The Blessed Madonna: “There’s never been a moment where I wasn’t learning something; this album is the sound of that”30-plus years into a storied DJ career, Blessed Madonna has finally dropped her debut studio album, Godspeed, on October 18 via Warner Records. 24 house-infused tracks (six of which are playful interludes) feature a diverse group of collaborators including Chicago house OG Jamie Principle, dance pop queen Kylie Minogue, Chicago funk artist Ric Wilson and London dance duo Joy Anonymous, and explore classic house, gospel house, underground rave sounds and beyond.
“Ahh, it hurts when I say it out loud. [30 years] is a whole person,” the Kentucky-born producer, real name Marea Stamper, exclaims on a video call from her home in London. “The great thing is that there’s never been a moment where I wasn’t learning something new. In some ways, this album is the sound of that. It’s me bumbling my way through trying to learn how to make every record that I love.”

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For example, the whistling flutes in the sunny, euphoric rave anthem Serotonin Moonbeams nods to Frankie Knuckles’ 1991 house classic The Whistle Song, while the lyrics (“Ecstasy technology, M-D-M-A-S-M-R”) harken back to Stamper’s youthful rave memories. The experience of creating the song (and much of the album) was as playful and expansive as the track itself. A few days after sharing Thanksgiving dinner together, she sat in the studio with rising dance duo Joy Anonymous, DJ/producer Karma Kid, and dance songwriter Jin Jin — her core creative brain trust on the project — all adding to each other’s ideas and giddily shouting out lyrics.
“When people ask how a song gets made, the real answer is that it shows up and you are kind of a witness to it. That really is what this album is,” says Stamper. “I’m just a product of all of the sounds that I’ve heard before — like that sample on Endtroducing by DJ Shadow — and all the DJs that I’ve loved. These little homages are inside of [Godspeed].”
She cites the wide-ranging six-hour sets from Laurent Garnier and Mr. Scruff in her early Chicago days as deeply influential to her approach to DJing. Now, this omnivorous approach to dance music has bubbled up in her approach to production, as she wove her inspirations together on her debut album.
Image: Aldo Paredes
“I couldn’t not make a house album,” the Happier producer emphasizes when asked if she set out to make a house LP. “But just like a DJ set, we’re going to go from James Ruskin to Patrick Cowley; I just wanted to show how all those things are connected.”
The three-year journey of making the project came with significant growth and exploration for Stamper as a producer. The sessions marked the first time she sat in a room with a group of people to songwrite collaboratively, which she says initially felt like “peeing with the door open” but turned into creative moments and friendships she cherishes. While she’s been tapped to remix major pop stars including Dua Lipa — even executive producing the underground-DJ-heavy remix album, Club Future Nostalgia – Ariana Grande and Florence + the Machine, she hadn’t recorded with vocalists before Godspeed.
“Secretariat [track 20 on Godspeed] was the first time I ever wrote words and melody,” says Stamper. “I wrote all of that myself and then had to walk Shaun [J. Wright] through what I wanted him to do. That was really terrifying for me, but Shaun and I were close enough that I felt comfortable.”
“Before this album, I had [produced] tracks with people but that is a very different process than writing song songs. It was all kind of like, ‘Yeah, sure, I can do that,’ which, of course, you don’t know if you can or not. But I did,” she notes with a chuckle.
Image: Aldo Paredes
Godspeed came with a lot of learning-on-the-go as a producer. A lot of it was made in the box, using esoteric methods to get the sounds she desired. For example, she wanted an orchestra and choir on the gospel house number Brand New, but instead asked every Godspeed collaborator that came through to sing the parts, building her own faux-choir. For the old-school record scratches, Fool’s Gold Records head and champion turntablist A-Trak recorded and sent some over in the eleventh hour.
“Faking an orchestra was wonderful. I went from not writing songs for people to doing proper, professional-level vocal arrangement just by sitting around and watching other people. But also, I grew up in church. If you’re from Kentucky, the four- to six-part harmony is just what we call Christmas,” she recalls with a laugh. “So much of [Godspeed] is just so humble. Whoever was there [in the studio] was working on their laptop.”
As for hardware, Stamper uses an old Roland Juno-106, a Moog Grandmother, a “bootleg” 909 drum machine and was recently, toward the end of the LP process, gifted a Teenage Engineering EP–133 K.O.II sampler by her husband Vadim. (He makes a guest appearance rocking a custom Godspeed belt buckle on the single’s cover art and the back of the vinyl version of the album.)
For plugins, she likes layering Sonic Academy’s Kick 2’s slam and kick drums, and uses a TR-909 emulator. “Pretty much any kick drum on [the album] is like five kick drums. I used a 909 emulator because I couldn’t afford a real 909 and the emulator actually is easier to use, and nobody ever sends me gear. I just want to say to anyone that’s reading: I make records for a lot of people, and it would be super cool if you wanted to send me gear like you do other people, whoever’s listening,” she says with a wink.
The Blessed Madonna with Karma Kid, Pat Alvarez, Jin Jin, Uffie and Joy Anonymous. Image: The Blessed Madonna
She also loves Audiorealism’s emulators — the ABL Pro semi-modular synth and the ABM drum machine, which has sounds of Roland’s TR-606, TR-808 and TR-909 — and has used them since she first started producing. (She admits they were bootleg copies back then, while she’s happy to be able to give them her money now.) Stamper also uses SoundToys’ AlterBoy and Decapitator, plus “all of the Arturia [plugins].”
“Half the tracks on the album are just run through Decapitator 25 times. I also used [SoundToys’] Radiator on everything,” the Strength (R U Ready) producer says. The latter trick came from Atlanta-based wildcard DJ/producer Nikki Nair, and his “complete lack of fear around distortion and saturation.”
“There are little pieces of all kinds of people that changed me forever: Nikki Nair, Dance System, Joy Anonymous,” continues Stamper. “It’s a pretty extraordinary thing to be able to sit with Paul Epworth — he [co-]wrote [Adele’s] Rolling In The Deep — I want to know what he knows, I want to know what James Vincent McMorrow knows.” One of those things is a recording and audio engineering feat that has always fascinated her; the impossibly close and clean claps on D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, a classic album she cites as a reference point for mixing, use of space, placing of mics and more. McMorrow, who sings on Brand New, actually learned the handclap trick from someone who worked on the album and taught her, to her astonishment.
“You put your hand right next to the microphone [and clap quietly]. You record it with high gain, so you’re getting almost no reflection; it [sounds] like the clap is almost inside you. If you get two or three people to do it at exactly the same time, it sounds like this perfect clap,” she explains.

