BAYNK

Jock Nowell-Usticke was standing in a Budapest supermarket buying alcohol on his way to Sziget festival when his phone rang. On the line was the promoter behind Auckland's Laneway festival, who had stumbled across a track called "Sundae" on SoundCloud and wanted to offer an unknown producer a slot on the 2016 lineup. Nowell-Usticke, who had never performed live, said yes. He had written the song as part of a self-imposed challenge to produce 100 tracks in 100 days while finishing a chemical engineering degree in Christchurch, New Zealand. Sixty tracks came out of that sprint. Number 77, "Sundae," changed everything.

Performing as BAYNK, Nowell-Usticke grew up in Hawke's Bay and attended Hereworth School in Havelock North before moving south for university. Piano lessons started at five, saxophone picked up around twelve, and guitar filled out his high school years. That multi-instrumental background shapes what sets his live shows apart from peers in electronic music: rather than standing behind decks, he sings, plays saxophone, and dances across the stage while triggering his own productions.

After the Laneway debut, BAYNK released Someone's EP in 2017, followed by Someone's EP II in 2019 and A Study in Movement in 2020, the latter featuring collaborations with Tei Shi and Mood Talk. His 2021 single "Esther" with Tinashe blended electronic production with R&B, earning a premiere on BBC Radio 1 and previewing the direction of his debut album. ADOLESCENCE arrived in January 2022, a ten-track record that also featured Cosmo's Midnight, DRAMA, Cub Sport, and Rainsford. The album earned a Grammy nomination for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical at the 65th Grammy Awards, where it competed against Harry Styles's Harry's House, which ultimately took the award.

Three headline tours of the United States followed, along with sold-out dates in Australia, the UK, Germany, and France. Festival stages grew bigger too: Coachella, Lollapalooza, Electric Forest, and Life Is Beautiful all hosted BAYNK sets. His sophomore album, SENESCENCE, was released on September 27, 2024, via Virgin Music Group. Recorded across the United States, Europe, Africa, and New Zealand, the ten-song record explores the passage of time and mortality, a deliberate counterpoint to ADOLESCENCE's fixation on youth and possibility. Now based in Los Angeles, BAYNK continues to fuse pop, deep house, funk, and ambient textures into a sound built on the restless curiosity that turned an engineering student's laptop experiments into a global career.