Dom Dolla doesn’t do many interviews, something he’s even said himself. So when the Australian hitmaker shared a full half-hour conversation alongside Tiga, hosted by New York’s Tia Ho, it delivered an inside look into Dom’s life that fans rarely get.
Filmed in a wood-paneled basement and structured more as a casual chat between friends than an interview, the chat ranges from ADHD and OCD to the gym being for losers, airline status wars, pub discos, and the accidental origins of some of both artists’ biggest records. Here are the moments worth knowing about.
Dom Dolla’s Fear of Doubt Creates Perfection
The interview’s most revealing thread is Dom speaking candidly about living with OCD. He’s dealt with it for years, calls it debilitating at times, and is quick to note it goes far beyond the clean-freak stereotype. The condition shows up in the studio as an inability to sit with doubt: the fear of not giving a record its best possible chance is what drives his obsessive testing of every vocal, drum and bassline. Near enough, he says, is not good enough. Tiga learned this the hard way, admitting he once texted “it’s good enough” mid-project and was swiftly overruled.
Tiga brings the opposite brain. After recognizing his own ADHD in Gabor Maté’s Scattered Minds book during lockdown, he now describes collaboration as a search for a traffic cop, someone whose discipline turns his flood of scattered ideas into order. In Dom, he found one, and something more: where Tiga always viewed Max Martin-style hit-making as voodoo, Dom showed him someone who actually unpacks the mechanics. His takeaway, delivered with a laugh: it actually takes work.
That chemistry produced ‘Don’t Worry Baby’, which was engineered with a deadline in mind. The record was built to premiere at Dom’s historic Allianz Stadium show in Sydney, and writing for 40,000 people pushed the sound design into some of the most aggressive territory of his career. The stadium visuals inspired the alien and laser imagery, which fed back into the lyrics: a fantasy of extraterrestrials rescuing us from a deteriorating world, deliberately spun as hope rather than doom.
The Hidden Dom Dolla Vocal in ‘Don’t Worry Baby’
Dom admits he hates the sound of his own voice on records, always pitching it up or processing it beyond recognition, and hiring singers to perform his toplines word for word. Tiga, funnily enough, started from the same place. He reveals he never imagined singing on a record until ‘Sunglasses at Night’, where he only stepped up to the mic because collaborator Jori Hulkkonen handled all the technical work, leaving idea, attitude and personality as his contribution. He hated the sound of his own voice too, then decided to lean into it, and the rest is one of dance music’s most recognizable vocal signatures.
Which makes the reveal all the sweeter: Dom’s voice is on ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ after all, layered quietly beneath Tiga’s because his collaborator didn’t send enough takes. An 11-year-old also gets partial credit for the final record: Tiga’s daughter walked away humming the female vocal hook after a single listen of the demo, which settled the argument over whether it stayed.
It’s not the first time Dom has smuggled himself into his own record. When Tia asks which of each other’s songs they wish they’d made, Tiga picks ‘girl$’, prompting Dom to confess that the robot-sounding B-section is actually his own processed voice. The vocal originally ran through the whole song before he asked his friend Caitlin Stubbs to re-sing it, and she nailed it.
Dom also breaks down his lyric-writing method as the three P’s: pitch, pocket and pronunciation. Melody and rhythm come first, hummed over the track, and the actual words get reverse-engineered to fit the story afterward. Tiga’s reveal in this stretch might be the quiet flex of the whole interview: Dom is only the second artist he has ever let write words on one of his songs. The first was LCD Soundsystem.
Pub Discos, a Strategic Mustache and Kicking Lionel Richie Off a Plane
The interview’s funniest stretch belongs to the origin stories. Dom has to explain the concept of a “pub disco” to Tia: take an old Melbourne pub, black out the windows, throw in a couple of strobes and a smoke machine, charge five bucks at the door and three bucks a pint. It’s about as far from Hï Ibiza as dance music gets, and Dom happily snuck into that scene underage before graduating to running the parties himself. That’s also where the mustache lore comes in. The youngest in his year level, he grew his now-signature mo at 17 in a failed bid to sneak into Byron Bay nightclubs, and it hasn’t left his top lip in the decades since.
Tiga matches him story for story. He confirms the legend that he once bumped Lionel Richie from a flight upgrade (“there can only be one”), then admits karma caught up when he recently tried to out-rank an elderly woman in a wheelchair, only to learn her husband was the highest-ranking Air Canada executive. He traces his lifelong Euro-glamour fixation to a childhood spent partly in Goa, India in the early ’80s, dreaming of becoming a James Bond villain, and confirms Tiga is his real birth name, an Indonesian nickname his parents borrowed from a traveler. The rapper Tyga, in his words, came after him. As for fitness, his position is firm: gyms are for losers, you’re only changing your body and not your brain, and raving counts as cardio. Dom counters that Tiga barely dances while DJing. Tiga insists he wiggles.
Dom Almost Never Released ‘Rhyme Dust’
The confession that will surprise fans most: ‘Rhyme Dust’, the Q-Tip-sampling MK collaboration that became one of the defining club records of Dom’s career, got almost no crowd response for six months. He came close to shelving it entirely before posting it online, where it found its audience, went viral, and transformed dance floors into what he calls absolute mayhem. He adds a telling industry footnote: once the record blew up, a suspicious influx of people suddenly claimed writing credits on the decades-old sample, none of whom had anything to do with the vocal he chopped.
The conversation closes on its warmest thought, courtesy of Tiga: making music with your friends as an adult is like winning the lottery. You tell your mom you’re going to a friend’s house, you hang out, you talk about your favorite records, and then you make a bassline.
‘Don’t Worry Baby’ is out now via Three Six Zero Recordings. Watch the full conversation below.
