LINNEY Is No Longer Just The Voice On The Record

For years, LINNEY built her place in electronic music through songwriting and vocals, hearing her voice travel through records by producers across very different corners of the scene. Now, the artist who once entered festivals primarily by walking onstage with someone else is increasingly stepping behind the decks herself.

That shift has accelerated quickly. LINNEY made her solo DJ debut at EDC Las Vegas in 2025, launched her own imprint Siren Records, began hosting a daily show on Insomniac Radio ONE, and continued expanding her identity beyond vocalist and songwriter. By 2026, she was playing multiple DJ sets aboard Groove Cruise, performing her own set at Ultra Music Festival and continuing to appear on some of dance music's biggest stages at the same time.

The interesting part is that becoming a DJ was never where the story started.

LINNEY grew up on ten acres of farmland in rural North Carolina in a family of scientists. Her father ran the Linney Lab at Duke University, while she gravitated toward performance. She appeared in plays and musicals at Carolina Friends School and remembers being an extremely shy child who found a different kind of confidence through music. In sixth grade, she was too nervous to tell a boy she liked him, but was willing to sing a song about it in front of the entire school.

By eighth grade, she was asking her parents for a recording studio for Christmas. What arrived was an old laptop, a MOTU audio interface and a Shure SM58 microphone. She spent her free time writing and recording songs, playing piano and guitar, making mixtapes and performing along with her favorite records. In her own words, music has always been how she translates the world.

She was also highly competitive outside music, running cross-country and playing soccer through high school. After experiencing episodes where she would pass out at the finish line, she learned she had been born with a heart condition involving two holes in her heart. Soccer also helped give her the name she would eventually use professionally. Her teammates called her by her last name: Linney.

At first, her professional future seemed headed toward musical theater. LINNEY was accepted early action into Emerson College's BFA Musical Theater program and moved to Boston, but eventually began questioning whether that path reflected the kind of artist she wanted to become. She wanted honesty, authenticity and emotional connection rather than feeling like she was learning to become a caricature, so she left the traditional BFA route and built her own academic direction, including classes at Berklee College of Music through the ProArts consortium and direct study with composer Scott Wheeler. Her final semester included an internship in Warner Music's sync licensing department in Los Angeles.

After graduating magna cum laude, she drove across the country from North Carolina to Los Angeles with her father and everything she owned packed into the car. Acting remained part of the plan briefly, but she disliked the audition process and turned fully toward music, supporting herself through coffee shop and restaurant jobs and working as a nanny while continuing to write.

Her first releases looked very different from the dance music associated with LINNEY today. She crowdfunded an EP and later released country-pop under her full name, Caitlin Linney, winning the Texaco Country Showdown with Los Angeles radio station GO COUNTRY 105, opening for Josh Turner and Easton Corbin and singing the National Anthem at what is now Crypto.com Arena. Her song “Heartbeat” was dedicated to the Duke University doctors who saved her father's life, and the video continued to play at the Duke Heart Center.

But country was not the final destination. LINNEY did not want to move to Nashville, and she felt some of the country elements being added to her records were becoming forced. She pivoted toward indie pop instead, releasing the EPs Things We Say and Things We Do and touring with a live band. “Coming Back For More” won the John Lennon Songwriting Contest, while the electronic-pop song “That Night” landed on Spotify's New Music Friday in the United States.

That track quietly opened a completely different door.

Dance labels began reaching out and asking LINNEY for songs. She would send piano and vocal ideas that were then developed into electronic records and played at festivals, but at the time she did not fully understand the scene surrounding them. She would occasionally see performance videos online without realizing what those moments meant to the people inside the crowd.

Then she saw one herself.

LINNEY was tagged in footage of Gareth Emery playing one of her songs to a massive festival crowd. A few months later, his team reached out about collaborating, resulting in “Yesterday.” Only a month after that, she flew to Minneapolis for what would also become her first rave, except she was not experiencing it somewhere in the audience. Gareth Emery brought LINNEY and NASH onto the stage at The Armory to perform the collaboration for roughly 6,000 people.

