Kavinsky has died — the Frenchman whose ‘Nightcall’ became the voice of ‘Drive’ and, thirteen years later, closed the Paris Olympics

The French producer Kavinsky — Vincent Belorgey — died on 28 July 2026. He was 50.

On 5 August Mixmag published a long tribute: its author Gemma Ross recalls that for the French house scene he will remain a hero, respected by its own pioneers.

He was born on the outskirts of Paris at the tail end of the French New Wave and looked at cinema through a musician’s eyes from an early age. First came an acting debut, and in 2007 his first film score: music for a comedy by his close friend Quentin Dupieux, known as Mr. Oizo.

The idea of the project itself grew out of film and video games. Kavinsky is a character behind the wheel of a Ferrari Testarossa, to whom Belorgey paid homage in the 2005 track ‘Testarossa Autodrive’. In the storyline, set in the 1980s, that character crashed his Ferrari and returned years later as a zombie — on a quest to make electronic music.

Everything changed with ‘Nightcall’ in 2010. The Brazilian singer Lovefoxxx features on it, and heavily vocoded vocals gave the track its eerie, robotic feel. It was produced alongside SebastiAn and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo of Daft Punk.

The following year Nicolas Winding Refn took the song for his film ‘Drive’. Ostensibly it starred Ryan Gosling, but the soundtrack outshone the Hollywood cast: Kavinsky’s retro synthwave set the neo-noir tone over the opening credits. The track went into Billboard’s Top 100.

“After ‘Nightcall’ was released and it had huge success, there was a bit of pressure. I took some good time away,” he recalled when speaking to Mixmag in 2022. “With such success, you have the opportunity to take your time, chill and do things you could never have done before. I want people to talk to me about something other than ‘Nightcall’ now, even though Drive was a huge help for me and I still thank the director for including my music in it.”

His debut album ‘OutRun’, almost a decade in the making, landed a couple of years after the single — and remained his last major body of work for a long time. The return came in 2021 with the surprise single ‘Renegade’ featuring Cautious Clay, and then the second and final album ‘Reborn’.

One of his collaborators on ‘Reborn’, Sébastien Tellier, called Belorgey a “one of a kind” artist and a legend whose “masterful music will stay with me — and all of us — forever”.

For years there were rumours that Kavinsky was back in the studio with The Weeknd, one of his earliest collaborators, but nothing ever came of it. On hearing of his death, Abel Tesfaye described him as “an inspiration to so many, including myself” — and for the first time ever performed their joint single ‘Odd Look’ live, at a show in Germany.

In 2024 ‘Nightcall’ returned to the spotlight: Kavinsky performed it at the closing ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games alongside Phoenix and the Belgian singer Angèle. The song broke the record for the most Shazammed track in a single day and re-entered international charts.

France’s President Emmanuel Macron, who has previously argued for French touch to be granted UNESCO cultural heritage status, called Kavinsky a “source of French pride forever”.