At present, there are hundreds of thousands of people sitting at their desk jobs, headphones on, listening to John Summit. It’s very likely that the vast majority of them admire him. It’s also not unlikely that a significant portion of them think that given a little push, access to Ableton, and a small taste of the algorithmic ambrosia, they could do what he does. There’s this earnest, everyman commercial appeal to John Summit, the DJ and house producer that your mothers and cousins and coworkers and little brothers have been bumping for the past year and a half. On paper, John Summit, born John Walter Schuster in Naperville, Illinois, is the liege of every frat DJ’s wet dreams. Boyish, openfaced, jocular. Delta Tau Delta at the University of Illinois. Was a bartender and an accountant until he realized that the nine to five life wasn’t for him and started making music full-time. This year alone—merely four years after his 2020 breakout single, “Deep End,”—he’s performed to crowds in the tens of thousands at Coachella, EDC, and Madison Square Garden. He released a full-length album, Comfort in Chaos, that garnered hundreds of millions of streams less than three months after being made available online.

If you’re sitting in a cubicle, skin turning translucent under the gentle erosion of daily fluorescent lights, and thinking If only I had access to a mixer! I have to break this to you. You can not do what John Summit does. Nearly nobody can do what John Summit does. John Summit is a maniac. 

“People always called me crazy,” Summit tells me when we speak in early August, about a month after the release of the aforementioned first full-length album, Comfort in Chaos. “And I’m always like, ‘Yeah. Hey, I am crazy.” We’re talking about his creative inception. Everyone knows that Summit, who produces deep house that appeals to even the most techno-averse listener, is a beneficiary of the pandemic-era TikTok music boom that allowed artists with songs with particularly catchy viral segments direct (and sometimes surprising) access to megastardom. Summit’s endemic synths and exuberant charm didn’t hurt when Summit’s initial offering hit the TikTok charts, but what also didn’t hurt? Summit’s dogged dedication to output. “it’s funny to me when artists say they’re going on tour bc i don’t think i’ve ever once stopped touring,” he tweeted recently. It’s true—in the second half of 2021, Summit was performing six shows a month on average. In 2022, the artist appeared at over 220 shows. He taught Ableton classes 3 days a week for a year and a half. He made a track nearly every day of the pandemic, which he shamelessly and relentlessly sent to his favorite Chicago-based DJs, hoping something would land.

“Jamie Jones went to Spy Bar, which is the local club that I was playing at in Chicago, and he was the headliner. I kept sending emails of my demos that I hoped he would play,” Summit tells me. He wasn’t signed to any major record label at the time–instead, he played a risky gambit: if one track could be broadcasted by a larger DJ, and the audience took their fancy to it, more would follow. “He opened his set with one of my songs, and then played eight more of my songs throughout the set.” Summit says.

Since 2020’s “Deep End,” Summit has secured himself a top spot in the house music/EDM circuit. He’s worked alongside powerhouses among the likes of Sub Focus and Dom Dolla. He’s performed alongside his once-idols, Green Velvet, Gene Farris, and Lee Foss. Now, at the pinnacle of his success, he’s started his own label, Experts Only, in hopes of giving other burgeoning DJs the same shot he was given. “I throw my own events, but it's really just looking for like-minded artists who don't have as big of a platform as I do,” he tells me of the label. True to his word, the label’s website has a button plastered on the upper corner of the homepage: Send Demo. “I look for artists who I see myself in, and also who are just making banging records that can work for my sets. Then, it’s fun, they will play their sets before me and they will crush it, and so I gotta come on afterward and crush it even harder. It keeps me young. It keeps my drive up.”

Known for his atmospheric, rapturous soundscapes, Summit pays particular attention to the locations at which he throws events. Experts Only has thrown events at caverns in Tennessee and atop mountains in Tahoe and Vail. “I would love to do an intimate, 300-person show at a planetarium and go crazy with the visuals there,” he tells me. “I just have big, crazy ideas for the future, like turning an album into a whole movie or a short film,” Summit says. The DJ seems like he’s always, always, on. 

Throughout our conversation, it’s made increasingly evident that this is indeed the case. He tells me, “I have to arrive to the studio already inspired. To get inspired, you have to take time off.” Understandable, coming from an artist who has plastered his name and likeness across show flyers and Instagram posts and TikToks and tweets and remixes for nearly three years straight.

Summit’s idea of taking time off, though? More music. “I was just in Ibiza for a week and then Mykonos for a week, and when I was in Ibiza, I went to the clubs every single night and just took in the music, and even did my market research. I was like, ‘What's working here? What are people liking?’” The summation of Summit’s market research: “DJs can get pretty complacent,” he tells me. “A big thing right now is Afro house, which I love, but some of the Afro house demos sound exactly like the guys who are big in it. It sounds like they’re just copying them. I was in Mykonos and Ibiza and every single beach club I went to was playing Afro house,” he says. He’s definitely against this copycat trend, it seems. He tweets: “goin thru promos right now.. not everything needs an afro house remix lol.”

Summit’s social media presence is formidable—his blunt, conversational style online is flagged by some as endearingly candid; by others, sticky. He’s gone viral for his personality almost as many times as he’s gone viral for his music. Recently, for admitting that he’s never gotten a woman flowers (“Well because, like, unless they’re asking for it, why would you just give it?” he queries on Jake Shane’s podcast), or earlier, for tweeting about a legal dispute between himself and a small promoter, who were both vying for the name of the “Off the Grid” brand. (He later apologized. “All we want now is for our communities to come together and dance as one,” he tweeted after). When we speak of how his career, and himself, have matured in the past couple of years, he laughs. “[After COVID] I feel like a lot of people didn't know how to act, me included. But now I feel like people have grown and matured with me,” he says. “When you expand so rapidly, you don't really have a choice of what and who your crowd is.”

John Summit comes from Chicago, where “house music was literally born,” as he tells me, but he’s living in Miami now. He’s traveling to London, where singles “Shiver” and “Palm of My Hands” were written. He’s traveling to Los Angeles to play the Kia Forum in November. He’s “doing market research” in Ibiza and Mykonos. John Summit’s job, literally, is to cultivate a good time, across all continents. Indeed, Summit is the warm, open, Midwestern face of a good time.  How does he know when it’s time to go home? “I’m probably not the right person to ask that,” he tells me. 

“No one wants a good night to end, and it's tough. One of the things I have to struggle with is having these amazing parties and then going home by myself in a hotel room. It'll be like 6 AM and I’m like, ‘Do I call people over and keep it going? Or do I actually call it?’ It's just such a huge adrenaline spike when you're on stage with all those people. To just to go to nothing afterward is kind of a mind fuck,” he says.

John Summit can’t halt the miraculous hurricane of attention, endless parties, champagne showers that he created for himself—he won’t. He won’t take back the hours spent sending repeat emails to DJs in hopes that they’d play his tracks, won’t go back on his pandemic production frenzy. Instead, he’s adjusting to where he is, now. Comfort in Chaos confronts this ecstatic lonesomeness, that stomach-clenching dopamine draught after the yearslong outpouring of love and attention. “Every month, it’s something new,” Summit tells me. “I love it. I live for this.”

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Photographed by Max Montgomery

Styled by Gorge Villalpando 

Written by Annie Bush

Grooming: Sonia Lee for Exclusive Artists using Kevin Murphy

Stylist Assistants: Cam Garcia, Beck Dobrzanski, and Gia Knight