all students,” Daniel says. “Music is so prevalent, and I think that pushed us pretty hard, because everyone around us was doing it. That kind of gave us the extra push. We wanted to be those guys who were doing all the street parties and stuff. It’s weird looking back, because all we cared about was playing on Castle Street. What motivated us was that we wanted to play at all these street parties. At the time, that felt like a really big deal.”

After both dabbling in solo projects, the pair first met at university in 2020 and joined forces as a DJ duo. They recall the dance music scene in Dunedin at the time as heavily influenced and led by drum & bass culture. With little to no representation for other subgenres, Daniel and Bodie both felt pressure in their early days to approach their selections with mainstream accessibility in mind. But DJing together in their shared Dunedin flat, healthy competition arose between the pair to outdo one another, and soon their B2B battles opened them up to exploring sounds outside the drum & bass world. Expanding the limits of their selections and embracing hard house, trance, techno, and hardgroove quickly fuelled the duo’s curiosity about production, and in 2023, they began setting their sound apart from their peers with original edits and tracks under the name TWOFACED.

“There's so much of the style of music we play being played in Dunedin now,” Daniel reflects on how Dunedin’s dance music scene has grown since the early 2020s. “Back then, you would have never heard techno or a house tune being played at a house party. If you started playing house music, people would kick you off the aux immediately. Like, no question.”

Now, Dunedin’s music scene is producing some of the most exciting dance music in the country. Acts like SoundCloud cult-favourite producer DJ Bax and his high-charged, hyperactive donk sound have put the city on the map for hard dance music, and the eclectic global club selections of the trio Norty Club, comprising Evo, Jousey and PASH, are influencing intention and inclusivity in the city's club culture. TWOFACED are a big part of the movement pushing dance music forward in Dunedin and beyond, breaking through geographical barriers and building something bigger. First forged in their humble student flat, TWOFACED’s now-signature sound fuses euphoric hard house rhythms and transcendent melodic trance atmospheres, resulting in hypnotising dancefloor heaters that are as emotionally uplifting as they are supercharged with intensity.

“After DJing together for a while, we kind of got to a point where we felt like we'd hit a plateau,” Daniel says. “When we both got into producing during university, there weren’t many people around us producing their own tracks. We realised the possibilities with producing are just endless.”

The infinite possibilities of production have catapulted TWOFACED straight from the underground of Dunedin onto dancefloors worldwide. While last year they hadn’t yet embarked on overseas stages, their breakout hit ‘I Need You’ was already travelling far and wide to all corners of the most coveted international clubs and festivals. First crafted as a SoundCloud sample edit, ‘I Need You’ layers the original track's piano chords, violin strings, and Nikita W's soulful, moving vocal melodies with a deep, kinetic bassline and rapid hard-house drums. Getting the original sample cleared was the gateway to the track's rise to global recognition, and soon, through shooting their shot in DMs with some of dance music's biggest names, ‘I Need You’ was going platinum on the USBs of DJ heavyweights around the world. The track took on a life of its own, from its full circle first play at Baseline festival in the city TWOFACED were formed, to sets from Kettama, a Calvin Harris set in Ibiza, to DJ Heartstring’s set at Sonus Festival, and a fast-growing resume of many more.

“Calvin asked us personally for the track after we posted it on SoundCloud,” Daniel reveals of how one of electronic music's most prominent stars acquired a track from a small town New Zealand duo.

Since the phenomenon of ‘I Need You’, TWOFACED’s momentum has continued to ascend with a handful of new tracks released after being previewed in their exhilarating live sets. Crafted early into their formation almost three years ago, long-anticipated set staple ‘Love Again’ rises and falls with tension-building synths, blending the duo’s signature formula of lush vocal refrains, pulsating house rhythms, and syncopated percussion. Their latest release, ‘Yearning’, laces together thumping hard house percussion, driving basslines, and soaring chopped vocals into a high-octane club anthem.

TWOFACED are carving out a distinctive sound that resonates deeply with both international audiences and some of the respected icons who first inspired them to start producing. While they’ve just completed their debut UK and Ireland tour this past February, with more huge European summer festival sets on the horizon, the pair fondly recall their come-up in the close-knit dance music community of Dunedin as a vital cornerstone of their career so far. Dunedin’s population may be small, sitting at just over 130,000, but the city’s DIY ethos has positioned it as a hub for producing impactful and forward-looking music - from the Dunedin sound era of the 1980’s to the dance music defining culture today.

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Laura McInnes is a Freelance music writer. Follow her on Instagram.