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Swedish-born dance music maker HNNY's career has two distinct phases. He started out in sample-rich house music, matching the energy of his releases to his work as a live DJ. Midway into his first decade of music, though, he suddenly stepped away from the club scene, and gradually re-emerged with a more ambient-influenced body of work.

Johan Cederberg, born in Malmö and raised in Stockholm, was drawn to hip-hop in his youth; the dense, sample-based work of De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest had a profound impact on his early style, as did acts as wide-ranging as Four Tet and Steve Reich. In 2011, he began self-releasing his first remixes and edits as HNNY (inspired by and adapted from the unique spelling of Winnie the Pooh’s favorite snack). He started releasing original tracks on the Local Talk label, including 2012’s For the Very First Time, an EP whose title track was built around a vocal sample of Leona Lewis' “Bleeding Love.”

He’d fuse his uptempo house style to plenty of other wildly transformed American R&B samples. The 2013 singles “No,” “Boy,” and “Exactly” flipped vocals from TLC's “No Scrubs,” Brandy and Monica's “The Boy Is Mine,” and Christina Aguilera's “What a Girl Wants,” respectively. These releases set the tone for his first full-length, 2015’s Sunday, whose title track and “Cheer Up, My Brother” became runaway streaming and dance club hits. HNNY's reputation as a spirited live DJ was well-established by this point, and he performed throughout Europe and America until the winter of 2016, when he suddenly backed out of a London engagement and canceled all future performances. (Cederberg later opened up about the nightlife scene taking its toll on his mental health.)

After a year or so out of the public eye, HNNY released the aptly titled Ta Paus (Swedish for “take a break”) in 2017. It was his first release to reflect a shift in musical direction: turning away from the big, Chicago house-inspired beats of his earlier work and more toward his early loves (old-school hip-hop) and new inspirations (downtempo ambient music). Music may have come more slowly, but the shift in sound intrigued fans old and new, as evidenced by singles “Hosoi” (2019), “Kindness” (2020), and “Early Birds” (2024), as well as his second album, 2024’s Light Shines Through. ~ Mike Duquette