genre electronic
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This week in dance music: Grimes canceled an appearance at D.C. World Pride, citing “family issues,” we spoke to the CEO of Epidemic Sound about a new remix series, we caught up with Mau P at Coachella, where he told us about the pressure of being a new generation dance star, saying that “I love […]
Bianca Oblivion had earned a degree in public health from Yale, a masters degree in epidemiology from UCLA and another masters in medical anthropology from Boston University, but what she really wanted to do was DJ.
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Growing up in a music loving family, the Los Angeles native immersed herself in city’s the sprawling music scenes as an adolescent and teen, while also taking dance classes in myriad styles. The love of music was just in her, and it went with her to Yale, where she was the music director for the school’s radio station and also hosted her own show.
Back in LA after graduating from Yale, she got another radio show on KXLU, then one night a friend asked if she wanted to spin at a nightclub in the city’s Culver City neighborhood. While she’d never played for a live crowd, she gathered her records, put some songs on an iPod and played the gig.
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“That was it,” she says. “After that I was like, ‘I need to do this more.’”
Her academic pursuits also continued in tandem, and at school in Boston, she immersed herself in the city’s club scene to the extent that by 2014, she’d been nominated for a DJ of the year award by a local paper. “I very much had these parallel paths and sides of me that that I was somehow balancing,” she says.
But after ultimately earning a trifecta of prestigious degrees, “my job search was not really panning out,” she says. “I wasn’t finding anything I was interested in or seeing how I was going to make these degrees work.”
Again back in L.A., she took a job as a substitute teacher, finding the flexibility of the gig made it possible to play shows. Making it all work, however, required some juggling. When she DJ’d for Princess Nokia at Coachella 2018, she graded papers in her backstage trailer before the show.
The same hustle that’s required to achieve so much in academia has also defined Oblivion’s musical career, which is reaching new levels following the pandemic as she’s focused more and more on her own productions and booked gigs around the world. She signed with the European agency Three Feet High in 2018 and released her first single in February of 2020, with the intention of doing a substantial European club run that summer.
This was, of course, weeks before nightclubs around the world shut down during the pandemic.
But instead of quitting, Oblivion used the global downtime to hone in on making music, without having to care whether or not it was getting played out. “It’s daunting,” she says of learning to produce. “It was not easy, especially while seeing a lot of my friends around me and peers in the scene just flying with that. It was like ‘What am I going to do? How am I even gonna add to this?’”
But with time and tenacity, she carved out a sharp and clubby signature sound that melds techno, bass, drum & bass and a host of other genre. She also developed an email list, organizing her career-related data in precise spreadsheets. (“That is where the training in school and data management came in very handy,” she says.) When the world reopened, she was well positioned.
“Since the pandemic my career has really accelerated,” she says. “I’ve gotten to play in venues and festivals I hadn’t even thought I would.”
Bianca Oblivion
Courtesy of Bianca Oblivion
These gigs include the U.K.’s famous Glastonbury, where she’ll play for the third time next month, a pair of Boiler Room sets, one a b2b with her good friend and fellow DJ Jubilee, and many other events across the U.S., Europe, Brazil and beyond. When speaking to Billboard over Zoom, Oblivion is just about to play a set in London, where she spends a lot of her time and finds inspiration in the cultural and musical diversity.
The next day, she’s playing 6,000 miles away in San Diego, and the day after she’ll do a set at Lightning in a Bottle near Bakersfield, Calif. Her summer schedule includes Shambhala, Dirtybird Campout x Northern Nights, Toronto’s Sojourn Festival and Belgium’s Rampage Open Air.
Oblivion is very aware that her rookie status is one of gradually getting in front of more and more people over the years, rather than the rocket ship of virality. She’s cool with that.
“Sometimes people win the DJ lottery,” she says. “They get a viral moment, or they know the right somebody, or there’s something that pushes them a bit further and accelerates them. I’m not one of those people.”
But “I’m not complaining,” she continues. “I’m built for this in terms of where I came from and my work ethic, getting into more than one Ivy League school. I just set my mind to something and I’m relentless, not in a business shark way where I’m going to stomp on everyone in my path. More like, ‘What can I personally do to make sure I cover every single thing I can to get to that point?”
The grinding has obviously paid off. While it was only a few years ago that she was figuring out how to make music, Oblivion’s releases are ever tighter, fiercer and more stylish. Her latest release, February’s Net Work EP, features four inventive and frequently hard-hitting productions that feature collaborators including Lunice, Machinedrum and Sam Binga. Her forthcoming single is a baile funk track with British dancehall duo RDX, with it’s release date yet to be announced.
