Meet The Chart-Topping Producer Who Lady Gaga Praises For His ‘Incredibly Positive Energy’

Henry Walter may be seated in a spacious Los Angeles recording studio, but he’s still having audio trouble. A full digital workstation sits about five feet behind him as he scoots around the room on a swivel chair, trying to fix the feedback coming from his laptop. “I haven’t opened Zoom in, like, a month,” he says with a sigh as he presses a few buttons on his keyboard. Once he finds the problem, he triumphantly puts his hands in the air. “I think we did it.”

There’s a charming bit of irony in watching one of the most prolific and successful producers in the music industry fumble with his audio output. Since starting his production career in 2008, Walter — better known by his moniker, Cirkut — has been behind some of this century’s biggest hits, helping to write and produce massive singles for Rihanna, Kesha, The Weeknd and dozens more throughout the 2010s. Today, the 39-year-old Grammy-winning producer’s sonic soundscapes score music by a slew of contemporary artists, including Jungkook and Latto’s Billboard Hot 100-topping collaboration, “Seven”; Charli xcx’s “360,” “Rewind” and “365”; and even Rosé and Bruno Mars’ “APT.”

“I think new producers and artists are inspired by his work, especially right now,” says pop singer Kim Petras, who collaborated with Cirkut on “I Don’t Want It at All,” “Can’t Do Better” and the Hot 100 No. 1 Sam Smith collaboration, “Unholy.” “He’s kind of a master at electropop. I think people are going to be inspired for a while by him.”

And on his latest collaboration, Walter hit an even loftier high. “I still kind of pinch myself,” he says with a grin of co-producing most of Lady Gaga’s lauded 2025 album, MAYHEM. “Like, ‘Wow, I helped produce a Gaga album.’ It’s really cool and I’m really proud.”

The feeling is mutual. Gaga, who co-produced the project alongside Walter, Andrew Watt and her fiancé, Michael Polansky, says she was astounded by Walter’s skill in the studio. “He has this incredibly positive energy that makes a beautiful space for songwriting and production,” she tells ­Billboard. “On the musical side, it was his intuition about production that struck me the most. Cirkut is incredibly gifted as a programmer. His technical proficiency is astonishing but also extremely musical — his musicianship is so well-­rounded and rich.”

But the electropop gems he crafts now are a far cry from his humble origins. Growing up in Halifax, Nova Scotia — which he affectionately describes as “not exactly a mecca of music” — Walter’s friends were hip-hop heads. Some were DJs who would invite a 14-year-old Walter over to watch them spin and scratch their records on Technic 1200 turntables. “I saw that and I was like, ‘I need whatever that is. I need to do that,’ ” he recalls.

In his adolescence, Walter became fascinated with “deconstructing songs and learning what makes them tick,” listening to as many CDs as he could and trying his hand at minor DJ gigs for school pep rallies, dances and a small school radio show. When he turned 18, Walter moved to Toronto, seeking out a career as a hip-hop DJ and discovering other sonic worlds in the process. “You’d go out for the night and you’d hear dancehall, soca, reggae, hip-hop and just all this incredible dance music,” he says.

The Toronto club scene helped cement Walter’s fascination with electronic music. By 2008, he formed indie electronic trio Let’s Go to War, and on the suggestion of fellow dance duo MSTRKRFT, he met with music attorney and record executive Chris Taylor, who subsequently signed the act to his label, Last Gang Records. As the group began to work on its album Karmageddon, Walter and his bandmates also started making production packages on the side. Taylor compiled the threesome’s beats onto CDs and sent them to songwriters in his orbit — among them Nicole Morier, who decided to write a song to one of their beats during a session with Britney Spears.

The result was Spears’ “Mmm Papi” off her No. 1 album Circus. It earned Walter, through Let’s Go to War, his first production credit for a mainstream pop star. While he remains awed by the “luck” that got his name in Circus’ liner notes, he also cringes as he reflects on the song. “I kind of just hear a person who didn’t know what he was doing,” he says with a laugh. “In all honesty, I didn’t know how to produce songs back then.”

Still, his work caught the attention of hit-maker Dr. Luke, who reached out within a year of Circus’ release to sign Walter to his burgeoning publishing label, Prescription Songs. At first, Walter worked remotely from Toronto, where he opened Dream House Studios with producer Alex Bonenfant and his former bandmate Adrien Gough, whom he worked with on the song “High for This” for an up-and-coming R&B artist called The Weeknd. After a few years of operating as Cirkut, Walter left Toronto for Los Angeles and, under the tutelage of Luke and the other songwriters on the prestigious label, began creating a career for himself. “I was given the opportunity to work with a ton of writers and artists who I wouldn’t have had access to previously,” Walter says. “It’s where I really cut my teeth and learned to produce pop and not just make beats.”

