When Nelly Furtado laid eyes on Dom Dolla, it was total respect at first sight. The feeling was mutual.
The “Maneater” singer collaborated with Dolla, the superstar Australian producer and DJ, on 2023’s “Eat Your Man” – her first release in six years – and they’ve owned the stage at Beyond the Valley and Lollapalooza.
“For me,” Furtado told Rolling Stone AU/NZ, “I wanted to work with him within 20 seconds of first hearing his music. I think he has the greatest taste in the world; he can hear subtlety in music and that is a gift not everyone has. It’s like the gift of calculated restraint, combined with pure soul. And I fucking love his approach to bass! So signature.”
The Canadian star spoke with us for our June-August issue, for which Dolla is the cover star.
“He has a pure love for the actual art form and craft of DJing and beyond that just the community of dance music,” Furtado continued. “He’s doing it for 100 percent the right reasons and he’s a happy guy with incredibly positive energy that just radiates and everyone wants to experience that elevation, purity and fun live – myself included.”
“Nights spent watching Dom’s sets,” she enthused, “have become some of my favourite nights ever.”
Dolla is a Furtado fanboy. “I listened to so much Nelly Furtado as a kid,” he told Rolling Stone AU/NZ. “I believe that her style and taste influenced mine, and she heard that in the records that she listened to of mine, she reached out and she said, ‘I’m writing a new album. Would you like to help me with it?’”
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Ideas bounced back and forth, they met up and “got along like a house on fire,” he recounted, and he took flight to Philadelphia to hang at her favourite recording studio.
When Furtado agreed to be a vocalist on a Dolla club record, he was “beside myself with excitement.” The result, “we ended up writing ‘Eat Your Man’ which was paying homage to all of her hits.”
And there are many hits: Furtado has five top 10 appearances on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, including three leaders, with “Promiscuous”, “Say It Right”, and Timbaland’s “Give It to Me”, on which she features with Justin Timberlake.
Currently, Dolla and Furtado are traveling their own paths.
Dolla is on the northern festival circuit, has residencies booked for Ibiza and Las Vegas, and will play his first stadium show in Australia this December.
Furtado last year dropped her seventh album, 7, which she’s supporting with a major festival tour of the UK and Europe. “I’m just going to keep putting more music out; been working with a load of DJs on really interesting reworkings of my old, and new music,” she told us. “And it feels perfect and fun.”
The June-August 2025 issue of Rolling Stone AU/NZ is on newsstands now.
