Griz Reflects on Hiatus: "I Just Needed to Figure Out Who I Am to Me"

Many people dream of taking extended time off from their job. Griz actually did it.

Almost exactly three years ago today, on June 6, 2023, the beloved bass-funk producer announced he was talking a break, writing on social media that “Life is really good, and I often make myself too busy to see where I am or how far this project has come. I’m following my gut instincts so for now, I’m not going to put a hard time limit length on the break.” He said he wasn’t sure when he’d be back.

And with that, he went about playing a lot of video games and Dungeons & Dragons. He made music without deadlines and quit smoking. He went to therapy, got a place in his native Michigan to be closer to his brother and spent more time with his family and friends. He was feeling good about his health, life and art and making plans to return with his own music festival, and then his dad died.

He hadn’t talked to his father in 16 years and says hearing of his death was like “having the roof of your house f—ing blown off.” His grandfather died not long after, a point by which the wheels for his return were already fully in motion. It was, to oversimplify, a lot to handle, but he figured it out, returning with his sold-out Seven Stars music festival in October.

Talking to Billboard over Zoom from his base in Denver on a recent sunny Thursday, the artist born Grant Kwiecinski seems happy and looks fresh, laughing a lot and speaking freely and philosophically while intermittently petting his dog, Frankie. This is his first interview in more than three years and may be his last for awhile. The occasion is Future Funk Volume 1 , the first new Griz album since 2021 that’s out Friday (June 5).

While Griz released an EP and dozens of singles over the last year, Future Funk Volume 1 feels like another phase of his return, functioning as a sort of thesis statement for his sound in total. That is to say it’s funky, crunchy, joyful, ebullient and also hard, a duality that reflects his Gemini star sign, he says.

Fans will have many opportunities to hear it this summer, with Griz on the lineup for events including Bonnaroo, Electric Forest, Outside Lands, North Coast, Experts Only and the return of Seven Stars this October. Here, Griz talks about leaving, coming back, losing his dad in the meantime and why now, his career is just a vehicle to experience life itself.

Let’s start with the hiatus. I re-watched your announcement of it, and it sounded like you were coming from a place of like, “I’ve learned boundaries, and I want to hang out with my friends and family and put all the things I’ve been learning into action.” How did that go for you?

Sometimes the stress gets too big, and for me it got too big. I was like, “I feel like I’m ill-equipped.” I was either going to get checked into a stress rehab or get canceled for popping off about something, because I didn’t understand how to handle artist pressure and say no to taking too much work and traveling and doing shows and playing music for everybody, and then say yes to the small things like making sure I’m attending a friend’s birthday party or a family thing.

Was that difficult?

I don’t want to be the guy where it’s always like, “Well, he’s just busy.” I was losing relationships with my family members, my friends, and that sucked. It’s hard to disambiguate the identity of like, “I am artist, I am self, I am vocation.” For me it’s so important to live life outside of work. I get too wrapped up in the work, everything becomes so personal, because my entire identity is wrapped up in this thing. If something doesn’t go well, all of a sudden I think I’m not a good person, and I don’t have an identity outside the things I do professionally, because I’m constantly just in it.

Was it always clear to you that you’d come back from the hiatus?

Oh yeah, definitely.

Was there something you’d worked out ahead of time, where you knew “When this happens, I will come back”? Did you need to get to a certain place?

It was a feeling. I knew it couldn’t be a four- or five-year thing. The situation didn’t feel that dire, but there were a few things I wanted to accomplish. One was that I needed to set myself up with a place in Michigan so I could be closer to my brother. That was big, and I was able to do that. The other thing is I needed to quit nicotine. That was hard. [Laughs] It’s f—ing hard! I wanted to get my health and mental health under control and have better support systems, so I hired a therapist. I also wanted a bunch of time to just write music.

Was it always clear that there would be a place for you in the scene when you came back? Is that something you worried about?

Of course. I mean, it’s natural to worry about that, but I’ve seen Odesza do it. I was like, “There’s a way forward here.” Skrillex and Pretty Lights had both done it successfully.

Then, it’s a lot of faith. I was making all this music and I kept feeding it out to my friends who were playing, and invariably they were like, “Can we play this out?” It was like, “F— it, sure.” So there was like, the smallest bit of [Griz] spirit in the scene that existed during that time. That enabled me to have a lot of fun writing music. Not that I don’t have fun writing music, but I’ve never written music and put it out that way, where you’re kind of behind the scenes. It was cool to see like people interacting with it. But yeah, I was worried. [Laughs]

Once you took a step back and some pressure was dissolved, did your brain and creativity start working in different ways? Did the art change?

Totally, because I was creating from a space of “Who knows when this is going to be released?” I had so much time to sit there with these sounds and make a bunch of whatever that didn’t need to be played anytime soon. I miss it. It was so nice.

Was there a typical day for you during this time? Was it all making music? Like, what were you doing?

[Laughs] I’m a huge nerd, and there was a video game I really wanted to play, so for like, all of October [2023], I kind of just sat and smoked cigarettes and played Baldur’s Gate III . [Later] I went to Puerto Vallarta for my friend’s birthday, and we all got super sick, and that’s when I quit smoking.

