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Sitting in a sun-swathed, picturesque garden somewhere in upstate New York, Bea Hardy makes it clear that she’s just passing through. Hardy is slowly making her way back to Brooklyn after a weekend set at Montreal’s Piknic Électronic, playing for a crowd of thousands. Though she’s more than acquainted with fast-paced grooves and packed rooms, Hardy appears just as comfortable in the tranquility of the outdoors, perched at a patio table in rectangular sunnies and wired headphones. It’s the beginning of July, and there’s a heatwave invading the entirety of the East Coast. Preemptively, she warns that she might have to move our meeting indoors.

The weekend’s festival was a homecoming for the Quebec-born DJ, though Hardy describes her formative years being primarily spent in New York City’s luminous party scene. She’s lived all over the world–naming Belgium, Spain, and a ten-year stay in London in her long list of extravagant dwellings–yet this particular period seems significant. “I moved to New York when I was fourteen, and that was a really big influence on my love for nightlife and music,” She tells me. “Going out there in my late teens, a lot of my contacts had clubs and bars. My network there was quite strong, so I was lucky that I was able to start playing early in my career. I was always enamored with music, and was gravitating toward the AUX cord from a really young age.”

Hardy’s affinity for music could be boiled down to a fascination with party culture, or even an impulse for movement. In reality, she tells me, it's a more complex configuration of narrative elements that make her work meaningful. She’s dedicated herself to exploring the stories of soundscapes, delving into a range of genres from synth-pop to soul as a means of inciting an emotional response in the crowd. Even in conversation, her musings send me impossibly back in time, revisiting evenings defined by songs that were just right, the thrill of their sentimentality.

“The first component is nostalgia based,” she reveals. ”It's that feeling when you go to a club, and you hear a song, and you're like, ‘Oh my God, I cannot believe this is playing,’ in the most exciting way possible. It has to be something that really taps into a specific memory, a moment that’s been left untouched. Then there’s newness, freshness, discovery, right? That's the Shazamable moment of ‘I need to know what that is,’ so bringing that into the narrative is really important as well. I think that both together build trust. It's about the combination.”

It’s this ethos of understanding that’s guided the DJ through some of the most illustrious events of her career. As a sonic branding consultant, Hardy works with a variety of organizations and labels to develop their musical persona, and in the process of crafting a distinctive sound for a client, she likes to be briefed with as much specificity to the vision as possible. Her favorite projects lead with a series of instructional puzzle pieces pointing to an era, genre, or keyword to center within her set. From there, she hunts for treasure. “It's like, how do you want people to be in the space?” she ponders. “How do you want them to live and breathe and feel? The music almost needs to be, to a certain extent, unnoticeable. It needs to blend.” 

With adaptability as an undeniable strength, Hardy has transmitted her curatorial ear into the development of A-B Affair, a collaborative party with fellow DJ Alex Delany. Built from a shared love of record-collecting and the desire for an unpretentious Brooklyn dancefloor, the two spin back-to-back vinyl hits with a playful spontaneity that Hardy describes as “bouncing off of each other’s energy.” On the genesis of their partnership, she explains, “Alex and I kind of nailed what we wanted the music to sound like very quickly. It was fun, upbeat, groovy, unserious. We wanted it to feel more like a house party than a performance. Like, if someone's coming to talk to me, I'd rather pour them a glass of wine than meticulously mix into the next track. It really wasn't about perfection. And in so many other aspects of my music career and curation, it is. I'm not behind the stage, I'm just there with them. Having the consistency of that familiarity was really important.”

Closeness is evidently precious to Hardy, though her ultimate goal is to inspire unity through sound. For her, harmony is the purpose of the party, an ingredient inseparable from the music itself that is demonstrated through a willingness to abandon formality for fun. Promoting an atmosphere of energetic correspondence is what drives her creative ambition within the New York nightlife scene. It’s the rarity and coherence of this phenomenon that sustains the DJ, the ability to propagate a collective joy and revel in its occurrence.

”I'm not a surfer,” she begins, seeming hesitant to even go through with the metaphor. “So I can only imagine what this feels like, but it's like getting on a wave. There's nights where you just never get on. You're playing stuff, and it's good, but it's just, like, there isn't that communion between the space, the music, the DJ, the people there. But sometimes you get on the wave, the crowd gets on the wave, and you're just riding it, and that feeling is amazing.”

Photographed by Tommy Rizzoli

Styled by Dy’amond Breedlove

Written by Madison Browning

Hair: Aidan Rodriguez

Makeup: Sienna Young at Rough Artists

Stylist Assistant: Oluwaseye Olusa Jr.