Fred Again is on the move. He’s performing against the stunning backdrop of Lake Vouliagmeni in Athens. He’s cruising through downtown Copenhagen on a barge. He’s turning up to play – well, quite by accident! – for the shocked patrons of an ordinary gastro pub in rural Somerset. Professionally captured and skilfully reproduced, all of these moments are on the Instagram grid of Fred Again (real name Frederick Gibson), the ubiquitous 31-year-old DJ and producer who is both one of British dance music’s biggest social media superstars and one of its most controversial.

Gibson makes polite, emotional dance music on the border between club and chart for a broad audience that has been stereotyped, at least domestically, as heterosexual, stooge and homogenous newcomers to modern house music. But with his new album Ten dayshe is forging a harder streak. The informal iPhone Notes app screenshots that usually announce his tour dates now show the names of huge US arenas. His 2022 online DJ set, Boiler Room, has 38 million views on YouTube. In June this year, he sold out a 77,500-capacity Los Angeles sports stadium. He has shut down Coachella, and it’s not unlikely that he will soon headline Glastonbury. For a young British DJ, the scale and ambition of his recent live spectacles has put him on a trajectory of success that very few others can boast.

But how? Almost two years ago, I saw an early live show of Fred Again at a sold-out venue in Manchester. At that point, Gibson was just transitioning from backroom beatmaker – he was involved in a third of all the UK number one singles of 2019 – to front-of-house musician, and his first release as Fred Again came out in 2021.

The pandemic has helped with that. Not only the silence of isolation, which gave Gibson the space to refine his Instagram and TikTok style that earns him high levels of engagement from his followers, but also the emotional turmoil of lockdown itself: His 2021 hit “Marea (We’ve Lost Dancing)” consists of snippets from a FaceTime conversation he had with fellow DJ The Blessed Madonna about how Covid eased the closure of nightclubs, transforming them into languishing and meditative electronic dance music.

This style – combining personal voice messages and internet junk into house tracks – was the anchor of his diary Real life album trilogy released in 2021 and 2022. At the Manchester show, Gibson – a personable and understated presence in his now-signature oversized T-shirt and sweatpants – mixed beats onstage in front of projections of spontaneous lockdown selfies. Couples in pristine white Carhartts kissed, guys held their mates: who could not be seduced by this defiant, if sentimental, celebration of music once again liberated into collective public spaces?

Then came the controversy. The excitement over Oasis’ reunion can be understood as nostalgia for a culture that could still produce artists who resembled the social background of the majority of people, and in which second-generation pop stars of Irish immigrants who grew up in council housing could attract huge audiences for their (at least initially) confrontational and violent art. In the summer of 2023, Fred Gibson’s elite aristocratic background burst loudly across social media and in major newspapers. (“Fred Again fans stunned to learn the DJ has VERY posh relatives and went to the same fancy £45,000 school as Kate Middleton,” headlined one Daily Mail headline.) Gibson – who has not spoken officially about his upbringing – was educated at Marlborough College. Both of his parents are members of the British nobility. Thanks to a handy Notting Hill connection with Gibson’s aunt, he was closely mentored by producer Brian Eno.

Suddenly, Gibson’s shy nickname “little old me” looked like an exercise in concealing his Tatler origins. This came after the pandemic turned on the lights of a sector riven by precarious insecurity at the grassroots and globetrotting excess at the top, and at a moment when British dance music was embracing its roots in black, queer and poor communities.

Not that this has slowed down the Fred brand. His performance at Glastonbury 2023 became one of the most talked about performances of the year. Not because of a standout sing-along track or one of the festival’s many political sermons, but because – as the sun set behind a packed Other Stage in front of a visibly grateful and impressed artist – he created a moment.

Fred Again, Gibson’s label head at Atlantic explained last year, “has built an incredible relationship with his fan base through exciting, unexpected moments,” and described his team as “obsessed with having moments that generate vitality and bring more people into his orbit.” When Gibson announced his new album Ten dayshe explained in an Instagram post that, in typical Fred Again fashion, can be read as both a personal post and a press release: “There have been a lot of big, crazy moments in the last year, but at the end of the day, they’re all really small, quiet, intimate moments.” The moments make the man, and all of this in a language that is persistently modest, compulsively informal, and probably a little dumber than a Marlborough education should convey.

The first sounds you hear on Ten days is a short collage of found sounds: a field recording of friends singing drunk; a fragment of a spoken word piece; a birthday voice message to Fred (presumably from his 30th birthday). This introduces “Adore U,” last year’s single with Nigerian-British artist Obongjayar and one of Gibson’s finest pieces. The vocal sample – Obongjayar’s distinctive near-falsetto at its most velvety – is jolted by warm synth pads that introduce a straightforward house beat. Its mood – romantic, optimistic – is a red herring for an album that’s downbeat and introspective.

When mastered, that mood can be powerful. Take, for example, “Just Stand There,” a track based on an original spoken-word piece by Northern Irish singer-songwriter Soak. Her plain Derry dialect provides a snapshot of an amorous moment, a one-bedroom apartment that now “feels like a Coliseum.” Vivid and specific, the piece is as close to the core as the album gets. But as with much of Fred Again’s work, the producer’s emotional cues are blunt and obvious. His range is like one of those plastic HappyOrNot customer service prompts with smiley faces—are you having a good, mediocre, or bad time? Gibson’s solemn piano or his more cheery signs of relaxation will surely tell you.

With the exception of “Glow,” a workout of stadium pyrotechnics produced in collaboration with veterans Skrillex and Four Tet and 26-year-old Duskus, Ten days fixates itself within the sound template that is given to it by Real life albums and gently deviated from the dubious collaboration with Brian Eno last year, Secret life. Like Ed Sheeran, for whom Gibson has produced and written, Fred Again’s everybro persona stubbornly resists the ideology of eras in which pop stars reinvent their identity and sound with each new installment; it shies away from taking risks.

At first glance, this is the riskiest idea Ten days is “Where Will I Be.” It’s an outlier, as it’s a reworking of Emmylou Harris’ 1995 country song of the same name. This is the year of the country-pop crossover, led by Beyoncé’s Cowboy Cartera smart and ambitious attempt to underscore the foundational role of black Americans in the creation of country music, a surprisingly experimental mainstream exercise in counterhistory. But here, Harris’ sampled voice fights for oxygen against swathes of sonic mulch, while Gibson simply mines the track for a simplistic catharsis that dampens rather than amplifies the song’s power. Watch out, Nashville, you may be in for a social media moment.

In a sensitive article for the FaceClive Martin placed Fred Again in a lineage of musical anomalies whose era-specific success—artists like Phil Collins, Moby, Mötley Crüe or Korn—could at least reveal important truths about the specific time in which they appeared. Gibson does that. When Tim Walz was announced as the Democratic vice presidential nominee, it was with an uplifting social media video meant to capture the moment Kamala Harris called the governor of Minnesota to offer him the job. Increasingly, we are childishly invited to share in intimate experiences—repackaged as viral moments—of people who are elected parliamentarians on their way to power. Fred Again’s success is in being fluent in the language of broad-based digital intimacy.

Moreover, the story of Fred Again sounds grim about who has had the time and freedom to experiment creatively over the past 14 years. As Britain’s cultural industries become more unequal and Fred Gibson’s music becomes ever more insistent on a collective experience, its appeal recalls an aristocratic slogan from the beginning of the last decade: We’re all in the same boat. Or at least for a moment.

Fred Again’s “Ten Days” is now released by Atlantic

(See also: The Sabrina Carpenter Effect)