How a TikTok Scroll Became "Girl In Ibiza" — WITH U and Joshua Baraka's Unlikely Origin Story

A studio clip, a late-night DAW session, and a platform reply that turned into one of 2025's most irresistible cross-continental collabs.

If there's a more honest encapsulation of how music gets made in 2025 than this, it's hard to think of one. Hamburg duo WITH U were doing what most of us do in the evening — aimlessly scrolling TikTok — when a studio clip from Ugandan breakout Joshua Baraka stopped them cold. The melody he was humming, offhand and apparently unplanned, had that thing: the instant-lock quality that separates a topline from a great topline. Rather than simply double-tapping and moving on, WITH U did something about it — opened their DAW that same night, built a production around the vocal fragment, and posted their take back to the platform as a reaction. Joshua saw it, loved it, and what could have been a fleeting moment of internet appreciation became a genuine creative partnership and, as of this Friday March 13 via German imprint Crash Your Sound, an official release. "What started as a random scroll turned into 'Girl in Ibiza,'" the duo said — and somehow that sentence is both completely mundane and kind of miraculous at the same time.

What makes the story more than just a good anecdote is that the record itself holds up to it. "Girl In Ibiza" doesn't sound like a track that was assembled across timezones via social media DMs — it sounds like something built in a room where everyone was already vibing. Joshua's vocal is warm and immediately ownable, carrying that quality where you feel like you've heard it before even on the first listen, while WITH U's production slots in around it with the kind of melodic, groove-led confidence that speaks to years of understanding how a record needs to feel rather than just sound. The result lands somewhere between sunlit escapism and genuine emotional pull — easy enough to soundtrack an open-air terrace set, but grounded enough to travel beyond it. Joshua put it simply: "It felt fresh, it felt right." Sometimes the most accurate critical assessments come from inside the studio.

There's also something worth noting about what this collaboration represents beyond the song itself. The collision of European electronic textures and East African warmth isn't a novelty here — it's the point, and it works precisely because neither artist is stretching to meet the other. WITH U bring the melodic architecture of Hamburg's club-leaning production scene; Joshua brings an instinctive vocal presence that has been turning heads well beyond Uganda's borders. Neither element flattens the other. The Ibiza reference in the title could easily read as a marketing shortcut — sun, escapism, the universal dance music shorthand — but in context it earns its place, capturing the effortless, carefree pull of a record that genuinely sounds like it arrived fully formed on a warm evening when no one was trying too hard. In an era of calculated cross-genre moments, "Girl In Ibiza" has the rare quality of feeling entirely uncontrived. That tends to be the difference between a record people stream and one they actually remember.

Listen to "Girl In Ibiza":