Another musical hero she brought on to the album was Chicago house luminary, Jamie Principle, whose iconic voice takes centre stage on We Still Believe. The original version came out in 2013 — one of the first tracks she ever made — and featured her own voice recorded on a BlackBerry phone, an acid line from a bootleg version of ABL Pro and strings from Apple Logic Pro 9. “I will always be obsessed with Jamie Principle… I wanted to make a record that sounded a little bit like Dan Bell, but what if Jamie Principle was on it?” Stamper reflects, underscoring the personal significance of including him on it later. After meeting and bonding with Principle at a Midsommar-evoking chalet they stayed in for a Sweden festival they both played, she asked him to record the vocals for the track.
Back in 2013, she was excited that anyone wanted to release her music and sold the rights to We Still Believe for just 300 dollars. Later, her management helped her buy it back and, shortly after, she licensed the version featuring the Chicago legend — the same iconic voice behind Baby Wants To Ride and Waiting on My Angel — to Grand Theft Auto, an understandably surreal experience.
“I bought my catalogue back and licensed it to Grand Theft Auto 36 hours later, which was a really nice thing. It felt good to own my own stuff and be able to control it,” the producer says.
She also sent tracks to producers she knows and admires to get another pair of ears on it. We Still Believe is now in its third iteration, after getting the Soulwax touch.”If you want to make a record sound great, send it to Soulwax because their audio chain is great,” Stamper asserts. The legendary brother duo added a chugging, sparkling finish to the tune and uncovered ad-libs (including “We have the right to resist… This racist fascist shit”) from Principle that gave the track an extra kick.

“Dance music can seem so superficial because you are talking about this party, but there’s always this other layer to it, this place just underneath the surface. Think about You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) by Sylvester. Boy. It’s got all the standard lines about being in a dance club, and then it hits, “You make me feel, mighty real.” That line is 1,000 pounds; it has the whole universe contained in it. I’m always wanting to find that feather that weighs a ton.”
“House music, dance music, is about comforting people but also making people uncomfortable.”
For an album that stitches together deliciously hedonistic dance pop, glitchy underground rave tunes, soulful gospel house, and messages of hope, triumph and freedom, it’s safe to say The Blessed Madonna has done that with Godspeed.
“I’m just trying to make records that express what it’s like to be on this earth, in my very, very short time here. Each one of us is a tiny little blip, and I would like my blip to be funky.”
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