David Guetta and Marten Hørger Shake Up Dance Music With Men Machine: 'Everyone Was Waiting for Something to Happen' [Q&A]

David Guetta and Marten Hørger join Beatportal’s Zoom room from two different time zones, but the collaborators behind Men Machine are very much on the same page.

The word “exactly” becomes a refrain they both utter throughout our conversation, which feels more like a casual catch-up among friends than an interview unpacking their new joint project and self-titled EP. Yet as they riff off each other, tracing Men Machine’s origins back to their shared influences, mutual artistic vision, and rare, effortless synergy, our call becomes exactly that.

In one breath, Hørger recalls learning that Guetta knew “the same obscure records from like a gazillion years ago,” down to their color. In the next, Guetta likens them to two painters who see the same sunset and miraculously produce the same visual. The pair speaks the same language, so much so that they’ve already begun discussing their second EP – while their first continues to shake up the dance scene after arriving via SPINNIN’ RECORDS on May 15.

The Men Machine EP put an exclamation point on Guetta’s recent performance at Coachella’s Quasar Stage, where Hørger joined him for their project’s world premiere after nearly a year of road-testing and refinement. While the music has since been supported by producers across genres, from Armin van Buuren to The Chainsmokers to WESTEND, their comrades came calling even before the five-set song formally landed.

“I had Swedish House Mafia asking me for it. It's interesting to see so many different people [supporting it], and what this shows is that everyone was waiting for something to happen. We are not saying it's us, but we're saying it might be,” Guetta says with a laugh.

The EP is Guetta and Hørger like you’ve never heard them before, and that’s by design. On it, they draw from the electroclash movement of the ‘90s and Kraftwerk’s raw analog sound, crafting a high-powered spinoff flexible enough to work across both the underground and mainstage, and born from their feeling that dance music deserved a jolt. 

“You can feel that the music is a little stuck right now and needs new inspiration,” Guetta tells Beatportal.

In a candid conversation, the producers break down how the project is resonating, their creative motivations, and what's next for their new movement, steadily gaining momentum.

The EP has gotten such a strong response. What has the reception been like for both of you?

Hørger: It's been nothing short of amazing; very emotional. One of the reasons we all get into music is to do awesome stuff with awesome people, and that's exactly what we've been doing nonstop. Working with friends is the best thing in the world. I'm very happy.

Guetta: Since the EP came out, the feedback I’ve gotten from the most influential DJs on the planet, who are texting to say, ‘Oh my God, this is so cool. This is so inspiring,' makes me very happy.

It was the same when I saw that we influenced [people] with Future Rave. We influenced so many people – some of them will admit it, and some of them won't, but I know what I'm hearing, and I can already tell that what we are doing right now is going to have an impact. I think this is probably what makes dance music a scene: Everyone needs to bring a little brick to create the house, and we all feed from each other.

I’m in a bit of a different position than Marten is – he’s all about club culture, so it's always pleasant when it works in the scene. Because I've been doing this for so long, I’m always trying to balance pop success with let’s say cultural relevance, and it's very difficult. 

It's nice for me to think I can still have hits but still be culturally relevant. That's the reason I'm doing this. I'm not trying to get more shows. I'm not trying to make money with the streams. That’s not what this is about.

So, it's very exciting, and it's also amazing to do this with Marten because he is like me. He is a very positive person, and we make very serious dark music, but we always laugh.

Did this project come from feeling that the dominant sounds in dance music were stagnating?

Hørger: It felt like it needed to be done, and I was very scared about it. David was the one who kept convincing me, ‘It has to be bold. It has to be wild.’ Then, we started playing the songs, and he was right.

Guetta: At the beginning, we were just going to make one record together. We started to speak about our musical culture and what we miss – the sensation we were feeling when we were younger – and we realized we had so much in common. We were like, ‘We should just do it if we miss it.’

When it's right is when you make music you want to play. When you say, ‘I wish I could play this, but no one is doing it.' Well then, let's do it ourselves.

A lot of people who go see David Guetta want to hear “Titanium” and “Sexy Bitch,” so when I play underground music in my set, and it's working, that’s how I know this can become a movement. I don't want to sound negative, but you can feel that [dance] music is a little stuck right now and needs new inspiration, and I think this is what happened.

