Margo XS on producing “pop music as noise music”

“I like to imagine a song as a planet; you have to use its resources to construct it,” begins pop’s latest in-demand producer, Margo XS. When she catches up with MusicTech from Los Angeles, she’s heading to a studio session to work on the deluxe edition and remix album of Zara Larsson’s Midnight Sun, the Swedish popstar’s Grammy-nominated reinvention LP, for which she co-produced nine songs, including bangers Blue Moon and Crush. Arguably instrumental to its success has been Margo’s bold electronic production, where she makes minimalism sound and feel maximal.

“My philosophy with producing is to have sound overlap as little as possible”, the Canadian producer says. “People might think about that as using EQs and sidechain compression to remove space and create room for another element but, for me, it’s not the more elements you add, the bigger it gets, but rather making each element as big as it can possibly be”.

How, though, does she achieve this? “Allow a bass, synth or drum to take up the entire frequency spectrum and let it exist individually in that moment. So while the composition is minimal, it can be the biggest 808 you’ve ever heard because it’s holding way more space than if it were competing with a bunch of synthesisers and drums.”

Margo learned this from her love for Skrillex, realising that the iconic producer’s gritty music is a series of one “maxed-out” sound after another. More recently, she’s analysed pop production similarly: “The less elements you have, the more room you can make for a big vocal.”

She recognises this isn’t always possible, however. “With a lot of songs, you need to have multiple things going on at once. But when I can get away with having one really big sound be the primary focus, I try to prioritise that”. This is how Margo fuses a variety of bass and drum sounds that would, in theory, clash in the low frequencies — wide, full-spectrum bass sounds and snare drums with lots of low-end information, for example.

This was true of the experimental sonics that she helped bring to the core of Midnight Sun: “There are a lot of weird sounds and weird moments — from the plugins I used from independent developers, to the varying MP3 codecs”. She also notes the custom sounds – “there are many songs where all the drums are synthesised” – as well as “playing with form”; the track Hot & Sexy is four different songs combined over a year.

She adds that, thanks to co-producer MNEK, there is a lot of varispeeding, detuned synthesisers, some songs “not in 440Hz” and lots of different methods of pitch shifting. The overarching idea, Margo says, was to “create interest and excitement”.

Contrastingly, when she gets in the studio with frequent collaborator Kim Petras – with whom she has crafted multiple speaker-blowing hyperpop bangers – they give themselves strict restrictions. “We’re always obsessed with the idea of ‘what is a synth line that can repeat over and over that you’ll never get sick of?’, and to not crowd that up with counter melody as a way to hide the catchiness.”

Instead, they embrace it and place them in different contexts. The beats for Freak It, for example, were borne out of Margo’s desire to make the loudest ending to a pop song ever. “It’s fucking ridiculous,” she laughs.

All this ties in perfectly with Margo’s ethos as a producer who started in the noise and industrial scenes. “Pop music as the most extreme it can be,” she says, adding that what drew her to the disparate genre was “how extreme saturation can be used, and how upfront and unforgiving it is”.

Of her credits so far, this applies most obviously to the aforementioned Freak It. “We wanted to make an EDM-pop song that is uncompromising in its use of compression limiting, almost as if it’s completely experimental music.” For Margo, it’s all “a fun challenge — and to still make it catchy and listenable”.

Take her upcoming production work for masked viral sensation horsegiirL: “I realised that what I could add to her harder, cheeky donk tunes was my pop vocal producing background,” she enthuses. “It’s been fun helping to find the threads between those worlds with her, because I’m just as in love with obscure underground dance music as I am the most basic bitch pop”.

Margo’s biggest commercial breakthrough could be right around the corner, though. She recently had “a really good session” with pop megastar Demi Lovato. “She’s really sweet and I hope there’s a song that comes out with this two-step new-school UKG drop that I’m really stoked about,” Margo teases.

Considering the vast array of names that Margo works with, it’s fair to say she switches her technique or style depending on the genre. “One thing that attracted me to being a producer was that I don’t have to feel locked into a specific sound,” she says. “Whereas, with being an artist, there’s pressure to evolve, but in a way that still stays true to the original concept or style of the record…”

Being a producer, then, is freeing. “I don’t want to deal with that,” she says bluntly. “If I want to make a rock record, I want to make a rock record. If I want to make a dubstep record, I want to make a dubstep record.” Hopping between projects has therefore allowed Margo to “go through all of these different phases without any guilt”.

These varying aspects of her artistry have culminated in deBasement, Margo’s electro-punk project with Alli Logout (vocalist of New Orleans post-punk group Special Interest), which started around the time the pair moved to LA. “The rave community is strange and not very gelled, and I was missing great DJs, great systems, great lights… that ’s the thing that keeps me going.” Feeling the same way, they became “a haven for each other” to make and explore that music in a city that “we were still trying to figure out how to exist in”.

Exploration and experimentation have long been key to Margo’s productions — and the same can be said of her vision for the future of pop. “I hope that it continues to surprise people,” she says, describing the genre as traditionally “very forward-thinking.

“Pre-DAW and home studio pop artists and producers were some of the only people to have access to new and expensive technology back then,” she continues, citing David Bowie being responsible for some of the first uses of digital pitch shifting, The Beatles with ADT (Artificial Double Tracking), Kate Bush the Fairlight CMI… “and all the crazy shit that happens on [Michael Jackson’s] ‘Thriller’ that had never existed before”.

In light of the democratisation of music in more recent years – which Margo partly puts down to the rise of streaming – she’s confident about where things could be heading. “I would really love a song that goes up the charts where people are like ‘I did not know something this weird can be this catchy!’”

With Margo XS consistently pushing sonic barriers and breaking new ground, bold new sounds will be infiltrating the mainstream for years to come.

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