Feel like me forever: Why viral success won't change NOTION

It’s the mid-2000s, and in a family home somewhere in the West Midlands countryside, a young Rob Penny is turning the dining room at the back of the house into a makeshift studio. 

There’s a guitar and an amp. A couple cheap mics he’s spent ages learning how best to position around his drum kit – he was, well, bang into them at the time – plus a multitrack recorder ‘borrowed’ from his dad. He’s cooking up tunes, layering his own lyrics and vocals over instrumentals in this little haven overlooking the garden. It’s his whole world. “I used to do that all day, every day… all my free time,” recalls Penny, better known to fans for the feelings-first, cross-pollinated dance anthems he dishes out as NOTION.

His parents were (and still are) musical – more on a passion tip than anything super professional – which explains the recorder knocking about in the cupboard, and their full support throughout this quite literal space-shifting. The kids at school, where he’d bring in CDs, were less fussed. But that didn’t put him off. He was always going to make the music he wanted to hear. For himself, first and foremost. There’s never been a plan B.

Penny is telling me all this not from his childhood home, but across a marble top table in Hackney Wick, East London, where we’re tucked between building sites in a sort of food spot/live venue filled with a mish-mash of decorative oddities and furniture. Like a pink sofa decked out in teddy bears. Or a hand-shaped chair, an undersized cushion sunken into its wooden palm. They’ve got an all-day happy hour going on at the bar, but he’s cruised over from his place in North – he moved to London from his long-time base of Bristol a month or so ago – and also just fancies an Earl Grey. He’s a low-key guy, by his own admission, so this feels more like him.

“Low-key” isn’t quite the word for how big things are going career-wise, though. Right now, Penny’s in the thick of what’s been his most front-and-centre chapter yet, catapulted in by viral success and the international acclaim that’s come with it, building off the back of everything that came before. He spent more than a decade finding his style, nurturing it, shifting it around. Folding the music he loves – be it bassline, house, garage or jungle, fast and furious or sweet and sentimental, lush blends of both – into a recipe of his own. That distinctly NOTION type sound. 

“Something I’ve realised through all my music, and a lot of the music I listen to – even back to listening to metal bands when I was younger – is I love the contrast between soft and heavy,” says Penny, reeling off acts like Deftones and Alaska’s 36 Crazyfists when we revisit this later. “I love that juxtaposition, or whatever the word is. The two different sides of it.”

There’s nothing especially chill, say, about being the fifth most-streamed British electronic music producer on Spotify in 2025, wedged in a J-name sandwich between Jonas Blue and James Blake (if you were curious). Same goes for what’s been happening on the live side. It’s been biggest show after biggest show, biggest tour after biggest tour as of late (“I’m rinsing it, I need to stop!” he laughs as I bring up the phrasing, which I’d spotted on some of his posts, such as this announcement for his return to Washington, D.C.), with plenty more of the same lined up.

To stay in a Penny frame of mind – he loves games and cars, and games where you drive cars – it makes sense to speed-run a few standouts: Coachella, Glastonbury, Beyond the Valley, Outside Lands. A headline show in Manchester, another at HERE at Outernet (that one was, erm, here in London). And a recent Radius Chicago link-up with former Mixmag cover star, and in Penny’s words, “The G.O.A.T.”, Interplanetary Criminal. Not forgetting his emotional homecoming set at Bristol’s Love Saves the Day last year. There were sing-alongs (the crowd), possibly some tears (Penny). And, of course, there was his take on ‘The Days’.

First released by Bolton-born singer, songwriter and producer Chrystal, ‘The Days’ already had its own little bit of lore pre-NOTION remix: it was an unfinished demo, “archived and forgotten about” for nearly a decade, before being dusted off in 2024. Penny put his wide-screen spin on it shortly after it dropped, dialling up the track’s euphoric elements and inherent catchiness, bolstering it with that much-discussed bass – a Reese, the legendary Kevin Saunderson’s late-'80s creation, long a staple of the UK underground and the styles that’ve inspired Penny, as he’s eager to acknowledge. 

Things went completely nuts. The remix was everywhere, all at once. Rinsed around the world, deep-dived via threads and forums (what! how!), replicated through tutorials – a real-time read of a wider cultural appetite. It’s since hit over half a billion streams on Spotify alone (where his monthly listeners nudge just shy of 12 million) and earned a BRIT Award nomination for Song of the Year, among a stack more accolades.

It’s been wicked, that goes without saying – his name now firmly in luminary territory. Just not exactly anticipated. “I feel like a lot of the last 18 months has been me navigating that,” Penny says slowly, stirring his tea. “And like, I don’t know, I was quite happily in my little lane, making some different stuff and discovering that side of myself, and trying to push myself creatively. And then ‘The Days’ happened, and everything was like, ‘Fucking hell!’. It’s amazing what that tune’s done – it’s changed my life, honestly, I know it’s a cliché, but it has. But, at the same time, my first reaction to that was, ‘Oh shit, how’s this gonna change?’”

