“i like the way you kiss me” by Artemas was produced in roughly three hours during a February 2024 Los Angeles session with producers Kevin White and Jesse Fink, posted online the next day, and released independently on March 19, 2024. Within weeks it was the #1 song on global Spotify. It has since passed 2 billion Spotify streams, gone RIAA 3x Platinum, and topped charts in eight-plus countries. Here is how the fastest-made hit of the TikTok era actually happened.
The context matters. Artemas had just put out his mixtape Pretty on February 9, 2024, riding the viral momentum of “if u think i’m pretty,” and had played exactly two hometown shows at The Lower Third in London. Then he flew to LA and got in a room with White, Fink, and his longtime guitarist and co-producer Toby Daintree.
How was the song actually made?
Fast, by every account. Daintree described the week to Music Week as the best of his career.
The week that we made I Like The Way You Kiss Me was the best writing experience I’ve ever had, it was magical... During the week, we did about two songs a day, and I Like The Way You Kiss Me happened on the third.Toby Daintree, Music Week
Artemas himself compressed the origin into two sentences for The Guardian: “We produced the song in approximately three hours, and I posted it the following day. The response was overwhelming.” In his track-by-track breakdown for Clash he got more specific about the writing: “I mumbled the melody over this psyche trap we made in the studio... I tried to embody the worst dude ever.” He has called the song satire: a character study of a toxic narrator, not a diary entry.
Where did the mumble intro come from?
The song’s most imitated moment, the low spoken mumble that opens the track, was an afterthought recorded while Artemas and Daintree waited for an Uber. “You should put a little mumble in the intro... it was the least thought out thing and it’s so funny that it blew up,” Daintree told Music Week. The chorus vocal got its signature warp the same unceremonious way: the pitch-shifted, “shape-shifting” effect (AllMusic critic Marcy Donelson’s word) began as a CapCut pitch-tease on TikTok before being formalized in Ableton, the same family of platform-native tempo tricks The Ring has documented in the sped-up era.
What happened when it came out
Artemas announced the single on March 15, 2024 and released it four days later. The day before release, the head of his label called to tell him it was going to completely change everything and go all the way. He watched it start from an airplane seat: “It was coming out on the plane: it had only released in Australia and there were about five or six thousand people listening to my music at once. Then I landed... I saw that 40,000 people were listening at once,” he told BASIC Magazine, adding, “I really do wish it didn’t feel as good as it did.”
The numbers stacked up at a speed that still reads like a typo. #1 on Spotify’s global chart with more than 8 million streams in a week. A UK Singles Chart debut at #13 on April 4, peaking at #3 on April 25. A US Hot 100 debut at #70 on April 6, peaking at #12 on April 27. The top of the Billboard Global Excl. US chart on April 22. More than 2 million TikTok users made videos with the song. Variety named it one of the most ubiquitous songs of 2024, and on the year-end charts it finished #1 in Germany and #9 on the US Hot Rock & Alternative Songs list.
Two songs a day, all week. The hit was the one they almost didn’t notice.
Why the speed is the story
The three-hour origin is not trivia, it is the thesis. Artemas had spent 2023 scrapping his old catalog and rebuilding on pure instinct, a song a month, posted daily, no committee. “i like the way you kiss me” is what that method looks like when it connects: no A&R notes, no six-month rollout, a mumble kept in because deleting it would have been overthinking. Even Daintree admitted to Music Week that “at first, I wasn’t even that into the song.” The audience overruled everyone.
Two years on, the song is the spine of a catalog past 3.6 billion streams and a 38-date world tour that closes at London’s O2 Academy Brixton in December 2026. Not bad for the least thought out thing in the room.