Blake Slatkin (born October 16, 1997) is an American record producer and songwriter from Los Angeles whose credits run through some of the biggest pop and R&B singles of the last five years, including The Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber's “STAY,” Lizzo's Grammy-winning “About Damn Time,” Sam Smith and Kim Petras's “Unholy,” and 24kGoldn's “Mood.” He has produced seven Billboard Hot 100 top-ten singles, four of which reached No. 1, and as of late 2025 his combined production and songwriting work has been credited with more than 106 billion streams. Slatkin spent roughly three years as an unpaid intern for superproducer Benny Blanco before landing his own publishing deal, and he has since built a career defined less by a signature sound than by a deliberate refusal to have one.
Blake Slatkin was born October 16, 1997, in Los Angeles, and raised there. His father exposed him to a wide range of music as a child, and Slatkin picked up the guitar at age 10, by his own account “in an attempt to impress girls,” an effort that did not pan out romantically but stuck as a lifelong pursuit. He attended Crossroads School in Santa Monica, where he was reportedly known as the best guitarist in his middle school class, and he performed at his own bar mitzvah. At age 13, seeing U2 perform at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena became, in his words, “one of my most vivid memories” and, at the time, “the coolest thing of all time.” He began performing with bands at talent shows and small Los Angeles venues, including the Whisky a Go Go, selling tickets to friends and teachers before school.
Slatkin originally aspired to be a rock star, but in high school he discovered the behind-the-scenes role of “producer” and pivoted immediately: “That's what I want to do,” he recalled thinking, “fuck being an artist.” He studied superproducers such as Pharrell Williams, Timbaland, Rick Rubin, Max Martin and Benny Blanco as models for the career he wanted.
Slatkin's origin story turns on a single lucky break at age 16: he spotted Benny Blanco in the background of a friend's Instagram post and begged the friend for an introduction, which led to an internship in 2015. For roughly three years he did, in his words, “bitch work” for Blanco, cleaning his closet, picking up packages and stacking firewood, while sitting in on Blanco's sessions and absorbing lessons about craftsmanship. He recalls Blanco's teaching style as “Mr. Miyagi-esque”: “I'd be cleaning his closet, and I'd leave a spot a little dirty. He'd be like, ‘How do you expect to be a good producer if you're not going to care about little things like that? You need to care about every little single thing.’”
Slatkin was not allowed to touch the music during Blanco's sessions for nearly three years, and he did not play Blanco any of his own material until his junior year of college. When he finally did, Blanco signed him as a producer, and in August 2018 Slatkin announced a publishing deal with Universal Music Publishing Group, facilitated by Blanco. Slatkin dropped out of New York University shortly after and relocated back to Los Angeles to pursue music full time.
Slatkin had moved to New York to attend NYU's Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, but his most formative experiences during that period happened outside the classroom, in two apartments he deliberately kept noisy. His first, on Avenue C, became a gathering point with a basement where artists came through, including Omar Apollo and Role Model. He later moved to a first-floor apartment on St. Mark's Place specifically because he thought he could make as much noise as he wanted; the building happened to share a wall with the theater hosting STOMP: The Musical, and despite hours of daily noise he received no complaints, with one neighbor telling him she would miss the music.
It was in these apartments that Slatkin met Omar Apollo and began a collaboration spanning nearly Apollo's entire career, contributing to his early EPs Stereo (2018) and Friends (2019) and later executive-producing his debut full-length Apolonio (2020). During the same period he developed a parallel songwriting and production partnership with Gracie Abrams, whom he had known since before 2016 as a fan of her early SoundCloud output. Slatkin ultimately served as executive producer on her debut EP Minor (2020) and its follow-up, This Is What It Feels Like (2021).
