Thaiboy Digital has found his paradise

Thaiboy Digital has changed his name again.

Born Khazitin Bonleunge, he later became Thanapat Bunleang and has also used the surname Thaothawong. His new name, which he assures me I can’t pronounce in Thai, means “seeker of wisdom.” He’s had other monikers over the years — Thaiboy Goon, DJ Billybool, the Legendary Member — but his friends have always called him Nino.

Read Next: The album that sparked the Drain Gang revolution

Everyone in Thailand has a nickname, he explains, because Thai names are so long and complex that even native speakers struggle with them. “That’s just how it works,” he says matter-of-factly on a bench in Brooklyn Bridge Park. He’s dressed unassumingly, though a keen observer might clock his silver rings, Cuban links, and half-bleached, slicked-back hair as marks of stardom. Minutes earlier, in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge, he and his wife Darajan (nickname Cartoon) tried horchata for the first time. It’s a mid-70s, mostly sunny afternoon in New York City, another day in paradise.

Thaiboy now enjoys horchata, but it’s not his Mexican beverage of choice. In a few days from now, before performing for a packed house in Bushwick, he’ll drink at least five Micheladas in the green room, maybe 10 if he’s got an hour to kill. “I will drink as many Micheladas as I can. Everywhere,” he says. He began this practice in 2022, when his tour manager introduced him to the popular Clamato version of the drink. He’s had the ingredients on his rider ever since.

His nine North American shows in May and June are proving grounds for his new LP Paradise, a departure from the moody Swedish rap he helped pioneer in the early 2010s with Bladee, Ecco2k, and Whitearmor as Drain Gang. Recorded in collaboration with the ⅔-Swedish trio swedm® (best known for their contributions to the most recent Skrillex album), Paradise pays tribute to the electronic dance music that soundtracked his teenage years in Stockholm and the joyful 3cha sounds that saved his soul when he returned to Thailand in his early 20s.

When he dropped the new LP on May 8, he wasn’t sure how it would sit with Drain Gang’s cultish following. “There’s a certain aesthetic to our fans,” he says. “I didn’t know how much EDM they listened to.”

He shouldn’t have worried. Days later in Brooklyn, as he stalked the stage in mostly denim, performing older trap hits and newer dance cuts, a sea of euphoric Zoomers hung on his every word. “It’s so wrong but feels so right / Is this life as life goes by,” he sang, harmonizing with Bladee’s hook on “Irish Tears,” a progressive house song that feels like walking out of the club and into the sunrise. “Only gold shines in my eyes / Not one flaw’s within my sight.”

Thaiboy’s life story is baked into Drain Gang’s lore by now. He moved to Sweden at 8 years old with his mother and swiftly adapted to this alien landscape, learning not only Swedish and English but also the unwritten social mores of his new culture. In the midst of Drain Gang’s quick ascent to cult status online in the early 2010s, the Swedish government told him he needed to exit the country. It was 2013 and he’d turned 18; with his mother back in Thailand, he had no legal grounds to stay. “The world shattered,” he says. “Growing up, you think everything’s gonna be OK: Do good and good things will happen. Then, out of nowhere, it’s over.”

The first few weeks at his mother’s home in Phuket were hard. After meeting some major players in the Bangkok rap scene, he relocated to the country’s capital and once again remolded himself within a new community, though he still kept close with his Drain Gang affiliates. In summer 2019, Thaiboy, Bladee, Ecco, and Whitearmor rented a villa on Ko Pha-ngan, an island in the Gulf of Thailand they’d go on to call both a “paradise island” and the eponymous “trash island” of the album they made there. The beauty and darkness of this formative trip have been highlighted elsewhere in the Drain Gang universe, too. “It’s bad, even on a paradise island,” Bladee rapped in 2023. “I’m in hell in my mind, even if I’m smiling.”

Thaiboy’s paradise is far less moody. The songs on his new album recall a simpler time in Scandinavia when Swedish House Mafia, Avicii, and Basshunter ruled the airways. Ironically, it was in Bangkok that Thaiboy first connected with the genre (Thaiboy and his friends were still kids during the country’s golden years of EDM). His first months in the city were characterized by constant clubbing: hours became days and days became weeks. But these nights of nonstop debauchery brought him back to the sounds that existed in the periphery of his past life.

