As Artemas’ I Like The Way You Kiss Me makes an impact in TikTok's year-end report, here's a chance to revisit our Hitmakers feature on the Top 3 single...
After taking off on TikTok in March this year, Artemas’ I Like The Way You Kiss Me has since racked up over 500 million streams on Spotify and hit No.3 in the UK. Here, producer and instrumentalist Toby Daintree takes us behind the scenes on how the alt-pop smash was created, and talks nursery rhymes, why you should never plan to go viral and last minute recordings while waiting for a taxi...
INTERVIEW: Miranda Bardsley PHOTO: Sophie Scott
The week that we made I Like The Way You Kiss Me was the best writing experience I’ve ever had, it was magical.
I met Artemas two-and-a-half years ago when I joined his band and we became friends. I was studying jazz guitar at Guildhall [School Of Music & Drama] at the time and Artemas was in this sort of limbo space where he’d signed his publishing deal, done his first mixtape and some of his tracks had done well. We started making this bedroom pop, Dominic Fike-inspired kind of stuff before we moved into darker R&B.
We were going to start a band, but one of Artemas’ songs popped off from his own project, so we decided to work on that together, writing everyday. I was a barista at the time, so I’d work from around 6:30am to 12:30pm then go to the studio, and we’d do that five or six times a week, it was intense! But also really exciting, we knew there was a vibe between us and it was so easy and fun. After a while, a few songs went off on TikTok and did quite well, like If U Think I’m Pretty [2023], which inspired the Pretty mixtape.
I Like The Way You Kiss Me came about when we were in LA working with Kevin White and Jesse Finkelstein, which was crazy. Jesse is amazing, he’s so nice and makes Artemas feel so at ease, and Kev is so efficient that it makes the whole session so easy.
During the week, we did about two songs a day, and I Like The Way You Kiss Me happened on the third. We had this beat which was a totally different vibe to start with – it was in half time – but we started listening to Eyedress and tracks like Mareaux’s The Perfect Girl, and we went for the darkwake kind of sound.
With me and Artemas, it’s commonly me on a guitar or synth doing chords or a riff, and him mumbling a melody. That’s how it was with this, I remember playing around with chords, we got the hook in place, did those double-time drums and as soon as we made the percussive, high-end bass, the vibe of the track was there.
I often think nursery rhymes have the best melodies, they’re simple and easy to remember – which is like I Like The Way You Kiss Me, it doesn’t have any extraneous elements you don’t need.
When it came to recording it, it was also so quick. Artemas never wants to put a vocal down more than once – the quality of the vocal you get is what you’ve got to deal with! I’m really drawn to that kind of philosophy of working quickly. If you overthink the first take, you’ll overthink the whole thing and if you’re not quick about something, it probably won’t happen.
We also recorded the melody two semitones down because we pitched up his vocals on the track. Initially we did that on the app CapCut to tease it on TikTok, but when people started hearing it in that pitch and tempo, we didn’t want to mess with what they were liking, so we pitched up the actual project in Ableton.
It was the track’s intro that went off. It’s crazy, before the hook, Artemas does this little mumble, which we did right at the end of the day. We were so tired and just waiting for our Uber from Kev’s studio when I said to Artemas, ‘You should put a little mumble in the intro.’ The mic was brought over to him on the sofa and he did it, it was the least thought out thing and it’s so funny that it blew up! I think that kind of nonchalance is so powerful in the track.
We finished it all in about three days. There was a different bridge we changed and we spent ages on the track’s instrumental bit, but the important things stayed the same and we only made little changes afterwards. Mixing is more of an emotional thing anyway, all the decisions at that point weren’t that technical.
It was in another session that we realised I Like The Way You Kiss Me was blowing up. It’s so funny because, at first, I wasn’t even that into the song. I thought it was good, but I didn’t think it was cool, even though not everything has to be cool... [Laughs].
As I heard it more I started to think it was and I remember driving around LA one night thinking it was a vibe. I was probably just being cynical, because now I’m like, ‘Damn, this is good!’ I think what people also like about Artemas is that he’s earnest in everything he does, he’s open to different things and he takes risks.
I don’t think we would have done anywhere near as well as we did without having a platform like TikTok, but we never think about it while writing. If you do, you end up creating pastiches of what you think might work. Every time we’ve had something that’s done well, we’ve had a period of time where we’ve been writing pastiches of the same kind of track and they’ve not been that good. When you get bored of trying to do that, that’s when you end up making something good – and it’s that kind of effortlessness in I Like The Way You Kiss Me which works.
This song has made me aware of not overthinking. It was the perfect storm of us trusting ourselves and going with our guts, and it’s amazing what happened. But for me? I’m the same musician as I was, and making music is still, genuinely, the only thing I like doing. So nothing has really changed...
