The word bunt means “colorful” in German, and, at the risk of sounding pat, that’s an apt descriptor of Levi Wijk’s sound, attitude, and story so far. “I think that’s what the Bunt. brand is all about,” he says. “Sweat, energy, honesty, positivity, happiness, and killing the barriers that some artists have between them and their fans.”
Since breaking through with a viral single nearly 12 years ago, Wijk’s fortunes have been up and down. He’s gone through several record deals, lost a bandmate, gone broke, played shows with five-figure attendances, and met his heroes. But whatever life has thrown at him, he’s never been anything less than vibrant in his approach and positively technicolor in his output. His style of loud, vivacious, arena-filling music has made him one of the hottest rising stars in EDM, and, thanks to his 2023 smash single “Clouds,” he looks a sure bet for festival lineups around the world for years to come.
He joins a crackly Zoom call at 9am where I am, and early evening for him. “Oh, my God, thank you for joining,” he says, audibly smiling through a thick German accent. He turns on his video to share his view: Cerulean surf caresses a white beach somewhere off the coast of Phuket, Thailand, where he and his team have stopped off between a set at that country’s EDC festival and a four-show run in India in a few days’ time. When he flips to his front-facing camera, he reveals a shirtless torso, shoulder muscles rippling, and a boyishly handsome grin. He’s excited for his first time playing India. “We’ve never been there, but I think it’s gonna be good. I think the Indian people are super-hype, from what I’ve heard.”
With barely any need for a prompt, he begins rattling off some highlights from the tour so far: a 12,000-cap stadium show at the Zenith in Munich; crowd-surfing in Paris; selling out the Shrine in L.A.; a pop-up show in a pizzeria and another in a barbershop, both in New York. Next up is his Coachella debut this spring. “The show we’re going to put on is going to be something people haven’t seen before,” he says. “Hopefully I’m going to be the first one that goes into the crowd for a big, big mosh pit.”
Playing globally renowned festivals before his 30th birthday might suggest a straightforward journey to the top, but Wijk’s road to this point has been scattered with potholes. He was born in Stuttgart, an automotive hub in southwest Germany, the son of a Turkish immigrant with a job at Porsche who spent his weekends DJing. Wijk Senior met his future wife while behind the decks in a Stuttgart nightclub. They had two boys, and one day when the youngest was 15, his older brother showed him “One” by Swedish House Mafia on YouTube. The video depicted fingers on a MIDI keyboard, turning knobs, pushing buttons and supposedly composing the song in real time.
“I would say they probably faked it, but it just showed how they made the entire song,” says Wijk. “It’s like, maybe I just need a keyboard to make a song, and it could go big and the whole world knows it.”
He was inspired. He even forwent the keys in the end, simply firing up Ableton and composing tracks on his laptop from that point onwards. At school he made friends with Nico Crispin, another kid who was as obsessed with soccer as he was. Then he introduced his new pal to the work of another DJ he’d recently discovered online: someone called Avicii.
“He was the same like me, like obsessed from the first minute,” Wijk explains. “I was like, ‘Hey, I’m working with this music program. Do we want to make it together?’” Wijk and Crispin started meeting up every week to share ideas for songs. They would choose the bits they liked best, and soon they had a modest collection of high-energy big-room bangers inspired by their Swedish idols. “That’s how we got into music. It all started there.”
The next challenge was to get their songs heard. In the early 2010s, Wijk and Crispin took to YouTube, where post-festival EDM compilations were beginning to take off thanks to the pyrotechnic montages being shared by events like Tomorrowland. Having recently settled on a name for their duo, Bunt. followed suit, compiling videos of the “Best Songs of 2014” and sharing them on one of their many anonymous accounts. They would choose something by Calvin Harris at Number One, then one of their own songs at Number Two, then something by Avicii, and so on. They would then sign in to their other accounts (“We had hundreds,” Wijk says) and comment beneath each video: “who the hell is BUNT???” Before long, the views numbered in the hundreds of thousands.