Hørger: That was one of the coolest things for me: to see, yes, it works in David's set. Also, now that it's been out for four days, we’ve been getting so much support from so many big names across all the genres. Usually, if I do a house record, all the house DJs play it, but it never happens that I make a record and like literally every DJ on the planet, from all different genres, is supporting.

Guetta: I don't remember all of them, but we saw videos of Anyma, Armin van Buuren.

Hørger: The Chainsmokers, WESTEND.

Guetta: I had Swedish House Mafia asking me for it. It's interesting to see so many different people [supporting it], and what this shows is that everyone was waiting for something to happen. We are not saying it's us, but we're saying it might be. [Laughs].

Marten, you said you were nervous about the whole thing. What were your hesitations?

Hørger: When we first started working on [Men Machine], there was no master plan. It came from us just hanging out, talking about life, and talking about music. We sat down and made music, and then it started to turn into something. It was so far out and so wild and so powerful that we thought this has to be its own project, kind of like a safe space for the both of us where we can push even further out.

Guetta: It's funny because everyone is different in how they approach music. For example, I was talking to Sia, and I've done so many records with her. We love working together, and we were talking about starting a bigger project together. I said, ‘We need to speak about music,’ and she told me, ‘David, the conversation I hate the most is talking about music. I'm happy to speak about life, but music, we go to studio, and we make it. It just happens. I don’t want to speak about it.’

Marten and me, we are different people. We intellectualize the music a lot, so we spend more time discussing what it should sound like, what it refers to culturally, what the type of emotion we want to give means. We speak a lot about the concept.

Hørger: There’s not many people I can do this with. Hardly anyone in the world understands these references like David does, and that's where it became clear to the both of us that it had to be a joint project because we ended up talking about the same obscure records from like a gazillion years ago, and he exactly knew them. He knew the color. That kind of situation never happens.

Guetta: If I'm trying to define what it is to be an artist, it's probably to have something to say that is not being said or to look at the world in a certain way. If you are a painter and you paint what you see with your eyes, maybe you see something different, even if you look at the same sunset. The fact that we could look at music and see the same thing was very impressive. I think we were both like, ‘Oh, wow, okay. I didn't know you were also in that vibe.’

David, given your stature and influence, when dance music starts to feel a little stuck, do you feel a responsibility to step in and introduce something fresh?

Guetta: Every time someone comes with something fresh, I get excited. I also want to be challenged. I love when I'm listening to something like, ‘How did they do that? I don't know.’ It takes me time to understand technically how they did it, and then I'm like, ‘Wow.’ I love when this happens, and when this doesn't happen for a long time, I'm bored as a DJ and as a producer.

I totally understand that people also have to do what works. It was Afro House for a few years, and we started this project more than a year ago. Now, you have an exciting movement around Cloonee and Prospa and Mau P, but there was a moment like two years ago where we just had Afro House, and we were like, ‘We have nothing against Afro House, but someone needs to come with something else.’

So that's it. It's a bit provocative, but it's also true that when we met, we were like, ‘What is the furthest musical concept from Afro House?'

Both of us felt like there was something missing, so we created it.

Kraftwerk’s The Man-Machine turned 48 yesterday. Why did you choose to reference that album specifically in the name of your project?

Guetta: We were looking for a name, and it felt right. At the time of disco, they came in pretending not to know how to play music, playing with two fingers and no groove, letting the machines work and almost acting like machines themselves. I think it's cooler at the time of AI that now, while machines are trying to sound human, we prefer to be humans trying to sound like machines.

Hørger: Once we had the name, we realized it represents us very well. There's two sides: the human side – friendship, emotion, and community – and then there's the machine side: precision engineering, the synthesizers we love, and the machines we work with so much.

What comes next after the EP?

Guetta: We were already talking this morning about the second one.

We’ve got to get some joint shows too.

Guetta: It would be a lot of fun to do a special Men Machine show. It’s like we’re bringing back the rave – that’s what it is.

Hørger: I think what you just said was great. It's a project to bring back the rave.