The energy changed her understanding of electronic music.

She also watched Tritonal that night and connected with the pop sensibility of their set. Later that year, LINNEY attended Dreamstate with close friend and collaborator Leena Regan. Inspired by the festival, they went into the studio that same week and wrote “Electric Kids.” Enhanced Music, Tritonal's label, showed interest, and the track eventually entered the Billboard dance charts and received rotation on SiriusXM BPM.

Just as that world was beginning to open, the pandemic shut it down.

LINNEY signed a publishing deal during COVID, lost her day jobs and decided she needed to find a way to make music her full-time life. She wrote remotely with people around the

world through Zoom and, almost quietly in the background, started learning how to DJ and performing on Twitch. One of the songs she loved singing during those streams was “Everytime We Touch,” the track she says originally made her fall in love with dance music before she even knew to call it dance music.

What looked like a lockdown experiment would eventually become one of the biggest transformations of her career.

Before that DJ chapter fully emerged, her reputation as a vocalist and songwriter continued growing. A record deal with Helix brought the solo EPs Desert Dream and We Dance, while performances with Champagne Drip took her to Electric Zoo and House of Blues Anaheim.

Another major step came through MaRLo. After performing Avicii's “Wake Me Up” with him at ASOT 1000 in Los Angeles and EDC Las Vegas, LINNEY was invited onto his Altitude World Tour in 2023, joining dates in Sydney, Melbourne, Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta. Just before the tour, however, she tore her ACL. Rather than immediately undergoing surgery, she began physical therapy, delayed the procedure and completed the international dates before returning home for surgery.

During that period, she also released “Desire” with Nicky Romero and TELYKast. The record later spent four weeks at No. 1 on SiriusXM BPM and was named the No. 5 song on BPM's Top 52 of 2024. Her performance of “Desire” with Nicky Romero at Ultra Miami became her first major performance following surgery. Still early in recovery, LINNEY needed assistance getting onto the stage and had been instructed by her doctors not to jump.

Then another unexpected moment changed the direction of her music.

Shortly after the performance, heavy rain hit Ultra and the festival was eventually shut down for the day. LINNEY was inside Blanke's trailer when the cancellation became official and heard the legal phrase “act of god” used in connection with what was happening outside. It immediately stayed with her.

She turned the phrase into “Act of God,” sent the song to Layton Giordani, who produced it, and eventually watched John Summit tease the record in his sets for roughly six months. In January 2025, it was released through Summit's Experts Only label.

The following year became the moment the different versions of LINNEY started merging.

“Act of God” entered the Billboard dance charts, giving her a second dance-chart entry after “Electric Kids,” while CamelPhat later remixed the track. She was selected for EDM.com's Class of 2025 and won Breakout Female Vocalist at the 2025 EDM Awards.

But the bigger story was no longer only what she was accomplishing as a vocalist.

In April, she began hosting Linney on ONE, her daily show on Insomniac Radio ONE. The platform gave her another way to participate in dance culture, talking about music discovery, creativity, mental health and stories from within electronic music while making a deliberate effort to spotlight the songwriters and vocalists who can be overlooked behind producer-led releases.

Then came EDC Las Vegas 2025.

After years of appearing at festivals primarily to sing collaborations, LINNEY returned in a completely different role and made her solo DJ debut. It was a full-circle moment, but also a clear indication that the DJing she had quietly started learning during lockdown was no longer a side experiment.

That same summer, she released “The Crown” and officially launched Siren Records, creating a home for her solo releases and a way to build the emotional, vocal-forward and cinematic side of the LINNEY project independently. She continued developing her live identity behind the decks while opening for artists including Robin Schulz, Laidback Luke and Steve Aoki.

At the same time, she was not abandoning the collaborative side that had brought her into electronic music. In October 2025, LINNEY released “Friends” with Subtronics, one of the most important collaborations of her career. The record eventually took her onto stages with him at the Las Vegas Sphere, The Shrine in Los Angeles and Coachella's Sahara Tent in 2026.

