A Chat with Joshua Milu (15.07.26)
Joshua Milú is a producer, vocalist, and multidisciplinary creative. We caught up with Joshua Milú after the release of his latest EP, Sucito: A Home.
OSR: Sucito: A Home is the first chapter in a larger ongoing series. What inspired you to create the Sucito project, and what does the name represent to you personally?
Milu: The inspiration came from my lived experiences and a need to highlight them in today’s musical climate. I moved from Stockholm, Sweden, to London in 2022 to study vocals at the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance (ICMP). At the time, I had been working as a youth worker for six years and felt that I needed to explore other careers as well. So I decided to get a part-time job as a cleaner for a London-based cleaning company. While working, I started to reflect on how little we hear about normal stories from ordinary people in music and media in general. Songs back in the day would often reflect the rhythm and the routines of the people. The name “Sucito” means the little dirty one in Spanish and has two meanings: the first is directly tied to how I would describe myself after a 10-hour-long cleaning shift, and the second meaning is how I describe dancing at queer club nights.
OSR: The EP explores themes of queer identity, working-class life, and belonging. Was there a particular moment in your life that made you realise these stories needed to be at the centre of your music?
Milu: Juggling studies, work, and identity was hard, and the cleaning job was very demanding on my body and mind. During my 10-hour shift as a cleaner, I resorted to music to motivate me. My taste in music is eclectic, and I find something I like in every genre. However, I started to notice that music released from the mid 2000s onward often lacked the working-class experience. But when I listened to old salsa songs, blues, jazz, hip-hop, or stuff from the 70s, they often had songs for and by the working class. I also saw that the queer perspective was underrepresented. So this Idea of crafting an EP series where the working class and the queer experience would be front and centre, to give the voice back to the community that I love and is a part of.
OSR: You’ve described the club as a place of education rather than simply escapism. How did London’s nightlife scene help shape your identity, both as an artist and as a person?
Milu: My final project during my master’s was about how the club culture shaped my queerness and how that influenced my music, so I have literally written a whole essay about it. To make a long story short, clubbing has never been about getting drunk and hooking up with someone for me. The centre has always been a place to express myself through dancing. However, when I moved to London, I didn’t have any friends, so I had to find ways to entertain myself, and it gave me a sense of freedom. I could get to know a new version of myself. Going clubbing was a way to meet new people, discover new sounds and expressions, which later influenced my music.
OSR: Your music balances introspective songwriting with dancefloor-focused production. How do you approach merging deeply personal narratives with sounds designed to make people move?
Milu: I do it by translating my emotions and movement into sound, because I am not off my face when I go out, I try to remember how a movement feels, and then when I am making, for example when I made the bass line for ‘Mayhem’, I had both a old school house song as a reference track but also the memory how I moved to it in the club. By combining those two references, I could make a song that would represent me and the way I feel correctly.
OSR: Tracks like ‘Mayhem’ and ‘Oatmeal’ draw from your experiences navigating university, work, and financial precarity. How important is it for you to represent working-class realities within contemporary electronic music?
Milu: Extremely important. For centuries, the ordinary person had songs written about them, for them and by them, but recently I feel like it has been less and less focused on stories for and by ordinary people. I am a huge fan of movies like Moonlight and Fences, because they depict normal people going through normal problems. The complexities of being a human are something that I love to highlight, but to make it in a way so that people can dance to it.
OSR: Sonically, the EP takes influence from artists like Kaytranada, Channel Tres, and The Blaze. Beyond those artists, what sounds, scenes, or cultural influences helped shape the project?
Milu: A lot of different songs and musical styles; I am quite an eclectic person. I’d say salsa, cumbia, reggaeton, disco, amapiano and house. Making music for me is a therapeutic act, which means that it takes a long time to research and explore the sounds and textures. So I went through different eras; in those different eras, I went to different kinds of parties and club nights, which influenced me differently.
OSR: The title track, ‘A Home’ feels like the emotional heart of the EP. What was the creative process behind that song, and what did collaborating with Roselyn Mugabe bring to the track?
Milu: ‘A Home’ holds a special place in my heart. When I made the first version of that song, Roselyn and I studied at ICMP together. During a recording and writing session, she came up with the chorus, which resonated greatly with me, because she was able to channel my yearning for acceptance into lyrics and melody. However, it took me about a year to get to the version we hear on the EP, because I had to live life and understand my queerness on a deeper level. After several attempts, I asked Yasmin Marion, a London songwriter, to help me with the verses. Her contribution to the song was immense, and I proceeded to record the verses on the finalised version.
OSR: As a producer, vocalist, songwriter, and multidisciplinary artist, how do those different creative roles influence one another when you’re building a project like Sucito: A Home?
Milu: Wearing different hats at the same time is quite difficult, which is why it takes so long to produce a project like an EP or an album. It is a skill I have cultivated out of necessity, not from actual desire. In the future, I’d love to collaborate more with others, because making a project 100% by yourself is hard, and getting influenced by other people’s point of view, experiences and creativity makes a project of mine reach its highest potential.
OSR: Inclusive nightlife spaces and grassroots organisers play an important role in the EP’s story. What impact do you think these communities have on the future of electronic music and queer culture?
Milu: Inclusive nightlife spaces and grassroots organisers are the past, present and future. Despite what the big tech companies, the streaming services and the AI hype people say, a music scene is nothing without its people. People create movements by listening, dancing and organising themselves. It is essential that we support London-based event organisers such as artbeyondtheshell, Altverse and Popola_uk, because they are the ones that put up-and-coming DJs and artists at the forefront. They are welcoming towards new creatives (not just artists and DJs), but the people who work in the background, too. They are also working for people to socialise, coming up with new, exciting concepts for people to find new friends. When we have a loneliness epidemic, we need forces that bring people together.
OSR: Sucito: A Home leaves listeners wanting more. Looking ahead, what can fans expect from future instalments of the Sucito series, both musically and thematically?
Milu: More energy, more flower power and more experimental sounds. I am currently working on the second instalment in the series, and it’s going to be a project where I go back to my production roots, which is Jersey/Baltimore Club music. I’ll also have a GQOM song in there as well. I’d love to write a poetry compilation and collaborate with different grassroots organisations that work with and for working-class and queer people.
Many thanks to Joshua Milu for speaking with us. Find out more about Joshua Milu on his Instagram, YouTube, and Spotify.
