genre dance

Ten years ago today, on May 29, 2015, Jamie xx released his debut solo album, In Colour.
The 11-song project reached No. 21 on the Billboard 200 and No. 3 on the Official U.K. Albums Chart, generating hits including “Gosh,” “I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times)” and “Loud Places” and becoming a beloved LP of the era.

Billboard also celebrated the album upon its release, publishing a glowing review that identified the British producer’s ability to create a collage of ’90s U.K. rave culture that simultaneously acknowledged the rich history of this era while also sounding entirely fresh.

“Jamie xx is 26 years old, which means he was barely out of diapers during the heyday of ’90s U.K. rave culture, which provides the heart, soul and inspiration for his jaw-dropping solo debut, In Colour,” wrote Billboard contributor Garrett Kamps.

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The review continues to say that “The xx member (real name: Jamie Smith) reportedly combed through videos from the era on YouTube, experiencing it in a way that generations before him could not: all at once, chopped up, voyeuristically and set to the best music. This, conveniently, describes the rush of hearing In Colour, an ambitious collage of dance music’s most artistically exciting decade, assembled with maximum TLC by a visionary who inherited its legacy.

“Pockmarked by bits of dialogue from the era’s radio shows and documentaries,” Kamps continues, “the record leaves no doubt as to its source material, and Jamie xx is among other U.K. electronic-dance acts, such as Disclosure and Four Tet, that are tapping the genre’s past to forge its future. But no one has nailed it quite like this.”

Read the complete 2015 review here.  

Speaking with Billboard last year upon the release of In Colour‘s long-awaited follow-up, In Waves, the artist said his country’s esteemed history with electronic music, combined with some good old fashioned homesickness, inspired the album’s tone.

“When I was making Colour, I was on tour [with The xx], and had been for seven or eight years nonstop,” he said. “I was really homesick, and I was dreaming up ideas about the U.K. and music in the U.K. and the dance scene there and everything that has happened since the ’80s in dance music in the U.K., which is a lot. It was sort of my fantasy version of U.K. dance music history. Because I was missing home, it made me feel more like I was at home, I guess.”

He also reflected on the differences within himself as he made two connected projects nine years apart, saying that while listening to In Colour while making In Waves, “I remember being really surprised by a lot of decisions I had made as a younger person, and remembering who the hell I was when I made those decisions.

“I guess I was drunk quite a lot of the time, having a lot of fun in my mid-20s,” he continued with a laugh while reflecting on the production process for In Colour. “It’s very painstaking, all these decisions you feel are so important. Then listening to them 10 years later or five years later, you can’t believe you made any of the decisions. And you think they’re wrong, or I would have made completely different decisions now, but I guess that’s a part of it.”

It’s a hot Saturday afternoon during the first weekend at Coachella 2025, and backstage Mau P arrives 30 minutes behind schedule after getting stuck in festival traffic. He’s got the de facto DJ entourage — agent, manager, content team — in tow, and after they locate his trailer in the artist compound, the Dutch producer sits on a couch outside it and smokes a cigarette, an ostensible moment of repose amid the chaos.
This is Mau’s second time playing Coachella. Last year, he was added to the bill a month before the festival as part of the lineup for the new Quasar stage, where he played b2b with Diplo. You can read the tea leaves and see that his star has only since risen, as Mau is back this year with his name in the most hallowed of set times: the Saturday 10-11 p.m. peak time party slot on the Sahara stage.

The meaning isn’t lost on the 28-year-producer, who is tall, has blessed bone structure and is wearing a t-shirt printed with an image of his dad, the late Dutch saxophone player Gerbrand Westveen, who is shown in his own moment of musical brilliance while playing two saxophones simultaneously. This image will reappear later tonight when Mau ends his set by flashing it on Sahara’s giant video screens above the words “In Honour of Gerbrand Westveen.”

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One has to believe the elder Westveen would be proud of his son, and certainly Mau is approaching it all with gravitas. “I feel like I have this responsibility,” he says while sitting at the table in his dimly lit trailer, a space crowded with stacks of Coachella branded water bottles, “because I love everyone that listens to my music so much, and they put me up front, so I better live up to it.”

Still, if you’ve not yet heard of Mau P, you are forgiven. While he hasn’t quite reached the mainstream ubiquity of peers like John Summit or Dom Dolla, the producer has been making chess moves through the dance scene over the past three years, and it’s hard to overstate how impressive the producer’s growing portfolio is and how influential he’s become amongst fellow underground artists and fans. Since playing b2b2b2b with Solomun, Four Tet and Chloé Caillet at Ultra 2025, he’s even been dubbed by dance fans as one of “The Avengers.”

