Tjade And Kara Okay find common ground on Holding On / You Make Me Say
Night has always suited Amsterdam’s dance music best. Not because the city moves faster after dark, but because it softens. Edges blur. Melodies linger longer than they should. Somewhere inside that space, Tjade and Kara Okay found common ground.
Their first collaborative EP, Holding On / You Make Me Say, arrives via Agrio Tracks as the label’s fifteenth release, pulling together two producers who approach club music from slightly different angles yet arrive at a similar emotional temperature. Released on 21 May, the project folds euphoric house, early trance references and bright progressive textures into two tracks designed less for peak-time impact than for momentum. Music built for movement that stretches across entire nights rather than isolated moments.
There is a looseness to both records that feels intentional. Holding On leans into tension and release with the kind of melodic lift that has become closely associated with Tjade’s productions over recent years, while You Make Me Say opens things up further, allowing more air between the drums and synth lines. Together, the tracks sit comfortably inside the emotional logic of European summer club culture: long transitions, warm mornings, festivals that dissolve into afterhours without warning.
The collaboration also feels timely. Tjade has spent the last decade refining a sound that reconnects contemporary house music with the emotional directness of early progressive and trance without slipping into nostalgia bait. Through Agrio Tracks, he has gradually built a catalogue that prioritises feeling over cool detachment, platforming records that embrace melody without apology.
Kara Okay arrives naturally within that world. Since his first releases in 2024, the Amsterdam producer has developed a growing reputation for energetic, piano-led productions that pull from ’90s house, rave and garage without treating those references as costume. There is weightlessness in his music, but also restraint. Tracks that understand euphoria only works when tension remains underneath it.
Support from DJs including Job Jobse, DJ Heartstring, Benwal, LAMMER and Kyle Starkey has already pushed the EP into clubs before release, though the record itself avoids sounding engineered for immediate reaction. Instead, it carries the feeling of two artists finding overlap in real time.
Kara Okay describes the sessions simply: “The best tracks are often made in one day. We were lucky enough to make two. It felt like euphoria, melancholy and groove came together naturally.” Tjade approaches it with even less ceremony: “Making music is fun. Making music with friends is even better.”
That informality matters. Agrio Tracks was never positioned as a traditional imprint chasing scale or algorithmic visibility. Inspired by the atmosphere of Patmos and named after Agrio Livadi beach, the label was conceived more as a refuge than a brand identity, shaped around accessibility and creative openness at a time when dance music infrastructure can often feel transactional and distant.
The release arrives ahead of the next Agrio Club event at Lofi on 20 June, another extension of the wider community orbiting around the label. Less a fixed scene than an evolving network of artists connected through shared emotional language.
For both producers, Holding On / You Make Me Say feels less like a statement than a continuation. Two artists operating inside the same current, allowing melody and velocity to carry the conversation forward.