The single most consequential moment in Slatkin's rise occurred about a week before COVID-19 lockdowns began in March 2020, when he met rapper 24kGoldn, guitarist and producer Omer Fedi, and producer KBeaZy (Keegan Bach) in a Los Angeles studio session that produced “3, 2, 1,” later included on 24kGoldn's El Dorado. “I felt like I had been searching for people who understood and were excited about music in a way that I thought about it,” Slatkin has said of that session. “It was like a light bulb went off.” That same group of collaborators would go on to create “Mood,” Slatkin's first Hot 100 No. 1, an eight-week chart-topper featuring iann dior.
He recorded his breakout hits, “Mood,” The Kid Laroi's “Without You,” and “STAY,” all at his mother's house in Los Angeles, where he had moved back after dropping out of NYU. “I made my first No. 1s at my mom's house,” he has said.
Slatkin's defining trait as a producer may be his refusal to have a signature sound. “I never want people to hear a song and be like, ‘Oh, that's Blake,’” he has said, citing Rick Rubin, who worked with System of a Down, Adele, Johnny Cash, Run-D.M.C. and Aerosmith without imposing a consistent sonic stamp, as his model. His catalog reflects that range: the trap-pop of “Mood,” the pop-punk-adjacent alt-pop of “STAY,” the disco-funk of “About Damn Time,” the minimalist electro-pop of “Unholy,” and the R&B and soul of Omar Apollo's God Said No all sit under his name.
Despite the range, some through-lines recur. Slatkin has said he primarily uses real instruments, with drums as a possible exception, and values vintage gear such as old guitars and synthesizers, believing there is an energy in them that resonates and helps him aim for a sound that is unique. He has said every sound and production choice must serve a purpose or be removed, and that he intentionally avoids obvious or copyable sound origins, treating even a simple bass or guitar line so it sounds distinctive. His overriding philosophy is collaborative rather than auteurist: “In every musical situation I've ever been in, it's kind of been the sum of all parts. It hasn't been me.” He frames a producer's job as being an artist's “No. 1 fan” and deliberately avoids “stuffy recording studio” energy, aiming instead for a room that happens to have instruments in it. Songwriting and mixing are treated as separate phases: he focuses purely on song, melody and lyric first, without concern for final mix polish, addressing mix-level decisions only once the song itself is finished.
No collaborator looms larger over Slatkin's catalog than Omer Fedi, the Tel Aviv-born, Los Angeles-based guitarist, songwriter and producer born March 25, 2000. The two met at the same March 2020 24kGoldn studio session that produced “3, 2, 1,” alongside KBeaZy, and their chemistry was immediate. Slatkin has described Fedi as “exceptionally talented,” saying “watching him work in the studio is nothing short of mesmerizing,” and calling their meeting a moment of finding “someone my age who shared my passion” for music.
From that point, Fedi and Slatkin became a de facto production duo threaded through nearly every major Slatkin credit of the early 2020s: “Mood” (24kGoldn and iann dior), “Without You” (The Kid Laroi), “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” and “THATS WHAT I WANT” (Lil Nas X), “STAY” (The Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber), and “Unholy” (Sam Smith and Kim Petras) all carry both names. Both are signed to UMPG as songwriters and both were early members of Austin Rosen's Electric Feel Entertainment roster.
The origin story of “STAY” captures the texture of the partnership. The Kid Laroi recounted to NME: “I was over at my friend Blake's [Slatkin] house. It was me, Blake, my boy Omer [Fedi] and Charlie Puth. We were all just hanging out, and Charlie went over to the keyboard and just started playing stuff…and what he played was the ‘STAY’ [melody].” In Slatkin's own account, Puth played the song's central riff on Slatkin's Roland Juno-60 synthesizer, and that riff made it to the final record unchanged; Puth then added clicky double-time drums that immediately inspired a melody from Laroi. The first full draft was completed in under an hour, though full production took months, during which Slatkin accumulated 60 to 70 different versions on his computer and mixer Serban Ghenea produced 10 to 15 candidate mixes. Fedi and Puth, alongside Cashmere Cat, rounded out the production team credited with the song's vintage, pop and punk-rock blend. “STAY” hit No. 1 on both the Hot 100 and the Global 200 and spent seven weeks atop the Hot 100, becoming the second-longest-running No. 1 in the chart's history and the most weeks at No. 1 in pop radio history.
