You’d be forgiven for thinking the title of Sammy Virji’s new album, ‘Same Day Cleaning’, references the struggles of getting clean laundry while on tour. After all, the producer and DJ has been on the road for what feels like years – flying the flag for UK garage worldwide with a huge smile on his face, especially ever since a super-viral breakout set at DJ Mag in 2023.
But ‘Same Day Cleaning’ is actually an old nickname Virji’s old music teacher gave him. “He was very weird in the best way possible,” the London-born, Witney-raised musician tells NME. “He used to come up with weird nicknames… very funny guy.”
That eager music student is now one of the UK’s most exciting young DJs and producers, recognised as a key force behind the current resurgence of UK garage – especially in America. In June, Virji closed out a North American tour with a show at Forest Hills Stadium in New York. His first stadium show, it was booked in lieu of two shows he was supposed to play at the embattled Brooklyn Mirage. “We kind of took a risk by going to a stadium because we had to sell even more tickets,” he says. “It was just weird knowing that I could do a stadium, but yeah, maybe at some point we’ll do some more.”
Virji will be headed back to the States – but not before celebrating today’s release of his second album ‘Same Day Cleaning’, a big-tent party that features UKG pioneers Tuff Jam and MJ Cole, not to mention Giggs, Unknown T and Skepta, to name but a few guests on the record. Read on for NME’s interview with Virji about hearing Skepta perform ‘Cops & Robbers’ at Glastonbury, collaborating with his father Fayyaz, a trombonist who played on ‘The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill’, and how he cleared a Dionne Warwick sample for the album.
Congrats on the new album. It’s been five years since your last one, a long period of time between records, and you’ve been very busy in the interim. So did you set out to do something different with this one?
Sammy Virji: “I wouldn’t say too different. I’d say that the major difference is there’s quite a lot of instrumentation in this one, like violin, brass and horn samples. And with this album, I got my dad to play trombone on it. I got him to make fully formed samples that I could then use, or I would write melodies – like play them on Logic, and it would sound really bad – and then send it to him to get actual instrumentation that I could sample from there.”
When you were making your album, was your DJ head still ‘on’ in some ways, or were you really trying to be a producer for this record?
“Yeah, I think producer. I don’t have much of a DJ head when I make music. Sometimes I do, with certain tracks like ‘Damager’, for instance, which has a big build-up and drop, I am thinking about what it’s going to sound like in the club or at a festival. There’s a wide array of stuff in the album. I’d say that the one that I had the DJ head on for most was ‘925’ with Chris Lake. I think that’s kind of how he makes things as well.”
“The top of my [features] list, which I thought would be so unattainable, was Skepta… It just blew me away that that happened”
You noted that this album’s got a little bit more instrumentation. Was there a point where you consciously decided this is what you were going to focus on for this record, or did that come around naturally?
“It was never a conscious decision, just happened that way. And I think my music now, anyway, has more of that. My sound’s changed slightly. There’s probably more fully formed songs in this, whereas a few years ago I’d be sampling little vocal snippets. There still is that in the album, but there’s also fully formed vocals from vocalists.”
Which guest vocalists were you the most excited to lock in a collaboration with? Or when you got the file that they sent over, you were like, “Oh my god, this is crazy.”
“All of them… but I think Skepta, because I remember speaking with management about getting some bigger features now that we were with the label, they could help with that. And the top of my list, which I thought would be so unattainable, was Skepta. But it didn’t even come about from the label. That came about completely naturally, because he just followed me on Instagram, so I had to send my message. And I’m not one to send DMs, but I just said ‘I’m a massive fan’. And then he was just like, ‘yeah, let’s get in the studio’. It just blew me away that that happened.” [Laughs]
And at Glastonbury, he becomes a last minute stand-in for a drop-out and he’s playing your collaboration, which goes off to thousands of people. What was it like for you to watch that?
“It was actually really lucky, because I wasn’t at Glastonbury, and on the day they said, ‘Are you able to make a PA version of the tune?’ And luckily I wasn’t at Glastonbury, because I think it would have been hard to upload it. I was able to quickly whip it up, and I watched it on TV. It was quite surreal.”
As you mentioned, you’re now on a label, compared to your first album, which you independently released. Besides features, did being on a label help as well with clearing samples? I was wondering how you managed to get Dionne Warwick’s ‘Forever My Love’ cleared for the track ‘Burn The River.