At the same time, he was rediscovering 3cha, a genre that blends the folk music of his youth — when he’d ride to rural Isan with his father’s family for molam jams that ran from evening till sunrise — with Latin rhythms, pop vocal samples, and old-school synths. In Bangkok, the 3cha parties happened after the clubs closed, serving up a salvation European dance music couldn’t offer. “It’s like medicine,” he says of the 3cha. “If you’re feeling down, it can fix your situation.”

A deeper confluence incited Thaiboy to begin making EDM of his own. In the fall of 2019, as he mourned the death of his close friend Isak, he and Darajan had their first daughter. Overwhelmed “with all of these feelings I couldn’t express in words,” he says, he dreamed of Isak coming to him in a beam of pure energy to show him a new way to make music. Later, as he watched his newborn daughter in the hospital, Thaiboy noticed that her heart rate was 138 beats per minute: the pulse of Eurodance. In 2019, under a new name, DJ Billybool, he began releasing dance music of his own creation, singing in Swedish on 138bpm tracks.

Billybool showed the world a side of Thaiboy they’d never seen. Under the moniker, he released an EP in 2020 and a full-length album, DYR (Dream Your Reality), in 2025. Produced by Eurohead, that project put Thaiboy’s syrupy vocals against gleefully goofy Eurodance instrumentals. He says he created Billybool to “speak to the homie in the sky and make him proud,” referring to Isak. The project’s success was the last piece he needed to merge his identities and bring his newer sound to his international fanbase. Shortly after DYR’s release, Thaiboy flew swedm® — Eurohead plus frequent Drain Gang collaborator Varg²™ and Aussie beatmaker jamesjamesjames — to Phuket to realize his dream.

In a skit at the start of Paradise, Thaiboy plays a taxi driver, humming a tune by the seminal Thai rock band Carabao as his car idles. The door opens, and he’s startled by a young man stepping in from the rain. “I gotta rush to Paradise,” the man says in Thai. “Can you take me there?” Getting there is free, the driver says, but the trip back will cost him his memories. “It’s like a week-long bender,” Thaiboy says of the record’s loose concept in our interview. “You can come back, but you won’t remember it.”

Paradise plays out this fantasy as well as any album could. The intro is followed by 36 minutes of blissful hedonism, with tracks like “Christian Louboutin,” “Euro Dollar Yen,” and “Money Dance” pairing trap flexes with melodramatic crescendoes and drops. Embedded near the album’s center, “Irish Tears” is a moment of introspection, a pang of nostalgia, a twinge of heartbreak in the middle of the rave. “Those are the best type of EDM songs,” Thaiboy says. “You get sad because it’s so beautiful. That’s what an Irish tear should be, seeing something so beautiful it makes you shed a tear.”

When Thaiboy talks about paradise, he’s speaking literally. His new album’s cover is based on a photo shot by Bladee on Koh Samui, a sister island of Ko Pha-ngan (and the setting of White Lotus’s third season). It depicts a perfect sunset reflected in Thaiboy’s mirrored shades. “When you go back to the biblical stuff, the Garden of Eden, there’s not a lot of depictions of how paradise looks,” he says. “I wanted to create that.”

Thaiboy has dreamed his reality and is living his dream: he has a beautiful family, his own record label (Bank of Star Sound System), friends who fly across the world for him, and a flourishing solo career. He sees no dissonance between his love of raving — of 10 pre-show Micheladas, of weeklong benders — and his life as a father and businessman. “I go back to what Gucci Mane said, which works with almost everything in life: You gotta have the sauce, but you can’t get lost in the sauce,” he says. “All that fun, you bring it back to your family in a different way.”

He sees abundance all around him, but there’s a sense of longing on Paradise he has a hard time vocalizing. He no longer pines for Sweden, he says, because home is wherever he and his family can build a future together. Right now, he’s more interested in shaking things up, moving somewhere with a language none of them speak and customs none of them understand. “If anything, I long to be back in the unknown,” he says, “to stir up my head and create something new.”