“Unholy” was produced during an intensive week-long session at Geejam Studios in Jamaica that included Sam Smith, Kim Petras, Ilya Salmanzadeh, Cirkut, Omer Fedi, Jimmy Napes and Slatkin. Rather than splitting into separate rooms as planned, the group, who already knew each other well, ended up working together in the main room the entire week in what Slatkin described as feeling like “a big party.” Slatkin has said Fedi is “usually present” throughout his long production processes and that the two have “spent years together” working out of Fedi's studio. Their joint fingerprints extend into six songs on The Kid Laroi's 2023 album The First Time and, most recently, into Ed Sheeran's 2025 album Play, on which both are credited as writers and producers on the opening track “Opening,” plus “Slowly” and “The Vow.”
Slatkin has given unusually candid interviews about his tools. He is, by his own description, a dedicated Pro Tools user, saying he might be “the only Pro-Tools-User” among his generation of peers, a choice made because his favorite producers work in that program. He says he hardly uses MIDI, working almost exclusively with audio, and keeps his computer perpetually ready to record so he can capture inspiration the instant it strikes.
His synth collection anchors much of his sonic palette. He has called the Roland Juno-60 his favorite synthesizer, the first piece of gear he ever purchased and the instrument used to build “STAY,” which he says he will keep forever. His broader keyboard arsenal includes a Roland Juno-106, a Sequential Prophet-5, a Moog Voyager, a Minimoog, a Prophet-600, a Mellotron, an ARP Omni prized for Joy Division-style strings, and an Oberheim OBX. His home studio, built out by Unf*ck Projects, was deliberately designed to avoid a dead, neutral acoustic feel, aiming instead for something closer to a living room. His monitor chain has evolved from ATC SC45As, used at his mother's house where his early hits were made, to PMC8-2 monitors, alongside a 15-year-old pair of KRK Rockit8s he still keeps for reference checks.
His outboard rack includes Calrec preamps gifted by mix engineer Spike Stent, BAE 1073 preamps, a Chandler TG2 and an Undertone MPDI-4, feeding a Sony C800 or a Heiserman H47 clone of the U47 he says can surpass the original in some respects. On the plugin side he leans on SoundToys, UAD plugins, FabFilter Pro-Q and BABY Audio tools, alongside Pro Tools' stock Spring-Reverb and Lo-Fi plugins; his master bus typically runs FabFilter Pro-L and an SSL-style compressor. He credits engineers Serban Ghenea, Manny Marroquin and Spike Stent with taking his intentionally loud rough mixes to final, radio-ready loudness, and says he learned engineering fundamentals partly from Sound on Sound magazine and YouTube channels like Pensado's Place.
Slatkin's publishing home is Universal Music Publishing Group, a deal originally brokered by Benny Blanco in August 2018; UMPG's global writer roster continues to list him alongside artists like Billie Eilish, Elton John and Taylor Swift. For management, Slatkin is represented by Electric Feel Entertainment, the Austin Rosen-founded management company he joined in 2019. Electric Feel's roster places him alongside Omer Fedi, 24kGoldn, iann dior, Louis Bell, Frank Dukes, Carter Lang, Billy Walsh, Brian Lee, Nick Mira, Andrew Watt and Post Malone, who is co-managed with Dre London. In 2020, UMPG signed an exclusive global publishing agreement directly with Electric Feel Entertainment to launch Electric Feel Publishing Europe, formalizing the pipeline between the roster and UMPG.
