French DJ and producer Kavinsky, whose track "Nightcall" became inseparable from Nicolas Winding Refn's 2011 film Drive, has been found dead at his home in Paris. He was 50. French media reported the discovery on the evening of Tuesday, 28 July 2026, with the news breaking publicly on Wednesday morning, 29 July, according to Libération. France24 confirmed the death in a live-news report the same day at 10:53 AM.

Born Vincent Belorgey in Paris on 31 July 1975, Kavinsky was a central figure in the French Touch electro movement — the late-1990s wave of French house and electronic producers that included Daft Punk and gave dance music one of its most distinctive national scenes. He would have turned 51 on Friday.

The Paris Prosecutors Office has opened an investigation into the cause of death. First responders found no suspicious elements at the scene, the office stated, according to Deadline. His home was in the 18th arrondissement of Paris, Libération reported.

Kavinsky's defining moment came with "Nightcall," a 2010 single produced by Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo of Daft Punk. The track opens Drive, Refn's neon-lit crime film starring Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan, and its slow, vocoded hook — "I don't know what you want from me" — set the tone for the entire film. The song outgrew its moment: it reached a global audience through the film, charted years after release, and became a touchstone for the synthwave genre that followed.

He released two studio albums: OutRun in 2013 and Reborn in 2022. OutRun took its name from the classic arcade racing game and built out the retro-futurist persona Kavinsky had cultivated — a leather-jacketed, aviator-wearing character who, in his telling, died in a car crash in 1986 and came back as a musician. Reborn, arriving nearly a decade later, was his first album in nine years.

His reach extended beyond the studio. Kavinsky performed at the closing ceremony of the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games at the Stade de France — a national stage for an artist whose sound had always carried a cinematic streak. He also acted in Quentin Dupieux's 2007 film Steak and made a cameo in the Netflix French-language original Banger, opposite Vincent Cassel.

Kavinsky leaves behind a catalogue small in volume but outsized in influence. "Nightcall" alone — a single track, produced by a fellow French Touch legend, placed at the front of a film that became a cult favourite — secured his place in both music and cinema history. The Paris investigation will determine what ended a life that, for millions of listeners, sounded exactly like a night drive through a city you never quite reach.