“In every industry, there’s going to be people who are going to jump the line or jump ahead, and that’s just what it is,” she says. “The only way to mentally deal, I think, is just to ask myself what I’m contributing. Why am I doing this? Is it because I want to get the best gigs or make the most money? No. I’m doing this because I live music This is my life. This is what I’ve been connected to since I was a child. So I’m going to make music and do stuff that’s going to fulfill me and add to the world that I love.”
The pursuit is also now paying off in ways that even this extremely educated artist didn’t imagine.
“People have come up to me at shows, especially young women, and they tell me they look up to me and like my music. I didn’t have that kind of role model as I was coming up as a DJ, at least not in the same way, so I’m just honored that people are even seeing me as a role model.
“Maybe I’m not that hot new DJ that’s touring everywhere,” she continues. “But obviously if my music is making a difference, and if just by existing in these spaces I can be someone that people look up to and see ‘okay, I can do this too,’ then that means something.”
It’s a Tuesday evening in May at Nightbird Studios, the recording complex nestled within L.A.’s Sunset Marquis. Within this infamous hotel rock and roller hotel, where Keith Richards once got behind the bar and poured drinks during the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, Anyma is tinkering away on a new album intended to end the current phase of his career.
A space packed with production equipment is certainly like a second home to the artist, but for him this place must also feel relatively mundane, given how much time he’s recently spent at Sphere. During a 12-date residency spanning this past December, January, February and March, the Italian American producer became the first electronic artist to headline the Las Vegas venue.
While already a longtime star of the global underground via his solo work and previously as part of the duo Tale of Us, this high-profile gig naturally pushed the producer to a new level of ubiquity, with his name suddenly alongside fellow Sphere residents including U2, the Eagles, Dead & Company and Phish. When asked how life is different now than it was on Dec. 26, the day before his residency started, he’s forthright.
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“Well,” he says in his thick Italian accent, “I’m less stressed.”
But those who’ve witnessed the not casual themes of heaven and hell, creation and destruction, humanity and transhumanism woven into his Sphere show and other previous visual output are right to assume the artist born Matteo Milleri is a deep thinker. Tonight, posted up on the couch in the studio’s dimly lit lounge, his webby tattoos peeking out from the sleeves of his hoodie, he elaborates on how the Sphere experience did, in fact, change him. And in fact, he’d hoped it might.
“I think if I would feel the same, it would not be a success for me,” he offers. “Because I put my ideas out there, so that they reflect back on me once they’ve been absorbed by the world. For me as an artist, it’s very important to feel like I’ve changed, evolved, improved my craft.”
Anyma is talkative, polite and emits a sense of gravitas while talking about his work, altogether seeming older than his 37 years. He began the Anyma (pronounced “ah-nee-ma”) project in 2021, fusing the work with both tech and lofty ideas about humanity, spirituality, technology, the past and the future. This Friday (May 30), Anyma releases The End of Genesys, the third and final LP in a trilogy, following 2023’s Genesys and 2024’s Genesys II.
This new music, Anyma says, “was scored to the Sphere opera movie, so it was really written with a very big inspiration.” The tens of thousands of people who saw the show witnessed this inspiration in wild and often surreal visuals that depicted scenes of space, verdant forests, deserts, burning cities and a pair of recurring characters — a human man and a chesty cyborg who who meet in various landscapes, with him eventually plugging a heart into her chest, a moment that drew cheers.
For Anyma, the project was a natural extension of his longtime goal of creating something different in the live electronic world. “The reason why I went into the production of the visual experience was because I don’t really feel much from live events,” he says. “Of course, the underground dance stuff is great, because that’s its own thing. I’m talking about the big concerts, the big festivals, the big productions. For me, even with the technology and the budgets available, I just went home with my ears hurting. It’s difficult to even grasp an artist’s perspective when the production is overwhelming.”
His goal was to make a more intentional visual presentation that “you can just basically augment your purpose and your art with it… That was the whole idea behind everything.” In this way, Sphere was simply the most powerful tool for him to express ideas he’d long been considering. (Having a pre-existing visual identity also helped the team save money on the Sphere show’s mighty production costs.)