I was also really invested in Dungeon & Dragons. I convinced my friends to start playing D&D with me, and I was the Dungeon Master, so we had this really wonderful year of playing lots of games. I would make set pieces and battle scenes and miniatures. It’s like, my favorite thing. I loved to do it. There’s a Dungeon & Dragons podcast called Critical Role , and the host Matt Mercer, is, to me, the most famous celebrity on the planet. Like, if I got to meet this guy, I’d lose my f—ing mind. So I flew solo to Los Angeles to watch him play D&D in person, which is like, the nerdiest thing I’ve ever done.

Mercer was featured on your June 2025 Side Quest EP, and you’ve also released a lot of other music over the last year and launched your Seven Stars Festival in Virginia last October. When did your break actually end?

Too early. [Laughs]

Say more.

There was this point where I really felt like I had my sh– together. I felt confident in the way forward and the plan we were formulating. Part of the plan was coming back and announcing the music festival we’ve been working on for years. We finally had Seven Stars, the concept, down. A music festival isn’t something like, “Cool, we’re doing it in a month!”

I think that was the trigger, where we were like, “We need to schedule this for a year out.” I think that was October 2024, where I was like, “By the time next October rolls around, I’m ready to get going.” I wanted to make sure I gave myself enough time to do that. We were releasing music, and I was like, “I feel like my fitness is on track. I have a good relationship with my therapist. I have a wonderful relationship with my friends and family.” Then we were on family vacation on this lake and I found out my dad died. I was like, “Yo. Uh-oh.”

I’m really sorry about that.

We were going back into it [work-wise], and I didn’t know how to communicate [that news] with people. It was a huge mess in my own personal world with him, because I hadn’t talked to him in 16 years. It had been such a long time.

I was kind of a sh–head when I was younger. [When I was 19 or 20] I went to jail for a month, for drinking underage. In Michigan, you get this thing called a “minor in possession of alcohol,” and I got three. At the second one the judge was like, “If you get another one of these, I’m going to send you to jail to teach you a lesson.” I was like, “F— you. Yeah right.”

What happened?

I got another one. I remember sitting in the courtroom, and they were like, “You’re sentenced to jail, like, right now.” I was like, “OK, so that means I go home for a little bit?” They were like, “No, in your suit you now go into a holding cell, and we’re going to cut the shoelaces out of your shoes, collect any money in your pocket and put it towards commissary, and you are now in jail for the next month.”

Holy sh–.

It’s real. It’s scary. I basically took that semester off. I wasn’t doing great in school anyways, partying a lot. It was a pretty eye-opening experience. Jail is very scary, because you can’t leave. It probably sounds so obvious, but you’re trapped. You can’t call your parents and say, “Hey, pick me up.” Especially being so young, it’s such a weird concept, because before that your parents are the ultimate authority figure.

And then you realize there are things they cannot save you from.

Yeah, and to be truly independent and live in the mess you make for yourself, it hits incredibly hard. … The TL;DR is that I got out, and that next November I went down to visit my dad for Thanksgiving. He takes me to a bar, gets me drunk, and is like, “OK cool, you’re driving us home.” I’m like, “Dude, you just got your underage kid drunk in a bar, and you’re asking him to drive home. I just got out of jail. Like, you’re a f—ing a–hole. This feels really dangerous.”

We didn’t have a great relationship before that, but I was like, “This just feels like I’m putting myself in a dangerous situation.” I see where he was coming from and that he was a good guy, but that was the nail in the coffin. I was like, “I can’t have this relationship with this guy anymore. It’s not healthy.” I felt like I got myself to a better place with it. He’s an alcoholic, and there was an interventionist. Dealing with a parent with active addiction is really tough, because you are teetering between “I want them to be the person that I want them to be for me, but I also can’t make that decision for them.”

I wonder too, when you become successful and have resources, if you felt like you could help because you had money.

Right, like “I can save them.” You can’t. It’s taken a lot of therapy to understand that. I couldn’t have made that decision for him, I can only try to show that I have this feeling of care and love and that the love is not conditional, but my participation in their world is conditional … because I can’t have a conversation with my parent at 10 o’clock in the morning and have them be wasted and get into an argument every single time we talk on the phone. That’s not OK for me to do to myself. As much as you love somebody, it really is difficult to come to that conclusion, and it’s also really conflicting.

Was that complicated by being a public figure?

I need to have enough energy to be able to give back to people and give them the experience they more than deserve, because look at how well they treat me and show up so enthusiastically and support me and listen to Griz music. It’s like, “I can’t save him, so how do I keep peace for myself so that I can exist as an artist who is like, the show love/spread love guy?” How do I exist as that person when all this drama is happening?” It’s like, f—.

That is tricky.

It takes time to figure out the right support system to foster show love/spread love, to foster t

_Originally reported by [Billboard](https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/griz-interview-hiatus-future-funk-album-seven-stars-fest-1236264085/)._