An Electric Feel studio manager has described both Fedi and Slatkin warmly as key figures on the roster: “Omar Fedi, a good friend, just absolute legend, he's one of our guys…Blake Slatkin, also, just one of the sweetest guys, talented. Two of them are just incredible.” Slatkin's records are frequently mixed by top-tier engineers such as Serban Ghenea and Manny Marroquin, who function as a recurring extension of his production team even though they are independent engineers rather than in-house staff. No evidence indicates Slatkin operates his own label imprint; his commercial infrastructure runs through UMPG for publishing and Electric Feel for management and production representation.
Omer Fedi's career runs on a second, largely separate track through pop-punk and rock, working extensively with Machine Gun Kelly and Travis Barker, a lane Slatkin has not entered. Fedi co-produced multiple tracks on Machine Gun Kelly's Tickets to My Downfall (2020), including “drunk face” and covers of Frank Ocean's “Swim Good” and Paramore's “Misery Business,” alongside Barker and Steve “Baze” Basil. He also contributed to Machine Gun Kelly's “Die in California,” the song that introduced Landon Barker to a wider audience, and to “GFY,” continuing the Machine Gun Kelly and Travis Barker pipeline into songs like “maybe” with Bring Me the Horizon.
Landon Barker, son of the Blink-182 drummer, sits downstream of this same Fedi-Barker rock axis rather than connecting directly to Slatkin. His breakout came via a guest verse on “Die in California,” co-written and produced by his father, after which he signed to Travis Barker's Elektra imprint DTA Records in 2023, releasing his debut single “Friends With Your Ex” and a 2024 follow-up, “Over You.” No direct Blake Slatkin production or writing credit with Landon Barker, DTA Records or Elektra has surfaced; the connection to Slatkin's broader professional world runs exclusively through the shared node of Omer Fedi, illustrating that while Slatkin and Fedi are close, long-term collaborators across pop and R&B, they maintain distinct genre lanes outside their shared projects. Slatkin's clearest structural cross-connections instead run through Electric Feel Entertainment and UMPG, which place him in the same commercial family as Post Malone, iann dior, 24kGoldn, Louis Bell and Frank Dukes.
Slatkin's signature honor is a Grammy Award for Record of the Year at the 65th Annual Grammy Awards in 2023, won for his work as co-producer, with Ricky Reed, on Lizzo's “About Damn Time.” That same night he was also nominated for Song of the Year for “About Damn Time,” shared with Lizzo, Ricky Reed and Theron Thomas, and for Album of the Year for Lizzo's Special. He had previously earned an Album of the Year nomination in 2022 for Lil Nas X's Montero. Grammy.com's official tally credits him with one win and four nominations, while a broader award tracker that includes non-Grammy honors lists one win and eleven nominations overall.
Beyond the Grammys, Slatkin was named to Forbes' 30 Under 30 list in 2022 and to Variety's Hitmakers of the Year list in 2021, with a dedicated Hitmaker of the Month feature that September. At the 2022 BMI Pop Awards, “Mood” won Pop Song of the Year, with Slatkin credited alongside 24kGoldn, iann dior, Omer Fedi and KBeaZy. He was also nominated for Producer of the Year at the 2022 iHeartRadio Music Awards and separately received an iHeartRadio Titanium award for reaching one billion total audience spins on “Mood.” More recently, Slatkin picked up two 2025 Hollywood Music in Media Award nominations, for Best Original Song in an Animated Film for “Zoo” from Zootopia 2, and Best Original Song in a Feature Film for “Drive” from F1, the latter also floated as a contender for the Best Original Song Oscar.
Slatkin's 2024 to 2026 run has been marked by a shift toward legacy pop institutions and film scoring alongside continued genre-hopping. In 2024 he was deeply embedded in Omar Apollo's God Said No, contributing six credited tracks, contributed two songs to Charli XCX's zeitgeist-defining Brat (“360” and “365”), and worked with the girl group KATSEYE and the Australian duo Royel Otis.