But if he’s sweating the pressure, he hides it well, answering questions and making casual conversation (“Do you have an accent?” he asks me. “How old are you?”) like he has all the time in the world. Meanwhile, five hours from now, he’ll play for a sea of people in an area just slightly smaller than a football field. There’s no exact count of how many people fit inside Sahara, but to the naked eye, there appears to be roughly 20,000 people here to see him, with the crowd spilling out of the tent and extending up the adjacent hillside viewing area.

Onstage, Mau’s hour-long set includes his string of hits, which along with increasingly higher profile shows like this one, cement his status as one of the moment’s essential next-gen dance producers. The crowd bumps and shimmies, altogether bucking the stereotype of stiff Coachella crowds. Mau also bumps and twirls (the cameras hone in on him while the screens flash with the words “Mau P is dancing”) as he builds a set from his own music along with his remixes of Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack” and his show-closing edit of Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place.”

Predictably, everyone goes especially hard for his 2022 breakout hit “Drugs From Amsterdam,” with the screens in tandem flashing a message at once gracious and true: “THIS IS THE SONG THAT CHANGED MY LIFE FOREVER. THANK YOU FROM THE BOTTOM OF MY HEART.”

Mau P plays weekend one of Coachella 2025.

Deanie Chen

“Drugs” indeed marked a turning point for the artist born Maurits Jan Westveen. He’d been making big room house as Maurice West since he was a teenager and in that era was just “really wanting to do what other people were already doing, which is sort of the safe option, but it worked for me for like, six years.”

Then he made the darker, woozier, tech house track, and it became a global club hit that’s aggregated 259.2 million official on-demand global streams and 39.8 million official on-demand U.S. streams, according to Luminate. He changed his artist name to Mau P (a play off his “Maupie” nickname) and everything he’s subsequently done has been “an experiment of, ‘Okay, now I have the audience because of ‘Drugs From Amsterdam, and I have the freedom to do whatever I want to do, so might as well do some crazy s–t.’”

Such crazy s–t has included “Merther,” which samples Jamaican legend Ini Kamoze and came out last year on revered U.K. house label Defected. The track demonstrates his ability to Frankenstein together styles that might not intuitively work, with the song made, he says, of “’90s rave breakbeats, combined with tech house, combined with bass that could be like, Metro Boomin, or rap,” he explains. “Then, in the structure, it just goes into banging breakbeats instead of just the house beat that was going on.” He’s also worked with hip-hop royalty including Gunna (on 2024’s “Receipts” with Diplo) and Mike Dean, who worked on 2024’s “On Again,” which was also the first song Mau put his own vocals on.

Meanwhile his official remix of Tame Impala‘s 2015 song “The Less I Know the Better” came out on Nervous Records in February, and is currently in the top spot on Dance Mix Show Airplay, giving Mau his first Billboard No. 1. Last week he released two driving singles on the Diynamic Imprint from Solomun, who Mau says “is like a dad to me. We talk for hours about life and our careers and how everything went for him, and I think he sees himself in me and that’s why he’s so protective and has always taken me in.”

Solomun’s advice for the young dance Jedi? Never change your style for anyone. In following this wisdom, Mau says his work is “combining multiple sounds and genres that people don’t necessarily think of would work. I listen to a lot of older music. My parents brought me up listening to jazz, and soul and Chaka Khan and Sade. My dad played the saxophone, so all of my knowledge of older music combines with how I see modern music and dance music.”

Releasing music across roughly ten labels has also been strategic. “I definitely chose [each label] because they all have their own community,” Mau says. “I’ve been around house and techno for so long, but I never really had a connection with [some of the] communities, so I was just trying to get everyone in and show them like, ‘Hey, I’m here.’” He’s also preparing to announce the launch of his own label.

Altogether, his approach has earned his catalog 463.6 million official on-demand global streams (through May 22), along with increasingly bigger shows that include upcoming festival bookings like Lollapalooza, Miami’s III Points, San Francisco’s Portola, his Pacha Ibiza residency and a host of European events. In November, he’ll play Colorado’s Red Rocks — a rite of passage for rising dance artists — and yesterday (May 27) he announced a headlining show at the Los Angeles State Historic Park, a venue reserved for only the biggest name DJs. It’s all a quantum leap from 2023, when Mau was first touring the U.S., playing 300-capacity clubs.

