“It’s a banger, man.” 

That is how DJ Richy Roy describes his debut album, Rave 306, which was released on all streaming platforms Friday.  

“They’re going to get the crowd pumped,” Roy said of the 12 tracks selected for the album. “It’s filled with big room house tracks – the kind of music you’d expect to hear at an EDM festival. Even got some big sports anthems that you might hear in a hockey rink or football stadium.” 

The journey to release the album started back in July when Roy was one of the recipients of the Millie Coghill Art Scholarship Award. He used the money from the award to take classes to learn how to create his own EDM music, pivoting from his already well-known skillset as a DJ.  

By the end of July, he had finished the course on electronic dance music production and started working on his first music projects. By November, his first single, “Time Will Tell” was released, followed by a few others over the following weeks.  

The production work saw him put together 18 songs, but then it came down to the song selection for the album itself.  

“I wanted the ones that I felt really energized a crown, something that gets people excited, right?” Roy said. “Something that we’re going to make them want to get up and dance and have a good time, and it was interesting through the process, experimenting with the different styles you could go with. You could go really slow, really fast, really hard... Where do you land on something that makes you happy and fall in love with? And these were the tracks that I really enjoyed.” 

Reception for the new album has been fairly good. Roy is taking both the compliments and the critiques in stride, noting that music is subjective, and there will always be a lot of opinions about it. However, one critique he has gotten he takes as a compliment. 

“One thing I hear, they say it’s really commercial, and I take it as a compliment because that’s what I was going for,” Roy explained. “I want something that a lot of people can enjoy but really gets them into electronic dance music because if they haven’t really heard it before, you can’t go full hardcore, hardstyle, deep deep house. You need something a little more commercial that you’d hear on the radio or something to attract them into this genre of music.”