“Of course I’m happy it ended in Sphere,” he continues, “but it was supposed to exist even on its own on a world tour. I want people to think and to like, feel, you know? Maybe go home the next day and reconnect with a loved one or something, because they were moved.”
His goal for for The End of Genesys is roughly the same. But while anyone who saw the Sphere show has effectively already heard the album, listening to these 15 tracks in your headphones — with no eye-pummeling visuals or seats shaking in time with the kick — is a different experience. Separated from its corresponding visual identity, the ears better grasp the music’s nuances.
The project includes several marquee collaborations, with the album’s banger of a lead single, “Hypnotized,” featuring vocals from dance icon Ellie Goulding. “Taratata” features previous collaborator and fellow tech enthusiast Grimes, “Human Now” has Empire of the Sun’s always-heady Luke Steele, and other songs recruit 070 Shake, Rezz, Sevdaliza and Yeat.
Anyma’s music has historically existed in the heavy and often cinematic realms of melodic techno, a genre that’s bubbled up in popularity in the broader dance scene over the last few years, a trend that’s partially a function of the success of Anyma and Tale of Us. (The topic of the duo is off limits, although Anyma’s agent, CAA’s Ferry Rais-Shaghaghi, told Billboard in February that “both guys are super-focused on their solo projects right now.”) But via the collabs and song structures, The End Of Genesys often adopts a more pop lean. This was kind of the point.
The previous two Genesys albums came at “a transitional part of my career, when I was still trying to understand how to crack the code with pop, electronic and dance,” says Anyma. And now? “I feel like I did it.”
“It’s the final evolution of the sound,” he says, “with the best artists I know, most of whom are my friends. It’s inspiring that I could connect all my knowledge and influences into a record and make it contemporary and potentially timeless. That’s not up to me, but I think some of this record is really timeless, and that’s what really exciting.”
Balancing all of these factors was tricky he says, “because these days people want very simple things on the dance floor, social media needs to be fast and that’s what’s really resonating with the younger generations.” He instead aspired to make music in the grand tradition of artists like The Chemical Brothers, Daft Punk and Massive Attack who made songs, he says, “that you could kind of vibe and dance to, but you could also sing. It was one cohesive artist statement with an edge of the rave culture behind it.”
Anyma
Courtesy of BT PR
The music will serve as material for Anyma’s many upcoming DJ sets, with his summer shows happening largely in Europe. The run includes an eight-week residency at Ibiza’s newest venue [UNVRS], a 15,000 capacity mega-club tricked out with a ton of technology.
He describes these upcoming performances as encompassing two worlds. The first is “DJ curation, longer sets, community and more forward thinking, exciting music… Then the big headline stuff and the bigger shows are more of a spin-off of the last act of Sphere, that aesthetic and those sonics.” He also says some of the new visuals will be AI-driven, with the use of AI currently a major focus of his work.
With all of these huge projects and big ideas, it’s hard to imagine Anyma in Netflix and chill mode, although he says it does happen. He’s based in Ibiza, where he enjoys the quiet of the farmland and the goats and the sea. Vacation for him is staying home, watching TV, listening to music and exercising for at least an hour a day, a habit that techno legend Sven Väth encouraged him to adopt. (“He saw me on tour and was like ‘You look a bit tired,’ and I was like, ‘You look great.’”)
But after the intense demands of Sphere, he says the most straightforward form of relaxation currently on his calendar is “going back to being a normal DJ.”
“This has been years of my life, of thinking, of my philosophy in the show. But creatively I also need to take a break — no artist creates just because there’s a screen. I don’t think I can do anything meaningful that way.”
Weirdness reigned once again at Lightning in a Bottle 2025.While the event — which marked its 22nd edition this past weekend, May 21-25 — has alternately been called a transformational festival, a wook gathering and a symposium of psychedelic culture, what’s definitely true is that despite its growth and demographic shifts over the years, the SoCal indie fest still manages to feel not just authentic but a reflection of a fairly specific culture, no small feat in the age of corporate mega-festivals.
In this case, that culture is one interested in art, pleasantly goofy outfits, myriad vibration raising activities and loads of electronic music. (It’s also one that will be recognized by fans of jam bands and attendees of spiritually adjacent festivals like Burning Man and Michigan’s Electric Forest.)
As such, this year’s LiB schedule was populated with activities such as “transformative grief rituals for conscious living and dying” and “high vibe breakfast: tacos for energy & longevity.” There was bingo, there was many varieties of yoga, there was a bar selling exclusively pickle juice, there was a roller skating rink and a drum circle for the kids.
