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The profile · researched 30 October 2026
Loods and the long road from a Shalamar sample to a sold-out Manchester warehouse
The Newcastle-raised Australian house producer has spent eight years on Steel City Dance Discs turning disco samples into club tools. With his album Isla rolling out single by single and three dates currently on sale, he is touring harder than at any point in his career.
Newcastle, and a record built on Shalamar
Loods comes from Newcastle, the industrial port city a couple of hours north of Sydney that has an unlikely claim on modern Australian dance music. He surfaced as a recording artist in 2018, and the record that announced him was not a solo statement but a split with another Newcastle export: Love Is Real, credited to Loods and Mall Grab, released on Steel City Dance Discs as the label's QUAALUDES001.
Resident Advisor reviewed it on 23 April 2018 and described the title track as nearly ten minutes built from a Shalamar sample, cheery horns, thumping lo-fi kicks and chopped vocals. The B-side, Sweetness, took its source material from Stephanie Mills and held back a little. The reviewer, David Garber, read the whole thing as a statement of the label's working philosophy — loopy, retro-tinged records made on the premise that raves are supposed to be fun — and noted that the appeal was in the feeling rather than in any technical ambition.
That verdict has aged into something like a description of the project. Almost a decade on, Loods still makes records whose first job is to work on a floor at two in the morning, and whose second job is to sound warm rather than severe.
A catalogue built inside one label
Where many producers of his generation moved between imprints in search of a bigger platform, Loods has essentially stayed put. Steel City Dance Discs has carried the bulk of his output, including two entries in the label's own numbered series — Steel City Dance Discs Volume 6 and Volume 11 — alongside the EPs and singles that fill out his Bandcamp page: Rough Cuts, Cold Hands Warm Heart, Pure Bliss Meltdown and its Gerd Janson remix, Need U, Never The Same, and Fill Your Soul.
The collaborations map the circles he moves in. Love Is Real with Mall Grab remains the calling card. Paradise with SG Lewis pushed him towards a slower, Balearic register. What Can I Do with A-Trak went the other way, into late-night groove. Wasted was made with Skin On Skin, the Melbourne producer whose rise has run roughly parallel to his. He also turned in a French-touch remix of Dom Dolla's Saving Up, which put his name on one of the biggest Australian house records of recent years without requiring him to change what he does.
The common thread is sampled soul and disco, chopped and looped rather than reconstructed, with the emotional weight carried by a vocal hook and a bassline instead of a drop. It is a narrow lane, deliberately so, and he has spent years widening it from the inside rather than abandoning it.
Isla, released one single at a time
The album has been the open secret of his 2026. It has a name — Isla — and it is coming through Steel City Dance Discs, the label that has released almost everything he has made.
The rollout started in March 2026 with Say That You'll Be There, featuring the vocalist Marlo Rex. The second single arrived on 31 July 2026: Feels Like Heaven, a collaboration with the Galway producer KETTAMA featuring Camden Cox, issued in a four-and-a-half-minute original and an eight-minute extended mix for DJs. The label framed it as sun-soaked house and leaned hard on the imagery of a hidden paradise, which tells you roughly where the record sits — closer to the Balearic end of his range than the raw sampling of the 2018 material.
A third piece of the campaign, If You Want Me, reunited him with SG Lewis on the same label. Taken together the singles suggest an album organised around guest vocalists rather than around club edits, which would be a shift for a producer whose reputation was made on instrumental tools.
Standing in late 2026
The touring picture is the clearest measure of where he has got to. As of late October 2026 he is on the road across two countries with three dates on sale, and the run reads as a genuine international circuit rather than an Australian artist making an occasional trip abroad.
The North American leg moved through SILO in Dallas on 23 October 2026 and Denver on 24 October, having earlier taken in The Great Northern in San Francisco on 25 September. On 30 and 31 October 2026 he plays two consecutive nights at History in Toronto, on a bill headlined by KETTAMA — the same producer he has just released a single with, which is how these touring relationships tend to work. From there he crosses to Manchester for Depot Mayfield on 6 November 2026, again on a KETTAMA-headlined warehouse bill.
Earlier in the year he was on the island: Amnesia on 15 June 2026 for Kettama presents Steel City, a 23:30 to 06:00 room shared with Kettama back-to-back with Cloonee and Angel Lee. The year closes at home, with Lost Paradise at Glenworth Valley in New South Wales from 28 December 2026 — the Australian festival season he came up through, played now from a considerably higher position on the poster.
What the show is
There is no live band and no production spectacle here. A Loods booking is a DJ set, usually a club-length one, and the staging is whatever the room provides — which in 2026 has mostly meant large warehouse spaces and multi-room events curated by someone else.
The set that changed how people talk about him was his Boiler Room appearance in London, covered in September 2025, where he played a programme made up entirely of unreleased material, including productions with KETTAMA, Partiboi69 and X Club. The write-up called it the culmination of years of exploration and experimentation, and described the room as a sweat factory — which is an accurate account of the physical conditions his records are designed for. His earlier Boiler Room outing, at a Mall Grab show in London in September 2018, is still circulating as a tracklist, and the distance between the two performances is the distance his career has travelled.
The practical consequence of the current booking pattern is that he is often not the last name on the bill. On the Toronto and Manchester dates he is part of a wider programme built around KETTAMA and the Steel City Dance Discs roster, which means a defined slot rather than an open-ended headline set. For an act whose strength is unreleased material and sampled euphoria, that constraint has not obviously hurt him.
The show, now
A Loods show is a DJ set, not a live performance — no band, no bespoke staging, the room supplying the spectacle. He is currently touring across two countries with three dates on sale: two consecutive nights at History in Toronto on 30 and 31 October 2026 and Depot Mayfield in Manchester on 6 November 2026, both on bills headlined by KETTAMA, which means a defined club slot rather than an open-ended headline. The run has already passed through SILO in Dallas on 23 October and Denver on 24 October, with The Great Northern in San Francisco on 25 September; the year ends at Lost Paradise in Glenworth Valley, New South Wales, from 28 December 2026. Earlier in the season he played Amnesia in Ibiza on 15 June 2026 for Kettama presents Steel City, a 23:30–06:00 room shared with Kettama back-to-back with Cloonee and Angel Lee. Musically the sets lean on unreleased and unfinished material rather than a fixed programme: his Boiler Room London appearance, covered in September 2025, consisted entirely of unreleased tracks including productions with KETTAMA, Partiboi69 and X Club, and the write-up described it as the culmination of years of exploration and experimentation in a room it called a sweat factory. Expect sampled soul and disco hooks, long extended mixes of his own records — Feels Like Heaven runs to eight minutes in its DJ edit — and a set built for sustained motion rather than peaks.
Researched from insomniac.com · ra.co · steelcitydancediscs.bandcamp.com · loods.bandcamp.com · steelcitydancediscs.bandcamp.com · songkick.com · jambase.com · ibiza-spotlight.com
Pictures
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons, credited
Jovan.gec · CC BY-SA 4.0
