Hungarian artist making waves in ‘Phonk’ music at age 15

July 31, 2023

BUDAPEST, Hungary — He’s only 15 years old, but Hungarian artist Nateki’s music has been heard by more people than the number that live in his Central European home country on Spotify alone.

His latest single, “Been a Good Run,” is a celebration of what was a very good 2022 for the high school sophomore, and a nod to what he hopes will be a very good 2023.

“Is more like a thank you,” Nateki said. “In 2022 was when my music career started going big so that was my New Year’s Eve song where I post something more relaxing than my usual aggressive, more house style. The main inspiration is this is a song that I personally can fall asleep to if I'm tired enough. It’s something you can be nostalgic to. The cover artist that I hired also tried to be more nostalgic with the design.”

Nateki said he’s been doing professional production for two and a half years and he’s been interested in music for most of his life.

He started posting music in 2021 and created his big hit, a song called “Midnight” in early 2022.

That song has been heard in different forms almost 175 million times since its release. It’s been seen another 2.5 million times on Youtube.

“Midnight was released last year in February and it got popular in May,” Nateki said. “At first I was like this is surreal and most likely it’s going to die out, but when I saw the numbers increasing I was thinking it would have a couple of bumps, but when it stayed high, I kept expecting it to die out never actually thinking it would stay. I kept waiting for it to die out and it’s been half a year and I realized this isn’t really going down.”

Nateki works in the drift phonk genre, an electronic sound created on the computer.

“It’s still a very new genre, not many people know the name except for maybe some in my generation, but it’s still an up and coming genre,” Nateki said. “The whole genre is based around synthesized cow bells being a sone of the main melody standpoints and it being distorted and very aggressive.”

Nateki said “Been a Good Run” is created in that phone genre, but it’s not as aggressive as some of his previous music.

And while the track includes people speaking and singing in the background, the words the people saying are not legible and not important to the music itself.

“The words don’t really mean anything, they’re more filler samples because without them the song sounds pretty empty and there’s nothing to it,” Nateki said. “The song is sort of directed at me. In the beginning of 2022 I had no actual listeners, no fans and by the end of it I had a lot of people anticipating my new release. And in ‘Been a Good Run’ I'm trying to imply that this year was a really good run, really good year just overall. If I look back at it, I'm sure I’ll look back and say oh man this was one hell of a journey and I don’t regret it at all.”