The Metal Kid From Bewdley Who Took Tech House to Red Rocks

On 9 May 2026, a sold-out crowd filled the sandstone bowl of Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado for a tech house headliner's debut there. The man behind the decks was David Bissett, better known as Cloonee, and very little about that night would have made sense to the boy he once was in a small town on the River Severn.

Bissett grew up in Bewdley, in England's West Midlands, and his first musical world was not house at all. It was metal. His father took him to see Killswitch Engage in Birmingham when he was still a child, and the first dance music that grabbed him was dubstep, a genre that shares metal's appetite for weight and aggression. The story of how he got from there to Red Rocks says a lot about where tech house has gone in the last decade, and why his records keep filling the upper reaches of Beatport's tech house chart.

From Sheffield booths to the Beatport top spot

The apprenticeship was conventional: years of DJing in Sheffield and other UK cities, soaking up the bass-heavy styles that ran through the north of England. The early releases were conventional too, in the best sense. His debut EP came out on the label run by elrow, the Barcelona party brand, and by 2018 he was releasing on Michael Bibi's Solid Grooves, the imprint that defined the stripped, rolling end of UK tech house.

The breakthrough came in 2019 with "Be Good To Me" on Big Beat, which went to number one on Beatport's tech house chart. For a British producer in that scene, that is usually where the story settles into a pattern: residencies, Ibiza, a steady climb. Cloonee's went somewhere else. In 2020 he signed to Black Book Records, the label of Chris Lake, the British-born producer who had long since made California his base. And in 2021, with America reopening from lockdown faster than Britain, Bissett took Lake up on an invitation and moved to Los Angeles.

Why a British tech house DJ moved to Los Angeles

That move inverts an old direction of travel. For decades, American house producers found their most devoted audiences in Europe. By the early 2020s, though, the gravity had shifted. Tech house had become the dominant club sound in the United States, powered by a generation of American festival crowds who wanted something heavier than pop-EDM and warmer than techno. Cloonee arrived just as that audience was ready for a new voice.

The move paid off quickly. In May 2022 he and Lake released their first collaboration, "Nightmares", a horror-tinged club track that opened with a child's voice. Miami's Club Space became a regular stop, and his rise is a textbook case of how that city's clubs and Miami Music Week turn DJs into American headliners.

A sound built from other people's voices

Los Angeles changed more than his address. Bissett has said that before the move the only Latin track he really knew was "Gasolina". In LA, with a large Latino audience turning up to his shows, he fell hard for Latin music, and that influence started seeping into the records. So did hip-hop, which he began treating less as a sample source and more as a co-writer.

The formula that came out of this is simple to describe and hard to copy. Cloonee's best-known tracks are built on the logic of stripped-back tech house: a rolling, often single-note bassline, a dry kick, loose percussion and a lot of empty space. Into that space he drops a voice that carries the whole record. He has spoken openly about how heavily his tunes lean on the vocal, and how central sampling is to the way he works.

"Stephanie", released on his own label in December 2024, is the clearest example. Made with InntRaw and credited to Young M.A as well, it is built around the verses of her 2016 rap hit "OOOUUU", and HNTR's remix of it went to number one on Beatport. In 2026 he pushed the idea further with "I Rhyme Quick", a reworking of Nice & Smooth's 1991 hip-hop classic "Sometimes I Rhyme Slow", which he had been testing in his sets for about eighteen months before it came out. The original vocal is sped up and dropped onto a thumping low end. The effect is a hip-hop record that behaves like a tool, and a tech house record that has a chorus.

That is the real reason the sound works right now. Tech house has always relied on vocal hooks, but most of them were anonymous: a chopped phrase, a spoken line, a looped "yeah". Cloonee's hooks are recognisable. A crowd that has never heard of Solid Grooves still knows a rap verse, and the moment of recognition does what a big drop used to do on a festival stage. Minimal arrangement, maximal hook.

Hellbent: a metal idea in a house world

The label he built in America tells you where the teenage metal fan went. Hellbent Records is both a record label and a clothing line, and its merchandise is modelled on the metal band shirts of his childhood gig-going. The name, as he tells it, describes the only attitude he thinks works in music: a determination to achieve something at all costs. "Sippin' Yak", released on Hellbent in March 2024, and "Stephanie" turned that attitude into streaming numbers, and the label has since become a platform for younger producers working in the same vein.

In a scene where label identity usually rests on a sound or a party, Hellbent rests on a mood: the dark, slightly menacing swagger of heavy music transplanted onto a tech house groove.

The numbers behind the run

By autumn 2026 the scale of all this is hard to argue with. Cloonee pulls around 13.6 million monthly listeners on Spotify, which puts him third among tech house artists on dj-index, behind only HUGEL and FISHER, and ahead of John Summit and his own mentor Chris Lake. In 2026 he and the Leeds duo Prospa went to number one on Beatport twice, with "Free Your Mind" and "Good Girl" (the latter with Tristan Henry), and in September "Free Your Mind" also topped Billboard's Dance Airplay chart. In late September his name sat on several of the top places of Beatport's tech house chart at once, which is how Beatport charts work when a producer is releasing in quick succession and DJs are buying every record.

That run is also the run-up to a debut album. "Are You Still You?" is due on 6 October 2026 through Good Music For Bad People and Hellbent, sixteen tracks in all, trailed by "Good Girl", "Get Up And Dance" and "Back Of The Club", the last released through Ministry of Sound Recordings.

What his story says about tech house

The title of that album is a fair question to put to the whole genre. Tech house began as a British and European club sound, and some of its biggest rooms are now American amphitheatres and Miami clubs, full of crowds who came up on hip-hop and reggaeton. Cloonee embodies that shift: a British DJ who had to move to California to find his sound, and who found it in New York rap verses and Latin rhythms rather than in the clubs of Sheffield.

Whether the formula lasts is another matter. Sample-led hooks age fast, and every successful vocal flip spawns a hundred copies. But the core of what Cloonee does is older than any trend: take the most recognisable thing in the room, strip everything else away, and let the crowd sing it back. The metal kid from Bewdley understood that long before he ever touched a mixer. It just took a move across the Atlantic to put it on a stage carved out of red sandstone.