There are duos that form out of strategy, and then there are those that form out of inevitability. MXGPU, the Lisbon-born project of two artists who’d each carved their own paths before finding each other, belongs firmly in the second category. With their debut album Sudden Light and three remix packages behind them, their own Discotexas label beneath their feet, and a 2026 that includes Primavera Sound Porto and a first-ever Tomorrowland appearance on the horizon, the duo has quietly built something rare: a world that is entirely their own.
In this interview, they talk about creative freedom, musical darwinism, and what it really takes to build something that endures.
You both had well-established solo careers before officially joining forces as MXGPU. What was the moment you realized this collaboration was something that needed its own identity, its own name?
It just happened naturally. We’re somehow doing music everyday, doing our first joint shows and the way everything was connecting between us and the audience just made us realise that it was definitely something bigger than the sum of its parts.
Your roots are in Lisbon, a city with a very distinct musical culture. How much of that environment actually makes it into your music, consciously or not?
Definitely our day by day environment reflects in what we do. Lisbon is a cultural melting pot at its peak and that comes with this super rich cultural landscape. There are rays of light, melancholia, nostalgia and freedom in our music, also traces of Lisbon. We just let all of this pour into our music without rationalizing, really.
Your album “Sudden Light” feels like a very cohesive emotional statement. When you were building it, were you thinking about it as an album from the start, or did the thread reveal itself as the tracks came together?
It started with just being at the studio without overthinking it. Being free of concepts can be a very interesting fuel to creativity. As we kept going at it, influenced also by a lot of live shows we were playing at the time, made us get to a place where we were having to deal with more than a hundred songs. From there we just looked into everything and started realising that a first big statement as MXGPU could be an album. Albums have the power to tell you a full story, to give you the time to take a journey from one point to another, so we just let ourselves go through that journey and the album became real.
You brought in collaborators like Malou for certain tracks. How do you decide when a song needs another voice, and when it should stay just the two of you?
We weren’t really looking actively for collaborations on Sudden Light, but the session with Malou happened in such a spontaneous way, where everything just clicked very naturally. We ended up working on two songs together: “find u”, where we co-wrote the vocals and lyrics, and “ease”, which was already in progress at the time and turned into a duet. The world needs more duets!
You’ve now put together three remix packages around “Sudden Light”, with artists taking very different approaches to your music. How did you choose the remixers and did you give them some creative guidance or were they free to interpret them?
We were very honoured with everyone who joined us on the remixes. This three-part reinterpretation of Sudden Light is made by people who we really admire and became friends with, people we connected through Sudden Light. There was no creative guidance. We simply knew that all these artists would just know what to do.
Is there a remix in this whole series that genuinely caught you off guard in the best possible way?
We can honestly say everyone surprised us in their own way. There were quite a few surprise remixes already in the works without us even knowing about it. Friends who just came back to us with these beautiful and super creative interpretations of our music.
One that really caught us off guard was DJ Ride. He surprised us with this crazy good DnB remix of “ease” that completely blew our minds the first time we played it. It’s such a gem, and honestly something that only he could have pulled off.
Discotexas has been the home for this whole project, and running your own label gives you a kind of creative freedom most artists don’t have but it also means you’re wearing a lot of hats. What’s the side of label life that nobody really talks about, and has there ever been a moment where you questioned whether it was worth the extra weight on top of everything else you’re doing?
To have a home is everything. We’ve become so used to wearing all these hats that we can’t really imagine it any other way. For us, it represents a commitment to the dream of creating the best possible place for things to happen, a ground where you can build the future, a space where our dreams can come true and where the full story can be told.
Everything about it makes it an ongoing, unfinished, full-time dream. So maybe the thing nobody really talks about is how deeply you need to feel it and live it, completely, to the core.
Your sound sits in this interesting space between emotional vulnerability and pure dancefloor energy. Could you walk us through what a typical writing session looks like for you two. Is there a clear division of roles in the studio, or is it more fluid than that?
The richness of this process is in not having limits and role divisions. The process of creating our music is just an ongoing thing where we try to bring new ideas every day, and when those ideas click with the two of us we just let ourselves go in the studio. We can be working on a melody in the morning and writing the first lyrics a couple of minutes later, recording synths and tweaking everything until we feel it’s working. So no such thing as “typical writing session”. But sometimes ideas need to simmer in the drawer for months, they will find their way onto the top of the other person’s pile. A little musical darwinism perhaps.
If someone came to you tomorrow, for example two friends with a shared musical vision, thinking about not just starting a project together but potentially building a label around it… What’s the one thing you wish someone had told you at the very beginning that would have saved you a lot of time, energy, or heartache?
That you need time and that you can’t rush it.
It takes patience, and you need to love what you do so much that you’re able to live with expectations not always being met, while still staying open to the good surprises that appear along the way.
It’s also important to keep trying to answer The Question: why are you doing this?. You don’t need a big philosophical explanation, but inside you need to know. That inner reason is what keeps you going through everything else.
As you look at 2026, what´s on the horizon in terms of touring and new music either as duo or solo projects?
2026 is shaping up really well, despite the impending doom. We’re doing some very special shows, one later in the year that will be announced soon. We’re also preparing something really unique for Primavera Sound Porto and we’ll be playing Tomorrowland for the first time, which we’re very excited about.
We already had the chance to play in Rio de Janeiro during Carnaval with Mayan Warrior, which was an amazing experience, and there’s still a lot more to unveil.
Music-wise, it’s also going to be a very busy year. We have a lot of new music coming out over the next few months, so we’re really excited to start sharing all of that. Given the world climate, an escape through music will be even more important.