The reason for his success? His agent, CAA’s Roger Semaan, attributes the rise to Mau arriving at a moment when house was reaching new levels of popularity in the U.S., and him making music that “wasn’t copying anyone… The way he presents himself on stage and the way he controls the room is truly like no other. He is someone that loves the art of deejaying and knows his library so well that it allows him to stand out.”

Mau agrees he’s “exploded faster and bigger” in the U.S. than in Europe, saying that in his homeland, “you have to kind of win them over a bit more, and it takes a while.” As such, the States “sort of feel like another planet that I go to, and a lot of people recognize me in the streets. Then when I go back to Amsterdam, I can go grocery shopping and it’s not a problem.”

Still, DJ stardom ain’t easy. He says the hardest part is “navigating mentally, because this s–t is not normal.” He’s humble enough to say the fame he’s experienced is “a little breadcrumb of what Justin Bieber has done in his life,” and says he feels for Martin Garrix — who had a breakout hit when he was 17 and has subsequently grown up in the industry. While he’s grateful his career blew up after “my brain was fully developed,” navigating the demands “is incredibly hard… I try to be nice to everyone.”

Certainly he’s very nice — warm, funny, conversational and generous with his time. He’s also found comfort in keeping his inner circle small. “I never liked that saying, because it sounds so negative… I work with the people I know well.” To wit, he’s known his manager since they were both 16 and has also known his photographer since the days “we used to just tour with the two of us and sleep in the same bed to save money.” The rest of his team has been with him since the start of the Mau P project.

He’ll be surrounded by these trusted allies as he crosses progressively large shows off the list through the end of the year. Beyond that, he’d love to make an album — although he says the idea “is scary,” given that he’s never released anything longer than two songs.

And right now, he just doesn’t seem to have time. He’s got to get to the stage.

Can house music on an opulent vessel for a private members club cut through the noise at the Cannes Film Festival?
This week, Billboard boarded a superyacht with Kismi, a new nightlife venture that bills itself as “a sonic sanctuary for music lovers,” and spoke with the event’s performers, Haitian producer Francis Mercier and German artist Marten Lou, to find out.

Amid its namesake film festival, Cannes attracts individuals of high net worth and influence and, with it, a host of splashy parties. Artists, celebrities, tastemakers and more tee up a tight schedule of appearances at exclusive premieres, gatherings, clubs and more, seduced by the spotlight and invitations to the hottest events. Among them was Kismi, a private, members-only experience soundtracked by the scene’s most current iterations of house music.

When guests exited their black cars at Port de Cannes on Wednesday (May 21), they were greeted with a stunning sight: the distant view of the city, with its lights breaking up the darkness, and the waves of the Mediterranean lapping against the spotless sides of Cannes’ famous lineup of yachts.

Just days before, this same ship saw a slew of celebrities who boarded for the afterparty of the premiere for A$AP Rocky’s new film Highest 2 Lowest, but this night was set to be far more discreet. “We’re not targeting everyone,” said Kismi chairman Paul Martino, a longtime tech entrepreneur who is also the managing general partner and co-founder of Bullpen Capital, a San Francisco-based venture capital fund. “Our members are stylists, founders, artists, collectors, tastemakers who care deeply about the details: the sound, the setting, the crowd. They’ve already seen what traditional nightlife looks like. They want something quieter, more elevated, and rooted in great music.”

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A general view of the “This Is It Yacht” during KISMI founder Christine Becker’s brand’s international debut aboard “This Is It Yacht” during the Cannes Film Festival, with special performances by Marten Lou and Francis Mercier on May 21, 2025 in Cannes, France.

Hoda Davaine/Getty Images for Kismi

To wit, the lineup for the evening featured headliner Francis Mercier, the steadily rising Afro house producer who’s been making his name on the global circuit from Coachella to Burning Man to Ibiza, where he’s launching a residency this summer at Club Chinois. The night’s opener was Marten Lou, who is German-born but residing in Paris and who shared his Euro-forward interpretation of the genre, along with German favorite Jan Blomqvist, who appeared for a surprise set and skillfully layered his vocals over his moody and melodic signature sound.

Mercier shared his excitement for bringing his set to a smaller crowd than he normally plays for. “You get a bit of every culture closer to you. You get a sense of the wider European energy, in the sense that during Cannes Film Festival, there’s a lot of internationals from Italy, a lot of internationals from East Europe, a lot of internationals from France, from the U.S. and whatnot,” he told Billboard, motioning to the surroundings. “So at the end of the day, it gives me the capacity to really connect with people on a closer level.”