His reaction wasn’t without reason. On a smaller (but still hugely sizeable) scale, Penny had been here before in an earlier era of his career, as bass house boomed and bassline resurged in the mid-to-late 2010s. “That whole thing kind of blew up at that point in the UK,” he explains. He’s right. There were huge tracks (including his own, cc: ‘Hooked’), and massive, packed-out shows on home turf and further afield. It didn’t always get the same sort of editorial sheen as other scenes taking off around it, nor was it as big in Bristol – an interesting contrast while he was living there – but this was very much a moment.

One that’d left him a little resistant, however, to being boxed in by a set sound or breakout hit; hungry for new ways to open up his sound and lean deeper into a more versatile MO, where the songs came with visual worlds and felt more like, well, songs than straight-up dancefloor fuel or even DJ tools. 

He self-released some of these explorations across a pair of projects: his 2022 debut album ‘OUTSIDER’, titled, in part, for how he’d been feeling as an artist, and opened with the irresistible “instant classic” (just one fan review) ‘FOUND LOVE’ featuring Carrie Baxter; and its follow-up, 2024’s slick ‘FORWARDS’ mixtape. The energy was there – this is still Penny we’re talking about – but the intent was different. 

He split across more lanes, too. Penny started his Dance Dubs series the same year as ‘OUTSIDER’ and was using it, as opposed to his releases proper, as a playful outlet to share some of the coveted, overtly-club-focused loosies, bootlegs and edits from his sets. As in, whipped up for them, road-tested during them, and, if they connected, dropped via SoundCloud and Bandcamp (free DLs, FYI). There’ll be some more DD drops this year. 

“Because I like so much different music, I never wanted to be like, ‘You’re that guy, do that’,” he offers, thinking back on this transitional time. “It was a conscious thing: ‘I’m going to show a different side to myself. This feels like a good time to do it. If I don’t break away from this stuff, I’m going to be that guy forever.’” 

Take a scroll through the YouTube comments under the likes of ‘Hooked’ or ‘Real,’ though, with their millions upon millions of views, and people are still popping up years later to tell him how much they mean to them. If you were to pinch Penny’s phone and check his DMs (don’t do that, obviously), you’ll see the same kind of messages. But there’s a complicated relationship there. “That was another one of those moments where I was like, ‘Am I going to be the ‘Hooked’ guy now?’” 

So along came the projects. A recalibration. “I’ve never wanted to be someone who has a big tune and then just makes that tune for the next 10 years. Like, I don't want to do that,” he elaborates, enunciating those last words. “The thing that's exciting about music for me is finding new ways to sound like me.”

Cue the singles that have landed in the wake of ‘The Days’ and seen Penny link with a varied, veritable bunch: Unknown T and D38 on ‘TENTEN’, Nate Sib for ‘UNCONDITIONAL’ and the pop-tinged ‘WAITING’ with Willow Kayne, which was his set closer while out on a world tour. A new one featuring IRAH just came out too, and ‘FITNESS FIRST,’ a link-up with Slew – who’s gone “triple platinum” in his car in recent years – kicked off 2026 with a banger.  

He’s been listening to a lot of rap while driving recently: MIKE and Rio da Yung OG “always”, ‘Tartan’ (just a hunch); the new Don Toliver, alongside the likes of Clara La San, Chris Stussy, Leod, Jadu Heart and Yussef Dayes. But to detour to another form of travel – and back to another tune – ‘GET OUT MY HEAD’, a February-released flip of Redlight’s 2012 stomper, was made in the airport on his way back from Hideout Festival last year. Possibly for Glastonbury, per the ‘Glasto edit’ in the OG file name. “Redlight has always been one of my favourite producers, and I've done like a million bootlegs of his tunes at this point,” he shares. 

“That’s the first thing I've released with the ‘The Days’ bass, really, since ‘The Days’,” Penny continues (that lead coming courtesy of his Moog Grandmother; he’s got another synth, a UDO Super 6, but those are the only bits of hardware in his collection – everything else is pretty much done in the box). “I feel like I'm more of a vibes person than a technique person, necessarily,” he adds on that note. “I've always been someone who would rather listen to a tune that feels great than has a perfect mixdown or something like that. Maybe that's just an excuse for having bad mixdowns…” 

“Vibes person” fits. Penny is relaxed and soft-spoken IRL. He’s finished his tea by now and is sitting back in his chair, thinking back on more origin story info as the playlist overhead fades from '80s and '90s bangers into Avicii. If you didn’t know, he started as a DJ first, and played drum ‘n’ bass almost exclusively for the first couple of years. He got his first gigs by way of (or by pestering) his friend AJ, who used to put on nights at a club in Hereford, where he went to college, called The Jailhouse. “I think at that point I was like 16 or 17, so I was too young to be in the club. They used to let me in for my set and then kick me out after.” Sometimes they didn’t, and he’d drink the artists’ riders.

