Ones To Watch: Yves Tomas
In our Ones To Watch series, we spotlight exciting new producers who are shaking up the game and progressing dance music culture while they do it.
British DJ and producer Yves Tomas is turning heads with his genre-bending club-bass-grime hybrid productions and creative DJ sets. He grew up in Saint Pauls, an outer suburb of Bristol, home to a vibrant and multicultural community. That’s where he soaked up the sounds of reggae, dancehall and raggae, thanks in part to St Paul’s Carnival, an annual festival celebrating Caribbean culture.
He started going to raves and free parties “way too young,” according to Yves. “I was the baby in the coat pile,” he laughs. “It was a proper free-range upbringing.” But it also informed his eclectic music taste and ability to harness underground energy in his productions. Now, he’s one of the UK’s most accomplished artists, having worked with grime artists like Ruff Sqwad, Tinchy Stryder, Giggs, and Frisco, and engineering vocals for global pop acts, all while releasing his own tracks on labels like Rekids and Hypercolor. Today, he chats through his early experiences in the rave, his penchant for 140 and grime, and the art of moving at his own pace.
Bristol to London, Tinchy to Rihanna
Yves grew up surrounded by music and community, so it wasn’t long before he began his own musical journey. “In secondary school I was going to Rooted Records with Tom Peverelist on my lunch breaks and saving up to buy a record every week,” he says. “I was picking up all the Punch Drunk stuff like Guido’s “Mad Sax”, and that era of 140 lefty dubstep that formed UK techno as we know it today.”
At the same time, Yves was neck deep in UK grime. “I’d pick up really obscure dub releases and buy Rude Kid’s “Are U Ready”, so bridging a gap between the two has always been my interest.”
When Yves moved to London at age 15, he dove head first into the local scenes there, landing experience at Soho Radio and then getting a job engineering for Tinchy Stryder and the Ruffsqwad crew. “It ended up being every other MC that passed through which was quite a few,” he says. “I did that for a couple of years and then went to Wendy House Studios, which is a hit-factor style environment,” he says.
Yves’ first call-up was Rihanna, which was exciting even though she didn’t turn up. “So that caliber of artist,” he says. “I was there for a couple of years, making my own music, engineering here and there, when an ex-girlfriend sent some tunes of mine to Radio Slave,” he says.
Around this time, he scored a short film called “Temper” for Nowness and created three productions for Holzweiler’s runways, which sparked a worldwide trend of underground producers making music for fashion houses.
He’d been making tunes in private, unsure if he wanted to send them out. But Radioslave responded immediately and asked if he could release them. “So he started the ball rolling, and it took two years for it to come out, and then it was smack-bang in the middle of COVID.”
Early Releases
As a shy kid who moved around a lot, Yves found production instantly appealing. “I wasn’t such a big talker,” he says. “I moved to lots of different schools, and I think that meant a part of me had gone inward, so realizing that I could make myself heard without having to talk was really attractive to me.”
He’d been plugging away at production for many years, but it wasn’t until 2020 that he felt ready to step into the spotlight. “I had to kind of experience and go through and figure out life before I could take flight,” he says
Yves’ Pilot EP came out on Radioslave’s Rekids in May 2020, and instantly won industry attention, especially from the heads. “It was really a producer EP,” he says. “It wasn’t about Spotify numbers. The record sold out, but the aim of it was to show my technical side.”
That won him instant respect in underground circles, and set the groundwork for what came next. He released tracks and EPs on Pyramids of Mars, Interlink Records and Rinse, but feels it’s only in the last two years he’d stepped into his full potential. “I’ve gone full-tilt - it feels like I’ve done the work now,” he says. “Before I wasn’t ready, and it’s tempting to force it when you’re young and if you have the talent, and people are giving you opportunities. I’m in a much better position to be present for it now and make the best of it.”
Plans for the Future
Yves’ artistry treads the line between low-tempo and experimental and bass-heavy club bangers. It’s a balancing act that very few artists could navigate, but Yves seems to do so with ease. That’s because there’s a collective energy that runs through his music – all of it embraces the unexpected, pushes boundaries and speaks straight to our emotions.
His 2024 Temper Ost EP packaged up his composition work for his Nowness film to create eight meticulously designed, ethereal tracks, while his PHRIDGE EP, out the same year, showcased a totally different creative spectrum, best described as deconstructed grime, breaks, and UKG.
Yves plays with the peripheries and boundaries of club music and underground culture with “The Original,” his latest release, out on Hypercolor in May 2025, marrying his penchant for left-field dub, grime, and UK bass. And for more of this energy, you can catch Yves on Rinse FM every month where he explores forward-thinking club music, or check out his debut mix on BBC coming soon.
