Subtronics

Jesse Kardon — born December 23, 1992, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — is better known as Subtronics, a portmanteau of his two great loves: SUBwoofers and elecTRONICS. The alias is the mission statement. He started on drums as a kid, met GarageBand in middle school, and discovered dubstep in high school — then taught himself production the modern way, grinding through online tutorials until the weird sounds in his head came out of the speakers. His first tracks as Subtronics arrived in 2014, and the wonk has never stopped since.

The legend was built on riddim. From early 2017 through January 2020, Subtronics released five volumes of Now That’s What I Call Riddim, mixtapes that mashed up hundreds of tracks — rarities and exclusives from Skrillex, Excision, and the bass scene’s heaviest hitters, many with spoken intros from the artists themselves. Around the same run came the EPs Impact and Cyclops (2016), Depth Perception and Wook Laser (2018). By the end of the decade he was a festival mainstay with a sound nobody else could imitate: alien basslines, cartoonish sound design, drops that feel like a robot having a breakdown.

“Griztronics” was the breakout. His 2019 collaboration with Michigan’s GRiZ went viral on TikTok and peaked at No. 9 on Billboard’s Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart, landing Kardon at No. 10 on the publication’s Next Big Sound chart that September. The collab run around it reads like a bass-music roll call: Rusko on “Bounce!”, Boogie T on “Senpai”, Zeds Dead on “Bumpy Teeth” — plus work with Marshmello and Rezz. The scene’s elite all wanted a Subtronics linkup, because the producer’s producer had become the weirdo’s weirdo.

Cyclops Recordings is the empire. He founded his own label in 2020, and it quickly became bass music’s most trusted curator — the signees, the compilations, the Cyclops Invasion tours. It is the tastemaker move: instead of waiting for the industry to validate the sound, he built the infrastructure to validate it himself. The Cyclops Army — his fanbase, named for the all-seeing eye that anchors his visuals — is one of EDM’s most devoted followings, the kind that shows up in costume and knows every drop.

The albums took him to the charts. His debut full-length, Fractals (January 2022), hit No. 4 on Billboard’s Dance/Electronic Albums chart and trended globally on X — above K-pop, a genuine shock to the system. The remix companion Antifractals followed, and then came Tesseract (February 16, 2024), his sophomore album, which peaked at No. 5 and launched the Tesseract Arena tour. The two-part Fibonacci project arrived in 2025. Each release pushes the sound design further while keeping the signature intact: nobody mistakes a Subtronics track for anyone else’s.

The live show is the coronation. He has sold out every headline tour since 2018, and in 2023 he inked a national tour deal with Live Nation — the industry formally recognizing what the Army already knew. The festival résumé covers Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo, Ultra Music Festival, and Electric Daisy Carnival Las Vegas. He curates festival-scale events at Red Rocks (the Cyclops Rocks tradition), the Kia Forum, the Tacoma Dome, Hampton Coliseum, and Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, plus his own two-day festival, Cyclops Cove, in Boca Raton, Florida. In 2025 he added a summer DJ residency at Encore Beach Club in Las Vegas — the weirdo, holding down the Strip.

The craft is the engine. Subtronics is famous for his advanced mixing and his relentless release schedule — bootlegs, VIPs, flips, and reworks that keep the catalog alive between albums. He streams his process on Twitch, pulling back the curtain on the sound design for an audience that treats production like a spectator sport. The back-to-back sets with the bass elite are their own chaos: tag-team drops, friendly one-upmanship, the wonk multiplying.

The Cyclops Invasion tours are the movement made physical. Where most DJs tour behind an album cycle, Subtronics tours behind an identity — the Invasion bills stack his label’s signees and bass music’s rising weirdos into package tours that function as traveling showcases for the sound he championed. It is A&R as live entertainment: the fans come for the headliner and leave with five new favorite producers. That pipeline — from his Twitch production streams, where viewers watch tracks get built in real time, to the label, to the tour — is the closed loop that keeps the Cyclops ecosystem self-sustaining.

Offstage, the mythology is disarmingly normal: he is married to fellow producer and dubstep DJ Sonya Broner, better known as Level Up. But the headline is the arc — a kid from Philadelphia who fell in love with subwoofers and electronics, built the strangest sound in EDM, and headlined everything without sanding down a single edge. Previously covers Subtronics because the bass face is mandatory. The Cyclops sees all — the drop is coming.