The boys of GTA have been setting the world on fire this past year. Whether their in the studio, or behind the decks, The Gift duo keep audiences entertained with their wide array of big and booming productions, collaborations and remixes. Producers without borders, their arsenal of sounds know no limitations.
For Miami natives Matt van Toth and Julio Mejia, music has always been a part of their lives. “We’ve both always been into music from a very early age,” Matt says, “I got into producing by wanting to record myself playing guitar, since I wasn’t in a band, and I wanted to make my own music. Julio started making beats for friends in high school as a joke.” When Julio hit college, beat making was no longer a joke, but now a passion. Coincidentally, this was around the time the two met, “We met through Facebook. We had a mutual friend, Mauricio, a local DJ around Miami. I was making music, and he was making music, and [Mauricio] linked us up and told us to check each other out. I was doing kinda open-format DJing at the time, and Julio was making beats and stuff.”
Armed with a passion for music and a budding chemistry, the boys went to work immediately, “[We knew collaborating would be a good idea] the first couple of times we met up and made some tracks. Literally, the first song we made got picked up by Afrojack for his label, which didn’t get released because we couldn’t get the sample cleared, but that was literally the first track we made together. We have the same inspirations and the same kind of style. It just worked out, and everything is going good, so why not just keep going with it?”
And keep going they did. Their debut release “It’s Time” was signed to Afrojack’s Wall Recordings making for a rather stellar introduction to the world, “Yeah, it’s unreal! We’ve always been working and have tons of unreleased music waiting for the right moment and opportunities to release. We still send those tracks to big DJs and get support from them! It’s good to finally see everything coming together.” Since their debut, GTA have had releases on Diplo’s Mad Decent, Ladback Luke’s Mixmash, A-Trak’s Fool’s Gold Records, Steve Angello’s Size Records and Diplo’s off-shoot project Jeffree’s, but the dynamic duet aren’t slowing down. This year has been met with a string of massive releases with “Yolohton,” “The Crowd,” and their most recent release “Bola” on Calvin Harris’s Fly Eye Records.
One thing we love about GTA is their outright refusal to be pigeonholed within any one category. They’ll experiment with trap music, house, moombahton, funky electro, booty bass, salsa, big room, anything they can put their flavor on. With their popular mixtape series “Death to Genres,” their mission is to get all the booties clapping every time, no matter the genre.
Winding down from their massive European tour alongside Rihanna for her Diamonds World Tour, we welcome GTA to The Gift on Thursday, December 26th at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, FL. Don’t procrastinate – buy your tickets today!
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/124000921″ params=”color=ff6600&auto_play=false&show_artwork=true” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/90482699″ params=”color=ff6600&auto_play=false&show_artwork=true” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/110768558″ params=”color=ff6600&auto_play=false&show_artwork=true” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