The centerpiece of his 2025 output is Ed Sheeran's eighth studio album, Play, released September 12, 2025, on which Slatkin worked alongside Ilya Salmanzadeh, Cirkut, Omer Fedi, Johnny McDaid and others. He is credited as producer or co-producer on at least seven tracks, including “Opening,” “Old Phone,” “In Other Words,” “A Little More,” “Slowly,” “The Vow” and “For Always,” plus deluxe bonus tracks “Skeletons” and “Technicolor,” and served as an instrumentalist across the album on keyboards, bass, guitar and additional percussion while engineering vocal sessions. In a Zane Lowe interview, Slatkin encouraged Sheeran to revisit some of his earlier musical sounds, an approach reflected across several tracks. The album's lead single, “Old Phone,” produced by Slatkin and Ilya Salmanzadeh, dropped alongside the album announcement in May 2025. In a lighter anecdote from the cycle, Sheeran told the Mythical Kitchen podcast that Slatkin gifted him roughly ten thousand pieces of Lindt Lindor chocolate truffles in a drum case to celebrate finishing the record.
Slatkin and Sheeran extended their partnership into film with “Drive,” the closing song for Apple's F1 racing drama starring Brad Pitt. Slatkin described stepping outside his usual, very structured and polished pop instincts to aim for something more authentic given the song's placement over the emotional arc of Pitt's character. He assembled what he called a “supergroup” for the recording, featuring Dave Grohl on drums, Pino Palladino on bass and Rami Jaffee on keys, and personally spent a day re-editing Grohl's drum take after feedback from Apple and director Joseph Kosinski that the drums needed to be more prominent. Slatkin also co-wrote “Zoo” with Ed Sheeran and Shakira for Disney's Zootopia 2 soundtrack. Moving into early to mid 2026, his documented credits include work with bedroom-pop artist Malcolm Todd, “Breathe” and “I Saw Your Face” from Do That Again, and singer Adéla's “KGB.”
In October 2025, Slatkin sat for a high-visibility long-form interview titled “How Blake Slatkin Became The Biggest Music Producer Today,” discussing his path from intern to hitmaker, the stories behind “STAY,” “Mood,” and “About Damn Time,” and his views on virality and emotional authenticity in songwriting.
Slatkin was in an on-and-off relationship with singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams from around 2016 or 2017 to 2022, a relationship that shaped much of her early catalog and coincided with their creative partnership on her Minor and This Is What It Feels Like EPs. As of mid-2025, Slatkin was romantically linked to actress and comedian Rachel Sennott, with the two first spotted together in June 2025 and later photographed at Charli XCX's wedding in Italy. The relationship carries an unusual six-degrees twist: Sennott starred in the music video for Charli XCX's “360,” a song Slatkin co-wrote.
Notable trivia from Slatkin's life and career includes his first entrepreneurial venture, an unsuccessful attempt to resell a single nugget of marijuana just before he began working for Benny Blanco. When “Mood” hit No. 1, Slatkin has said he “ran around my garden in circles, screaming. Literally, screaming alone,” before calling the rest of the collaborators to celebrate together. He has said he sometimes had Omar Apollo sing under a blanket to simulate a vocal booth during their early, scrappy recording sessions, and that for “About Damn Time,” his team brought in an entire horn section to record just two notes.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1997 | Born October 16 in Los Angeles, California. |
| 2015 | Begins interning for Benny Blanco after a chance Instagram sighting. |
| 2018 | Announces a publishing deal with Universal Music Publishing Group, facilitated by Blanco; drops out of NYU and relocates to Los Angeles. |
| 2018–2019 | Early credits with Omar Apollo (Stereo, Friends), Role Model, Gracie Abrams and Rod Wave. |
