Leftfield pop musician Jai Paul is celebrating ten years since his single “BTSTU” with a previously unheard track, “Super Salamander”, hosted on a website that recreates his old MySpace page, no less.
The British producer took to social media earlier today (April 21) with a link to the website btstu.com. “It’s 10 years today since i put out my first single… it’s been a bit of a mad one still…,” he wrote, “so just wanted 2 do something fun n say thank u to everyone who’s been down from the start.”
The website leads to a recreation of Paul’s old MySpace page, the platform where he first uploaded “BTSTU” in 2010.
You can listen to “BTSTU” on the website, along with “Super Salamander” and alternate edits of songs from his demo collection, Leak 04-13 (Bait Ones).
A reddit user ghost_bubbles also pointed out links to new remixes of “BTSTU” hidden within the website’s source code, including the “Halloween Edit” and “Michael Gain G-Funk Edit”, produced by A.K. Paul.
In true MySpace fashion, the website also includes Paul’s top eight friends, including Ruthven, Hira, and M.T. Hadley, and even features some old negative reviews of “BTSTU” (“sheer pointlessness”, “Kid A was eleven years ago”). An email address with a message to record labels reads, “record labels, gimme a JOB!!!”.
The page also displays his list of influences, ranging from Whitney Houston and J Dilla to Charanjit Singh, D’Angelo, and The Prodigy.
After the leak of what would have been his debut album in 2013, Jai Paul took a step back from the public eye, though the little music the public did get to hear is credited with changing the sound of pop.
The artist turned to focus on building a collective with his brother A. K. Paul forming the Paul Institute in 2017 (weirdly, the pair even appeared in a property developer’s magazine). Last year, A. K. shared the Paul Institute track “Be Honest” – listen back to it here.
He returned in 2019 after a seven-year hiatus when he surprised fans with new singles “Do You Love Her Now” and “He”.
Responding to the leak, he said: “I understand that it might have seemed like a positive thing to a lot of people – the music they had been waiting to hear was finally out there – but for me, it was very difficult to deal with,” he writes. “I felt pretty alone with everything, like no-one else seemed to view the situation in the same way I did: as a catastrophe.”
He also says that there were some “long term effects” to the leak: “On a personal level, things gradually went south and I had a breakdown of sorts. I was in quite a bad place for some time. I was unable to work and withdrew from life in general.”
Take a look at Jai Paul’s faux Myspace space here.