Animals
Martijn Garritsen was eight years old when he watched Tiësto perform at the 2004 Athens Summer Olympics and decided that was what he wanted to do. Nine years later he was doing it. Animals was released on June 17, 2013, on Spinnin’ Records. Garritsen, who records as Martin Garrix, had just turned seventeen. He wrote and produced the track entirely alone. The drop is built on an interpretation of Busta Rhymes’ “What It Is,” running at exactly 128 beats per minute. Before its official release the track circulated anonymously, fueling widespread speculation about who had made it. When the answer turned out to be a teenager from Amstelveen, North Holland, the story became as much a part of the song as the music itself.
The commercial performance was extraordinary. Animals hit number one in the United Kingdom, making Garrix the youngest Dutch artist ever to top the UK Singles Chart, and became the first instrumental to do so since Mr. Oizo’s “Flat Beat” in April 1999. (That distinction is arguable: the single edit contains brief spoken phrases.) It reached number one in Belgium and French-speaking Switzerland, number 21 on the Billboard Hot 100, and number one on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Songs chart. It became the first instrumental to crack the Billboard Hot 100 top 40 since Kenny G’s “Auld Lang Syne (The Millennium Mix).” Garrix became the youngest producer in history to reach number one on Beatport. The MTV Europe Music Award for Best Song followed. The Grammy nomination for Best Dance Recording followed. The YouTube video has since passed 1.6 billion views.
"I think it's the melody. It gets stuck in your head. I've heard the track a million times, so I'm kind of tired of it. But I think that's one of the reasons why the track is charting so well."
One Curious World does not usually feature music this commercially successful. The platform exists to surface what algorithms miss, and Animals is not that song. It is one of the most-heard electronic tracks of the last decade. The reason it is here is different: it is a document of something that almost never happens, a seventeen-year-old making something alone in his bedroom that changes the trajectory of a genre. Garrix has since been ranked number one on DJ Mag’s Top 100 DJs list five times, in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2022, and 2024. The song has been on Beatport’s Top 100 Big Room chart continuously since its release date. What he understood at seventeen, working alone, that a melody of sufficient insistence can defeat any amount of context, remains the most useful single lesson in electronic music production. Animals is the proof.