“That is probably the best thing about major labels, their ability to clear samples. And that [sample] being such a big one, they’ve got the money to, I guess, clear that and pay what needs to be paid. I don’t like getting stuff replayed, because it loses its charm a little bit. Sometimes, the replay is really, really good. But I think that’s something that I don’t want to get replayed, I wanted to keep it as it is, because it is just a bootleg of that tune and I was excited for that.”
And to clarify for readers who may not know: when you say ‘replay’ you mean get another musician to play that part, get another vocalist to sing that part, right?
“Yeah. So you’d have to pay a fee, I think, for the master of the sample. So what’s always easier to do is just to get someone to replay it, so you don’t pay the master fee, but it still sounds like the tune. They are really, really good, some of the replays. I’ve had it done before. But I think with Dionne Warwick, such an authentic-sounding singer…”
Yeah, that’s a magic sample. I think it would have lost a fair bit of the charm if it were replayed. Did you know anything about the process of how she said yes? Because she’s actually surprisingly online. So I wondered if she’d actually heard about you, or seen videos of you playing the edit out and about.
“I don’t know about her, but I think I remember someone saying… I might be making this up, but the person that wrote it, I think they had passed away a few years ago. They had to get permission from their family, and there’s loads of different people. It was quite a hard process to clear it. But you know, it got done in the end. And I’m really excited that that was able to be on the album.” [Editor’s Note: Sammy Virji’s label A&R later confirmed this to NME via email, saying that it did take a long time to contact the estates of the deceased songwriters and to have Warwick herself listen to it.]
It must have been worth it. I know lots of your fans love that particular edit. There’s always people hoping for releases of beloved edits or unreleased music that you air in your DJ sets. And there might be some who hear the album and they’re like, “Oh, this edit I hoped for is not on there.” What do you say to those fans?
“‘It will come out at some point, but for the album, take it as it is.’ [Laughs] Maybe a deluxe version? I could release some of the other stuff on the deluxe version. If there is one.”
Is there one?
“I don’t know, I haven’t made it yet! [Laughs] Wait for the normal one [to] come out first. Weirdly… I thought that taking a little break from producing after is what I would do, but now that I know I’ve got a big body of work coming out, there’s no pressure for me to make music. Because that pressure has been lifted, I then feel a lot more creative, and I can just go in and mess around and experiment. So I’ve actually been making a lot of music as well, post the album being made.”
When you found yourself experimenting, are you toying with different genres? Are you reaching for samples that you might not normally touch?
“Yeah, that’s it, doing loads of different genres. Actually, a lot of the stuff that I release comes from me messing around with other genres. The Skepta tune originally was a hip-hop or a drill beat. And I remember thinking ‘let me just whack a two-step beat on this and see how it sounds’, and it sounded really good. So I ended up using that, but I was trying to create something else in the first place. It’s so valuable to just muck around and see what comes out. Making a lot of random stuff, it’s really important.”
You’ve spoken in the past about how you know you’re really happy to fly the flag for UKG, but at the same time, you’ve also brought to attention that you make lots of other different kinds of music and play lots of different kinds of stuff in your DJ sets, as well. Do you think that your listeners and your fans are seeing and hearing that from you?
“I think people that are discovering me now who don’t really know what garage is, they’ll just label me as UK garage, and even stuff that isn’t, which is a lot of my music – like, ‘If U Need It’, for instance, which is one of my biggest tunes, people would label that as garage when it’s it’s actually not at all. On the album I’ve got collaborations with a couple of pioneers of UK garage, and I hope that it might be some sort of education maybe. On the album there’s proper garage, and then there’s also house-ier bits and the bassier side of stuff.”
When you look at videos and view counts online, you can see that UKG has spread. But in a physical sense – like the size of crowds, people’s reactions to your music, your DJ sets – what kind of change have you seen? How big is the change that you’ve witnessed over the years of playing and making this music?
“It’s been a pretty big change. The size of crowds is quite scary. Different places, as well, respond differently to different branches of garage. There’s a lot of different branches that you can go down. I’ve just come from a lot of places in Europe where garage isn’t particularly big, but the crossover at the moment that’s happening with garage and trance, hard house – that goes down really well. I know Silva Bumpa’s an artist that’s doing this crossover and IPC [Interplanetary Criminal], they work really well in Europe. But then in America they might like a kind of bassier side of it. It’s about trying to play stuff that’s gonna hit all people. But it is hard to get the crossover right all the time.”
Sammy Virji’s ‘Same Day Cleaning’ is out now via Capitol