Over the next few years, Walter helped pen seminal No. 1 hits like Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball,” Katy Perry’s “Roar” and Maroon 5 and Cardi B’s “Girls Like You,” ­developing his reputation in tandem with his production philosophy: to steer the ship without taking up too much space for himself. “I want to be able to lead the room and lead it to a good place,” he explains. “My duty as a producer is to see through the song and make sure it gets to the best place possible while also not making it about me. It’s about the artist and the song.”

The philosophy has stuck with his artist collaborators. Petras fondly remembers not just the “fun” atmosphere Walter creates in the studio, but the skills he employs to perfect the final product. “He has an amazing brain for melody and production, of course, but he’s also probably the best and fastest vocal producer I’ve ever worked with,” she says. “He just has an incredible ear for pop vocals and pop melodies, and I’ve learned so much working with him.”

After leaving Prescription Songs in 2018 to strike out on his own, Walter leaned on his industry contacts for new work. He collaborated with Watt on Spears and Elton John’s 2022 single, “Hold Me Closer,” and when Watt subsequently asked if he would be interested in working on a new Gaga project, Walter leaped at the opportunity. “I tried not to go in with any expectations because I hadn’t met her before,” he says. “There’s always an initial phase of feeling each other out, figuring out if you vibe with them. Either you have chemistry with someone or you don’t, and I’m glad that we did.”

According to Gaga, that studio chemistry with Walter came quickly. “The first song we worked on together was ‘Vanish Into You,’ which started out as just an analog synth Moog bassline, and as the song took form, his sonic choices for the drums struck me ­instantly,” she says. “We hadn’t spent a lot of time together, but he was naturally drawing upon all our musical influences … right away, I heard the Justice influence, the Franz Ferdinand coolness, The Cure’s vulnerability and softness. We were just an instant match.”

Walter credits Gaga’s singular vision for MAYHEM — which she describes as a mix of “well-written pop songs” and creating “free space to try different sounds” — as the driving force behind the final product. “She’s intentional about everything while also being humble in the sense that she’s willing to say, ‘OK, we tried that, it didn’t work,’ ” Walter says. “Her musical taste is broad, and she would know the exact reference to help us unlock something.”

That collaborative spirit let Walter leave his mark on MAYHEM while still making an album that is unquestionably Gaga’s — something they both say its single “Abracadabra” exemplifies. The songwriting process for the album’s breakout hit started with the track’s grinding post-­chorus breakdown, which Walter had created on a whim. “That was just a 30-second, very incomplete beat I had made, but when Gaga heard it, she was like, ‘Wait, what was that?’ ” he remembers.

Gaga recalls that same moment with a sense of awe at how Walter didn’t just create the song’s sound but also specifically tailored it to her. “That moment that he played [the post-chorus] was powerful, sort of like a dare, as if he were secretly saying, ‘You know what you need to do,’ ” she says. “That is a beautiful feeling with a producer, when you know they’re excited to hear what story you will tell together and you feel an urge to rise to the occasion.”

That’s not to say that creating MAYHEM was all business. Walter recalls creating “Killah,” the ­electro-funk standout featuring fellow producer Gesaffelstein, in a session where Gaga let loose in a way he wasn’t expecting. “There’s that part in the bridge where she lets out this long scream, and we were all sitting there like, ‘Holy s–t!’ ” he says. “We even put a track in the song where we just put up a mic in the room while we were all yelling and laughing because that vibe was infectious.”

It’s easy to see why, even with only about a decade-and-a-half spent actively working in the music industry, Cirkut ranked No. 4 on Billboard’s Top Producers of the 21st Century on the Hot 100 chart, only behind veteran hit-makers Max Martin, Luke and Stargate and outpacing world-famous production stars like Jack Antonoff and Benny Blanco.

Yet when asked if he would be interested in receiving the same kind of household recognition as someone like Antonoff, Walter hesitates. “It’s a balancing act. Of course we all want recognition for what we do, but I also value my privacy,” he says. After a beat, he gestures to the well-appointed walls of his workspace. “Honestly, I just feel like my place is in the studio,” he says, smiling. “I like being here and making things that people love.”

This story appears in the Oct. 4, 2025, issue of Billboard.