“It’s mad because, obviously, the speed garage thing has had a big resurgence the last four or five years, or whatever, but he was booking speed garage DJs and bassline DJs from up North, and was a proper head about all that stuff,” he continues. “We were obsessed. He used to book DJ Q. I think he had Royal-T at one, Champion came to one.”

His first EP, ‘Digits’, which nodded to artists like these, particularly the latter, was actually released by Champion in 2012 via his Formula Records – he’d given him a CD of beats when he came down to play. “So shout-out Champion and also Royal-T, because he was the first person who brought me down to Rinse [FM], and that was my first radio experience as well.”

‘Digits’ he made while still living at home, before moving to Bristol right after its release. He was still bang into the metal bands he’d long loved. By this point, of course, he’d discovered drum ‘n’ bass. And dubstep. YouTube rabbit holes get another shout-out here – as does a clip he used to binge-watch of Coki playing the gargantuan ‘Spongebob’ at a DMZ night, and the wheel after wheel that followed. “I was like, I want to do that. I want to play tunes that make people go off in a club.”

Which is what he’s done in those same club settings and now at milestone headline shows, where fans head to hallowed halls to hear him bolt through both the bangers and the dubs, but also their favourite releases deftly worked in. The songs they love, and want to sing back to him – and will tell Penny off, he says half-jokingly, if he doesn’t play them. 

There are certainly no complaints when he steps up in the Mixmag Lab a couple of weeks on from our interview and steers away from the tried and tested NOTION hits. The crowd response is, suitably, ecstatic as he powers through an hour-long set packed with brand new music, including collaborations with Sean Tommy, Capo Lee and X CLUB.

It’s while we’re chatting about shows and touring and fans – like Teshan, who’s been to every single UK date for the past few years, or his upcoming run across Australia and New Zealand, which will be another biggest one yet (and has completely sold out) – that I wonder something. Throughout our conversation, Penny describes himself as a “massive introvert” a couple of times, not a “life of the party” kind of person, or someone who even parties that much at all. I mention how much fun he looks like he’s having on stage, even with this mind, and he laughs. “Because I’m enjoying myself! I love playing. It’s like you step into a different mode. I think most people who do stuff like that would relate.”

He’s quick to connect his perspective and general outlook back to that of a broader, more communal artist experience. I notice it again when we touch on the topic of social media, which, even writing it, feels a bit archaic. But yeah. Socials. TikTok. IG. Getting what you’ve made, and what you’re up to, out there in front of a following that’s growing at a feverish rate. 

“There’s definitely a lot of new people that have come on the journey this year…” he stops himself. “‘The journey,’” he cringes, shaking his head before regrouping.

“For me, it’s using it as a tool to push my music … I’ve seen what it can do from ‘The Days’ and other things that have had success on there. It’s a tool, so use it. And I’m proud of my music, so I want as many people to hear it as possible.”

He’s settling into an approach that feels most natural. He keeps things pretty active, and enjoys sharing works-in-progress and ideas he’s been toying with at home, even if they may never drop – not everything has to. This suits him. The working from home, sure, though he has been doing more sessions since moving to London, but also treating socials more like a sketchbook.

“When I was younger, I’d definitely try and do stuff I thought I needed to do, and I think a lot of people feel like that when they’re getting into music,” he reflects. “If you’re the kind of person who’s got a big personality and you want to show that, I think that’s sick, but that’s just not me. It’s fine to find your own ways to do things.”

Penny wants to make music forever. He says this almost in passing while talking about the routes he could take in the face of a smash hit. “You could rinse some hype for two years and probably do really well out of it, but I feel like that’s a short-lived way of doing it…” he ponders. 

Has that ever been the motivation? No. So he won’t be swayed now. Staying tapped in with that kid version of himself, noodling away and getting inspired in the studio, is way more his speed. (For what it’s worth, he still hasn’t listened back to the CDs he was burning back then – even if his mum occasionally threatens to bring them out. “I’m like, nah, nah, nah,” he chuckles as we get ready to head our separate ways. “11-year-old me singing songs!”)

He expands on it some more outside, where we’re met by the whir of machinery. “I feel like I’m in a very lucky position where I’m doing the same thing now, but with more ears, on a bigger platform… Like, I really like what I’m doing, and I just want to do that on a bigger stage.” He grins. “No pun intended!”  

NOTION in the Mixmag Lab drops this Wednesday, April 22

Jasmine Kent-Smith is a freelance music journalist and creative copywriter, follow her on Instagram