Mercier also commented on the current Afro house boom, which he’s a part of alongside a host of other acts who’ve made their name on the sound, turning it into a global trend and massive draw.

“I think right now, Afro house has become quite mainstream, where I would say a lot of artists have used the genre and its popularity to kind of infiltrate and kind of like commercialize it and Westernize it,” says Mercier. “But I think the authentic Afro house is gonna grow some more. I think the original Afro house artists are yet to gain stardom. I think it’s still underway.”

While Kismi keeps trends and individual talent in mind for bookings, founder Christine Becker insists that intuition is key. “Some of the artists we’ve booked happen to be at the edge of something bigger, but that’s not the reason I chose them. It’s usually instinct, when something feels honest and precise, I know it fits.” Previous Kismi event bookings by Becker include Hugel, Moojo and Keinemusik’s &ME.

As Lou, Blomqvist and Mercier went back-to-back, they gave a heartbeat to the event. Their rhythms swayed the partygoers on a dance floor that was small, but never packed to the point of discomfort. The guestlist included actors Ian Bohen (Yellowstone) and Tyler Hoechlin (Superman); reality TV personalities including Jason Oppenheim (Selling Sunset), Lenny Hochstein (The Real Housewives of Miami), and Porsha Williams (The Real Housewives of Atlanta); contemporary artists, directors, photographers, models and more; but the crowd felt both present and surprisingly egalitarian – especially when, with limited options, everyone waited together for the few available bathrooms. 

Kismi’s Cannes party painted a picture of what’s to come – but what does the future hold for the event? “Growth for Kismi won’t look like expansion in the traditional sense. We’re focused on deepening the brand, not widening it,” Martino explained. “That means three to four core events a year in culturally significant locations, two off-calendar pop-ups, and a set of very specific brand and artist partnerships.”

The price tag to get into these parties run the gamut from $1,000 member’s guest tickets to $50,000 member tables, with Kismi also offering $100,000-plus membership tiers, which Martino calls “a way to be part of shaping that energy from the inside.”

As Kismi sets its eyes on a future of electronic music parties for the elite, the genre itself continues its own perpetual forward march. “Many people talk about, ‘Oh, now [House] is getting burned or it’s too commercial, it’s too big.’ I think that’s just natural development, you know?” Lou reflects. “I think that’s a great development and everyone has to adapt, develop new things, try to find new sounds.”

This week in dance music: Dua Lipa covered Daft Punk’s essential “Get Lucky” while on tour in France, Calvin Harris posted an eight-minute video in response to plagiarism accusations from Chicane and we spoke with BPM festival co-founder Phil Pulitano about his new event, a boutique show happening this January in the Puerto Rican rainforest. […]

In July 1998, the Billboard Hot 100 was dominated by hits like Brandy and Monica’s “The Boy Is Mine,” Shania Twain’s “You’re Still the One,” Usher’s “My Way” and Next’s “Too Close.”
But beyond the mainstream, another type of music was permeating club spaces in major cities across the U.S. and beyond as dance music continued its rise out of the underground and became a cultural phenomenon.

As part of it all, on July 24, 1998, Philadelphia-born acid house producer Josh Wink played an extended set at New York City’s then-essential club Twilo. Three years prior, Wink had released his breakout single, the era-defining rave track “Higher State of Consciousness,” along with the club hits “don’t Laugh” and “I’m Ready,” making the then extremely dreadlocked producer a scene star known not only for his evocative productions, but for long sets that brought audiences through myriad sounds, BPMs and mood.

Wink is now marking these anniversaries with Wink’s Found Sounds, a release series that will include unreleased performances, rare live recordings and other aural ephemera. The releases begin with Wink’s set from Twilo, which you can hear exclusively below.

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“Twilo became an international club institution in the 1990s, located in the heart of New York City,” Wink says in a statement. “DJs and fans were drawn to it for the same reason: to experience great, diverse music on an incredible sound system in a venue that had become a mecca for electronic music. It felt like home to me — a place where I could fully embody entertainer and educator. What I loved most was watching the crowd respond — an ocean of bodies ebbing and flowing to the beat, eyes closed, mentally swimming through my selections. That, to me, was Twilo.”

While Twilo closed in 2001, you can go back in time to the club via this 90-minute mix spanning house, acid house, drum & bass, techno and more.