“That’s how we also got our first record label deal,” Wijk says. After the YouTube ploy, he received a message from someone at Kontor Records, a German label known for releasing music by EDM legends like Scooter, Tiësto, and Armin van Buuren. The A&R asked if either of Bunt.’s members was free for a phone call. Crispin nominated Wijk, telling him he was the more confident one. “I was, like, so nervous,” Wijk says. “I actually dressed myself up, even though it was only a telephone call. I put a shirt on and everything.” From his bedroom at his parents’ house, he agreed to the A&R’s proposed terms and, aged 16, they signed a deal for an advance of €2000. “I hung up and I was absolutely freaking out. I was like, ‘We just made €2000! That is absolutely crazy.’ It was the first feeling that you actually can make money with music.”
Bunt. released two singles with Kontor, first “Journey” and then “Harmonica,” which promptly went crazy online. With the pounding drops of big-room house and the jangly swing of country, people started calling Bunt. “folk-EDM.” Off the back of that success, Interscope came calling. They found Bunt. a new manager, someone Wijk now describes as one of his closest friends, and he came with a plan. For nearly two years, Bunt. didn’t release another track. They spent 10 months working on a single song. When it came, it proved it was worth the wait. “Old Guitar,” another banjo-wielding folk-EDM smash with a rambunctious chorus sung by Tennessee folk act Josiah and the Bonnevilles, reached number four on Spotify’s U.S. Viral chart. A debut mixtape followed, featuring remixes of Mumford & Sons, James Bay, and Of Monsters and Men; later came a sequence of singles, each one sounding as kaleidoscopic as the last.
In 2019, things took off in earnest as Bunt. signed with Geffen. Wijk had enough money to quit his job as an accountant at Porsche and move to L.A. “My dream was always to quit my job and work as a full-time music producer,” he says. “Finally I got the chance.”
They continued to release music, including the 2020 Avicii tribute “Crocodile Tears” following the Swedish superstar’s death, but in 2021 Crispin told Wijk that he wanted to leave the band. “I was basically doing most of the creative stuff and he was leading more on the business side,” says Wijk. “I’m someone that is like, once I’m obsessed, I do it the whole time. After work, I just hustled through the music production thing till midnight.” Crispin couldn’t keep up. They parted ways, but remained close friends. Crispin now runs a tennis business while doing music on the side, and opened for Wijk at a recent show in Mexico. “We hang out as often as we can,” Wijk says. “But he also said he’s so happy that he’s not involved anymore because he could never handle all of that. I think we made the right decision.”
Although Wijk kept releasing music, including the mixtape Folktales in 2022, his fortunes took a nosedive. His girlfriend broke up with him. His money started to dry up. He had to move back to Germany and start working part-time jobs as a bartender and an Uber Eats driver. Once he was home, he got a message from his friends the Ironix, inviting him to go and live with them in Hamburg. Staying in their apartment, Wijk was immediately happier, but he still had to keep working his day job ferrying takeaway meals around the city, which was especially punishing in the rainy Hamburg winter. While he was still releasing tunes — among them the semi-viral sugar-rush “Paperplanes” — he wasn’t making enough money, and in late 2022 he gave himself a year to either make it big, or quit.
In January 2023 he released “Clouds,” a heavenly mash of clanging keys, angelic vocals, and enough audio uplift to carry a house around the world. It went wild on TikTok and flew up Billboard’s Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart, with streams numbering in the hundreds of millions on Spotify. “It basically changed my life overnight,” says Wijk.
Then came the world tour, the mixtape Levi Don’t Do It, and a constant stream of party-starting singles. Wijk became known for his live shows, which he invariably plays in the round, on a raised platform alone with his DJ decks in the middle of a panoramic crowd. Often he’ll descend from his perch to rave alongside his fans. Footage exists online of Wijk pogoing onstage alongside his mother.
His career now seems limitless. He met the Chainsmokers (“really nice people”), played a show inside Bayern Munich’s stadium, the Allianz Arena, and is now looking forward to his Coachella debut. His publicist tells me that Wijk “never sleeps but is always happy.” Having played 161 shows in 2025, it seems he’s gifted at keeping a level head. He’s never touched drugs and hasn’t had a drop of alcohol in more than a year, perhaps influenced by a desire to avoid a fate similar to that of his idol Avicii.
“I don’t know where it comes from, but I think I’m genuinely just a happy person,” he says. It’s a seemingly hard-wired optimism that comes through loud and clear in his music. In 2026 he vows to work on a debut album and keep playing shows around the world. He’ll do everything in his power to make each one of them special. “I would definitely say that a Bunt. show is something that you haven’t experienced before,” he says. “That is something that I say with a big, big confidence.”