| 2020 | Meets Omer Fedi, 24kGoldn and KBeaZy at a March studio session that produces “3, 2, 1”; executive-produces Omar Apollo's Apolonio and Gracie Abrams's Minor EP; The Kid Laroi's “Without You” becomes his first top-10 breakthrough. |
| 2021 | Breakout year: “Mood” (24kGoldn feat. iann dior) hits No. 1; “STAY” (The Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber) hits No. 1 on the Hot 100 and Global 200; Lil Nas X's “Montero” album credits; named to Variety's Hitmakers of the Year. |
| 2022 | Lizzo's Special album, including “About Damn Time” and “Grrrls”; named to Forbes 30 Under 30; “Mood” wins Pop Song of the Year at the BMI Pop Awards. |
| 2023 | Wins Grammy Award for Record of the Year for “About Damn Time”; Sam Smith and Kim Petras's “Unholy” and six songs on The Kid Laroi's The First Time. |
| 2024 | Omar Apollo's God Said No; Charli XCX's Brat tracks “360” and “365”; work with KATSEYE and Royel Otis. |
| 2025 | Ed Sheeran's album Play; “Drive” for Apple's F1; “Zoo” for Zootopia 2; two Hollywood Music in Media Award nominations; first publicly linked to Rachel Sennott. |
| 2026 | Credits with Malcolm Todd's Do That Again and singer Adéla; “Drive” discussed as an Oscar Best Original Song contender. |
He is best known for The Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber's “STAY,” Lizzo's “About Damn Time,” Sam Smith and Kim Petras's “Unholy,” and 24kGoldn's “Mood,” four of his seven Hot 100 top-ten productions that reached No. 1.
Guitarist, songwriter and producer Omer Fedi, whom he met in a March 2020 session with 24kGoldn and KBeaZy. Fedi appears alongside Slatkin on “Mood,” “Without You,” “Montero,” “STAY,” “Unholy,” and multiple tracks on Ed Sheeran's Play.
No. “Industry Baby” (Lil Nas X featuring Jack Harlow) was produced by Take a Daytrip and Kanye West, and “Peaches” (Justin Bieber) was produced by Harv and Shndo; Slatkin holds no writing or production credit on either song. His genuine credit on the same Lil Nas X album is “THATS WHAT I WANT,” and his genuine Bieber credit of comparable stature is “STAY.”
Not through direct production credits. The Post Malone link is organizational, through shared representation at Electric Feel Entertainment. The Machine Gun Kelly link runs entirely through Omer Fedi, who produces separately for Machine Gun Kelly and Travis Barker in a pop-punk and rock lane that Slatkin has not entered.
He interned for Benny Blanco starting at age 16, after spotting Blanco in the background of a friend's Instagram photo. He spent roughly three years doing menial tasks and observing sessions before Blanco signed him as a producer and helped broker his 2018 publishing deal with Universal Music Publishing Group.
His publishing is handled by Universal Music Publishing Group, and his management is Electric Feel Entertainment, the Austin Rosen-founded company whose roster also includes Omer Fedi, 24kGoldn, iann dior, Louis Bell and Post Malone.
| Year | Song | Artist(s) |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Without You | The Kid Laroi |
| 2021 | Mood | 24kGoldn feat. iann dior |
| 2021 | STAY | The Kid Laroi & Justin Bieber |
| 2021 | THATS WHAT I WANT / Sun Goes Down | Lil Nas X |
| 2022 | About Damn Time / Grrrls | Lizzo |
| 2022 | Special | SZA |
| 2023 | Unholy | Sam Smith feat. Kim Petras |
| 2023 | Happy | Kesha |
| 2024 | 360 / 365 | Charli XCX |
| 2024 | Spite / Dispose of Me / Be Careful With Me | Omar Apollo |
| 2025 | Old Phone / Opening / The Vow | Ed Sheeran |
| 2025 | Drive | Ed Sheeran (F1 soundtrack) |
| 2025 | Zoo | Shakira (Zootopia 2 soundtrack) |
| 2026 | Breathe / I Saw Your Face | Malcolm Todd |
Further reading: Omer Fedi's parallel work in pop-punk connects through Travis Barker and, downstream, Landon Barker, whose own entries cover that side of the story in full. Readers researching Slatkin's core catalog may also want the entries on the other producers and artists in his UMPG and Electric Feel network.