Maddox Jones has never stayed in one lane for long. He started out fronting The Departure, racking up four UK Top 40 singles and opening for The Killers and Placebo, before going solo in 2020 with the EP Headspace, which climbed to number four on the iTunes Singer-Songwriter chart. Since then he’s moved through pop and R&B-leaning material, landing a number one on the Music Week Black Music Club Chart with “Body & Soul” alongside Great Adamz late last year. His latest move is a dive into dance music, teaming up with German producer Gummy DJ for “Somebody Like You”, out July 31st via Radikal Records.
Gummy DJ brings his own momentum to the pairing. Since launching the project in 2023, he’s racked up more than 14 million YouTube views and landed at number three on the Music Week Commercial Pop Club Chart earlier this year with his rework of Sash!’s “Encore Une Fois.” His production here leans on the familiar tools of festival dance music, pulsing four-on-the-floor kicks and arpeggiated synths that build from quiet verses into full drops, giving Maddox’s vocal room up front rather than getting buried under the low end.
The song’s core idea, that longing for connection can coexist with a euphoric chorus, is the kind of balance that either clicks or doesn’t depending on how the vocal sits against the drop, and on paper this one seems built to let the melancholy in the lyric survive the bigger moments rather than get steamrolled by them. The Hamburg-shot video leans into that tension, following Maddox through the city’s streets and riverside before landing in the clubs where Gummy DJ shows up in person.
Between Maddox’s run of UK chart placements and Gummy DJ’s climb on the Commercial Pop Club Chart, “Somebody Like You” reads as two artists at genuinely complementary points in their careers, not a mismatched collab for the sake of it. Whether it lands as more than a solid festival-season single depends on how it plays next to the rest of Gummy DJ’s catalogue, but the pieces are in the right place.