The cult status Drain Gang commands online has created an inscrutable, near-mythical air around its members. So I’m surprised that when I meet one of the crew’s leaders, Thaiboy Digital, he looks exactly like I was expecting, dressed in his signature preppy Swedish style with a splash of designer: red Ralph Lauren polo, blue Evisu jeans, and bright yellow Christian Louboutin sneakers, the ones covered in studs. We’re in Thonglor, an upscale neighborhood in Bangkok, but the way he talks about it, it might as well be his hometown of Stockholm, minus the weather. His friends Bladee and Yung Lean were just here, and he recently saw producer Gud whiz past on a bike without knowing he was in town.
I’m sitting across from him at a table at The Commons, a multi-story complex of trendy food stalls and bars with a sprawling outdoor seating area in the shade, dotted with greenery and fans to combat the sweltering heat. A playlist of inoffensive music wafts out the speakers, and at a specialty coffee shop, Thaiboy orders the house blend from Chiang Rai. I follow his lead.
Thanapat Bunleang—Nino to his friends—was born in Khon Kaen, Thailand, and moved to Stockholm when he turned 9. But once his mother’s work visa expired and he turned 18, he was not granted permanent residence, leading to his official deportation in 2015. Now, Bangkok is where Thaiboy Digital calls home. And despite being 5,000 miles away from the Drain Gang hub, he has remained active, releasing three full-length solo projects and multiple EPs and loosies. Lately, he’s been moonlighting as DJ Billybool, his Swedish-language Eurodance project, which has become an incubator for some of the most inspired and personal work of his career.
“I was so lost,” Thaiboy says, looking back on those first years in the city after his deportation. “I don’t think I valued my life in the way I do now with my family. Everything had been taken away from me, so why should I care?” It was a time of heavy partying, missing home, and hanging around the wrong crowd. “It was trapped out,” he adds. “Whenever the guys were here, it was dope. We’d record, and it was productive, but as soon as they’d leave, it was back in the trenches.”
Once Thaiboy began experiencing high-energy Thai party music on sweaty dancefloors, it rekindled his love for dance music and sparked connections between his Thai and Swedish upbringing, leading to his dark and trancey new EDM album Paradise, out in May. “Other than all the lessons I learned, it was the music that I took from my dark ages,” he says.