Amid the high heat of the weekend, many attendees could be seen floating on various whimsical inflatables in Lake Webb, located at the center of the site in the Buena Vista Recreation Area 25 miles outside of Bakersfield. Here, tens of thousands of attendees erected their tents and rolled up in their RVs for the event, which is produced by the Do Lab.
Of course, more than any other element, there was music. The 2025 lineup was a mighty one featuring headliners like LiB regular Four Tet, returning star Jamie xx and John Summit, who embraced his self-proclaimed wook side with a Sunday night set on the mainstage and then played a surprise (but not too surprising) b2b with friend and fellow headliner Subtronics.
A flurry of other big and rising stars played across LiB’s six-plus stages, tents and art cars, with the music going until the early hours of the morning. A Saturday night party from L.A.’s legendary A Club Called Rhonda Party series even featured a set by Parris Goebel, who recent work includes creating the choreography for Lady Gaga’s brilliant Coachella 2025 performance and who lit up the Crossroads tent with her high energy show.
And while there were all the typical lights and lasers, arguably the biggest light show of the weekend happened on Saturday night, when a SpaceX Dragon cargo ship returning from the International Space Station created a golden streak of light across the sky.
See photos from Lightning in a Bottle 2025 below.
It’s no secret that artists are at the mercy of the algorithm when it comes to reaching fans online and through social media — but many acts report that new music and posts on platforms like Instagram and YouTube only reach a tiny fraction of their fan bases.
This issue is one experienced by Norwegian producer Alan Walker, whose manager, Gunnar Greve, tells Billboard that “when we release a new song, it reaches only 0.4 to 2% of our most active listeners. The same goes for YouTube — even fans who want to stay connected don’t always see the content. Editorial playlists and algorithmic feeds have started to replace organic discovery.”
This is despite the fact that Walker has roughly 10.4 million followers on Instagram alone and has clocked songs with millions, even billions, of streams.
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“When I released ‘Faded’ in 2015,” Walker says of his biggest hit, “streaming was still in its early days. There was a sense of excitement, a new world opening up. But in the years since, the pace of the industry has exploded. Today, the landscape is crowded, noisy, and often overwhelming even for those of us with big followings and strong communities.”
Like many other artists, Walker has observed that “the connection between artists and fans is starting to slip. Not because people care less, but because the systems we rely on don’t prioritize or find space for meaningful content. The pressure to chase trends or fit into playlist algorithms often takes the spotlight away from creativity, experimentation and emotional connection. The reasons most of us got into music in the first place.”
To cut through this noise, Walker and Greve are preparing to launch World of Walker, a custom app and online community tailored for Walker’s millions of global fans.
Launching on Aug. 8, World of Walker will offer exclusive immersive fan experiences, access to premium content (including Walker’s entire music and video catalogs), behind-the-scenes material, exclusive weekly livestreams, direct chats and more. Users can also participate in community-driven projects, events and discussions. The app is free to join, and pre-registration is available now.
The way Walker and Greve see it, World of Walker will provide greater opportunity than most social platforms for everyone involved. “For one, we can speak freely, without worrying about algorithms or chasing virality,” says Walker. “I have a global, diverse fanbase with different interests, and this app gives each person the chance to build their own World of Walker. They can find their people, join conversations that matter and stay connected to what truly resonates with them. We also get better insight into what fans actually want, which means we can shape the platform based on real feedback, not guesswork.”
Greve says the goal is reaching 500,000 users within the first year, “but the most important thing is for people to be active and engaged within the app.” In terms of monetization, he adds that the business model has two layers.
“First, just having a direct line of communication with fans without relying on third-party platforms. This is a success in itself. But in the app, we’ll have a mix of activity-based experiences and monetization through a small premium model and an in-app store with both physical and digital items. If we create enough engagement and value, profitability will follow.”
While Walker and Greve acknowledge that not every artist has the resources to build such a platform, they hope their project will help the industry evolve “in a way that puts fans and artists at the center. Not just as tools for big corporations,” says Greve.
Ahead of the app’s August launch, fans will get the opportunity to join the world of Walker in real life when he plays the final show of his two-year Walkerworld Tour at SummerStage in New York’s Central Park on Saturday (May 31.) Walker reports playing for more than 500,000 people during the tour and says he’ll also be releasing new music this summer.
World of Walker
Courtesy of World of Walker
World of Walker
Courtesy of World of Walker
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.