That is what makes the current LINNEY story more interesting than a simple transition from vocalist to DJ.

She is not replacing one identity with another. She is expanding it.

By 2026, the expansion was visible almost everywhere. LINNEY opened the year with three DJ sets aboard Groove Cruise Miami, earning an invitation to return for the 2027 sailing. At the EDM Awards, “Act of God” won House Song of the Year while “Friends” with Subtronics took the Dubstep/Bass category. She was also nominated for Vocalist of the Year.

During Miami Music Week, she played her own DJ set at Ultra Music Festival, then stepped onto Ultra's mainstage to perform “Heaven” with Steve Aoki and played an additional set at E11EVEN Miami. The same year brought “Afterlife” with Jai Wolf and a growing series of solo records through Siren Records, including “wontletgo,” “HALO,” “slow burn” and “better angels.” “HALO” entered the Dance 100 and received rotation on Diplo's Revolution and DANCE 89.5.

The solo material also reinforces something that has followed LINNEY since childhood: songs still begin with stories. “slow burn” took inspiration from Sarah J. Maas' A Court of Thorns and Roses series and Rebecca Yarros' Fourth Wing, while “better angels” was inspired by a phrase her father used.

Coachella offered another surreal snapshot of her increasingly multidimensional career. LINNEY joined Subtronics during his Sahara Tent set while also hearing her voice appear in Kaskade's Coachella performance. At EDC Las Vegas, she hosted the official festival aftershows through Insomniac Radio, presented a special fireworks broadcast, played a DJ set at Forest House, interviewed Armin van Buuren and returned to the mainstage as a vocalist with Steve Aoki for “Heaven.”

The summer continued in the same fashion. She opened for Aoki at Piknic Électronik in Montreal and joined him for “Heaven” at both the festival and its New City Gas afterparty. She later opened for Laidback Luke at Academy LA, played direct support for Cheat Codes at Nebula in New York and joined a SHIFT NYC panel discussing music's ability to bring people together.

In July, “A Little Bit,” her collaboration with Kaskade and Crankdat, arrived after first being heard at Coachella. LINNEY also appeared on Nurko's 2026 album SOLSTICE with its closing track, “Wish You Well.”

Look at the full picture and the evolution becomes clearer.

The shy kid who used songs to say what she could not say aloud became a songwriter. The musical theater student who wanted something more honest became a solo artist. The country and indie-pop singer who was still searching for the right home found electronic music. The vocalist who attended her first rave while performing for 6,000 people eventually started learning how to DJ alone during lockdown.

And the person who spent years walking onto festival stages with a microphone is now increasingly walking onto them with the entire set in her hands.

That evolution does not erase what came before. LINNEY continues to write, sing and collaborate while simultaneously becoming a DJ, producer, radio host and label founder. Her project has grown because those identities are beginning to exist together rather than competing with one another.

Which makes her latest solo chapter particularly revealing.

“TOUGH LOVE,” dated August 7, 2026 in the material provided for this feature, turns away from the visible milestones and toward what pursuing them has actually felt like. The song deals with rejection, burnout, comparison, disappointment and the fear of not being enough. It explores the complicated relationship an artist can develop with a craft that provides purpose and identity while also having the ability to test their confidence.

After Billboard records, awards, festival mainstages, major collaborations, a label, a radio show and a rapidly growing DJ career, the song deliberately avoids presenting perseverance as the absence of fear.

For LINNEY, it is about continuing while the fear is still there.

That makes the current chapter feel connected to almost everything that came before it. Her career has involved changing direction repeatedly, from musical theater to country, country to indie pop, songwriter to electronic vocalist, and eventually vocalist to something much larger.

The point of the story is not that every turn worked immediately.

It is that she kept taking the next one.

As the message behind “TOUGH LOVE” puts it, this chapter is not simply about saying “she won.”

It is about being able to say:

“She didn’t quit.”