By Jason Koerner,Senior Contributor,Steve Baltin

Copyright forbes

MIAMI BEACH, FLORIDA – MARCH 28: Music producer and DJ Chris Lake attends Miami Music Week at SiriusXM Studios on March 28, 2025 in Miami Beach, Florida. (Photo by Jason Koerner/Getty Images)
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The album might seem irrelevant to a majority of music listeners, who now go for individual tracks and make playlists on their favorite streaming service. However, to artists, finishing a body of work that takes you on a musica journey is still the supreme accomplishment for a musician.

Just ask English DJ and producer Chris Lake. At 43, Lake is a Grammy nominee with multiple hit singles in the electronic dance world over nearly two decades. But when Lake talks about his long-awaited debut artist album, Chemistry, released earlier this year, he lights up with pride.

“This is going to be my focus moving forward. I really enjoy doing this. And I think I can see the vision,” he tells me. “This is the sort of thing I want to be doing moving forward. I am definitely turning into an album artist. This is my future now.”

I spoke to Lake about that metamorphosis into an album artist.

Steve Baltin: One of the things that stood out in your Billboard interview was you talking about the idea of making an album. When I was reading it, I was thinking of something of Steve Aoki saying to me about the pride in making an album because an album is something that you grew up on. I’m sure there were albums that were very influential early in your career.

Chris Lake: He’s right, I completely agree with him. It definitely feels just more substantial. You have to put more thought into it. It’s a much larger body of work. There’s a skill to approach that singular song, like you’re trying to eke a certain emotion, to make people feel something with a song. But if you multiply it, in my case, by 15 songs, and you’re trying to create an emotion 15 times, how do they all sit together? It’s a completely different discipline. And that’s why I took two years.

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Baltin: You say you try to create emotion, but the nice thing about is its multiple emotions, and like every artist album it takes you on a journey.

Lake: One hundred percent. And that’s definitely something I try to do. At the end of the day, I tried to make it interesting for me. If I’m not trying to make it interesting for me, I can’t expect it to be interesting for other people, right?

Baltin: When you do something for yourself, people feel that authenticity.

Lake: Exactly, I completely agree. I think that’s why the body of work is special for me, because I really focused on just having moments, making them and there’s this meaning behind all of these songs that I’ll probably never tell in interviews. I know what I put into them; there is a lot of meaning to it. It’s loaded and I do feel like that connected to people, the reaction’s been great. I’m really happy because I think the last thing I thought about was the reaction. Then you finish it up, you put it out and you’re exposed to the world, you’re exposed to opinion, ridicule, praise, all of it. Praise feels great, ridicule or people not liking it doesn’t. Probably it only takes one of those to have more of a profound effect than a hundred of the positive ones. But luckily, I haven’t really had that much. It’s been really positive. People seem to like it.

Baltin: Have there been songs you’ve been pleasantly surprised by the response to?

Lake: I think most of my predictions of what I thought people might think of the songs has generally been accurate. “Psycho” has been pretty crazy. Of the 15 songs that is the most automatic song of mine, like I would make songs like that 100 times a year. It’s kind of like you if put me in front of computer, gave me an hour and said, “Make a slapper for the club. I’ll go and make 100 of those. But there was something a bit different about that one. Still, I poured a lot of effort into how everything came together musically and then there was that one which just isn’t that musical at all, it’s like just this big thump over the head. That one surprised me because people have warmed to it a lot more than I expected. Maybe it’s what it’s surrounded by that makes it like stand out the way that it stands out. Or maybe it’s just singularly taken as a song that people really connect with regardless. I don’t know, but that’s been quite funny. Maybe it’s just f**king fun.

Baltin: Does having out there now make you appreciate shows in a different way? Is there more of a pride in bringing the album to an audience?

Lake: I think it’s made me have an appreciation for everything in a different way. I’m looking at my career in a slightly different realm just because the album is actually allowing me to do that. It’s given a focus for the year that is obviously the main focus for me. The album is a big deal. I’ve built my shows around it. The plan that we’ve laid out with my team has been great. You know, we’ve thought it out. The shows are intentional for that moment, for that city. We’ve had we’re just had a really f**king good year having moments. San Diego was a perfect example. That’s one of my favorite cities to play in. I can’t think of a bad show I’ve ever had there. I’ve done small ones up to the one that we just did, and I just felt like I was sharing that moment with a whole load of people that have been sharing a lot of moments with me for years. There are new people there but there’s a lot of people that have been to shows before. And that was one of the nice things I felt. Those people that said they’ve been to like 10, 15 of my shows, that one felt different. And it felt different from me. I felt like I was delivering something. It’s a bit of a celebration of the year I’ve had, what we’ve just done, the music that’s been made and how I intend to move forward as well.

Baltin: Growing up, who were those people who created those escape moments for you?

Lake: I was obsessed with Sasha and Digweed. I was obsessed with that stuff. But the thing that was difficult for me was I was living in the northeast of Scotland, quite isolated with dial-up internet. That was my connection to the world and to anything that was cool. And I was following message boards that were talking about the music that was predominantly going on in America and some of it in London, Manchester, some of the major cities in the UK. I was following what was being talked about and learning about the music via the internet. So, I was quite voyeuristic in my learning of music and shows, but they really inspired me in what they were doing, when they started doing things like the Delta Heavy tour, when they went out on tour together across America. I found that really inspirational, the way that it got people so excited about what they were doing.

Baltin: I saw in the piece as well, where you talked about the fact early on during that “EDM boom,” you had some hard times. That was an interesting time because so many people were trying to capitalize and not doing stuff that was real.

Lake: Yeah, that’s what I look back on at that time. That’s what it felt like. It was just a bit of a side swipe and a distraction that I got caught up in and that at the time I regretted. I look back on it now and I think it was a blessing. It was the best mistake ever. I was able to thankfully have the resolve to overcome and had the vision on how to move forward through it. And I just think it’s made me a better artist and a better person.

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