‘No Artist Creates Just Because There’s a Screen’: In the Studio With Anyma

It’s a Tuesday evening in May at Nightbird Studios, the recording complex nestled within L.A.’s Sunset Marquis. Within this infamous hotel rock and roller hotel, where Keith Richards once got behind the bar and poured drinks during the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, Anyma is tinkering away on a new album intended to end the current phase of his career.

A space packed with production equipment is certainly like a second home to the artist, but for him this place must also feel relatively mundane, given how much time he’s recently spent at Sphere. During a 12-date residency spanning this past December, January, February and March, the Italian American producer became the first electronic artist to headline the Las Vegas venue.

While already a longtime star of the global underground via his solo work and previously as part of the duo Tale of Us, this high-profile gig naturally pushed the producer to a new level of ubiquity, with his name suddenly alongside fellow Sphere residents including U2, the Eagles, Dead & Company and Phish. When asked how life is different now than it was on Dec. 26, the day before his residency started, he’s forthright.

“Well,” he says in his thick Italian accent, “I’m less stressed.”

But those who’ve witnessed the not casual themes of heaven and hell, creation and destruction, humanity and transhumanism woven into his Sphere show and other previous visual output are right to assume the artist born Matteo Milleri is a deep thinker. Tonight, posted up on the couch in the studio’s dimly lit lounge, his webby tattoos peeking out from the sleeves of his hoodie, he elaborates on how the Sphere experience did, in fact, change him. And in fact, he’d hoped it might.

“I think if I would feel the same, it would not be a success for me,” he offers. “Because I put my ideas out there, so that they reflect back on me once they’ve been absorbed by the world. For me as an artist, it’s very important to feel like I’ve changed, evolved, improved my craft.”

Anyma is talkative, polite and emits a sense of gravitas while talking about his work, altogether seeming older than his 37 years. He began the Anyma (pronounced “ah-nee-ma”) project in 2021, fusing the work with both tech and lofty ideas about humanity, spirituality, technology, the past and the future. This Friday (May 30), Anyma releases The End of Genesys, the third and final LP in a trilogy, following 2023’s Genesys and 2024’s Genesys II. 

This new music, Anyma says, “was scored to the Sphere opera movie, so it was really written with a very big inspiration.” The tens of thousands of people who saw the show witnessed this inspiration in wild and often surreal visuals that depicted scenes of space, verdant forests, deserts, burning cities and a pair of recurring characters — a human man and a chesty cyborg who who meet in various landscapes, with him eventually plugging a heart into her chest, a moment that drew cheers.

For Anyma, the project was a natural extension of his longtime goal of creating something different in the live electronic world. “The reason why I went into the production of the visual experience was because I don’t really feel much from live events,” he says. “Of course, the underground dance stuff is great, because that’s its own thing. I’m talking about the big concerts, the big festivals, the big productions. For me, even with the technology and the budgets available, I just went home with my ears hurting. It’s difficult to even grasp an artist’s perspective when the production is overwhelming.”

His goal was to make a more intentional visual presentation that “you can just basically augment your purpose and your art with it… That was the whole idea behind everything.” In this way, Sphere was simply the most powerful tool for him to express ideas he’d long been considering. (Having a pre-existing visual identity also helped the team save money on the Sphere show’s mighty production costs.)

“Of course I’m happy it ended in Sphere,” he continues, “but it was supposed to exist even on its own on a world tour. I want people to think and to like, feel, you know? Maybe go home the next day and reconnect with a loved one or something, because they were moved.” 

His goal for for The End of Genesys is roughly the same. But while anyone who saw the Sphere show has effectively already heard the album, listening to these 15 tracks in your headphones — with no eye-pummeling visuals or seats shaking in time with the kick — is a different experience. Separated from its corresponding visual identity, the ears better grasp the music’s nuances.

The project includes several marquee collaborations, with the album’s banger of a lead single, “Hypnotized,” featuring vocals from dance icon Ellie Goulding. “Taratata” features previous collaborator and fellow tech enthusiast Grimes, “Human Now” has Empire of the Sun’s always-heady Luke Steele, and other songs recruit 070 Shake, Rezz, Sevdaliza and Yeat.

Anyma’s music has historically existed in the heavy and often cinematic realms of melodic techno, a genre that’s bubbled up in popularity in the broader dance scene over the last few years, a trend that’s partially a function of the success of Anyma and Tale of Us. (The topic of the duo is off limits, although Anyma’s agent, CAA’s Ferry Rais-Shaghaghi, told Billboard in February that “both guys are super-focused on their solo projects right now.”) But via the collabs and song structures, The End Of Genesys often adopts a more pop lean. This was kind of the point.

The previous two Genesys albums came at “a transitional part of my career, when I was still trying to understand how to crack the code with pop, electronic and dance,” says Anyma. And now? “I feel like I did it.”

“It’s the final evolution of the sound,” he says, “with the best artists I know, most of whom are my friends. It’s inspiring that I could connect all my knowledge and influences into a record and make it contemporary and potentially timeless. That’s not up to me, but I think some of this record is really timeless, and that’s what really exciting.”

Balancing all of these factors was tricky he says, “because these days people want very simple things on the dance floor, social media needs to be fast and that’s what’s really resonating with the younger generations.” He instead aspired to make music in the grand tradition of artists like The Chemical Brothers, Daft Punk and Massive Attack who made songs, he says, “that you could kind of vibe and dance to, but you could also sing. It was one cohesive artist statement with an edge of the rave culture behind it.”

The music will serve as material for Anyma’s many upcoming DJ sets, with his summer shows happening largely in Europe. The run includes an eight-week residency at Ibiza’s newest venue [UNVRS], a 15,000 capacity mega-club tricked out with a ton of technology.

He describes these upcoming performances as encompassing two worlds. The first is “DJ curation, longer sets, community and more forward thinking, exciting music… Then the big headline stuff and the bigger shows are more of a spin-off of the last act of Sphere, that aesthetic and those sonics.” He also says some of the new visuals will be AI-driven, with the use of AI currently a major focus of his work.

With all of these huge projects and big ideas, it’s hard to imagine Anyma in Netflix and chill mode, although he says it does happen. He’s based in Ibiza, where he enjoys the quiet of the farmland and the goats and the sea. Vacation for him is staying home, watching TV, listening to music and exercising for at least an hour a day, a habit that techno legend Sven Väth encouraged him to adopt. (“He saw me on tour and was like ‘You look a bit tired,’ and I was like, ‘You look great.’”)

But after the intense demands of Sphere, he says the most straightforward form of relaxation currently on his calendar is “going back to being a normal DJ.”

“This has been years of my life, of thinking, of my philosophy in the show. But creatively I also need to take a break — no artist creates just because there’s a screen. I don’t think I can’t do anything meaningful that way.”