Eight days out. There’s a whole side of Tomorrowland that trades drops for hypnosis. The melodic techno rooms, where the point is to lose track of time entirely and wander out at sunrise wondering what happened. Mind Against are on the bill this year, so here’s a run through the sound they came up in: 1. Mind Against - Walking Away The Afterlife aesthetic in one track: patient, cold, gorgeous. It takes almost three minutes to fully arrive and every second of that build earns it. This is 4am music, played to a room that has stopped checking the time. 2. ARTBAT - Return to Oz The Ukrainian duo’s remix that basically defined a festival era. That bassline rolls for eight minutes and never once feels long. If you’ve been to a big outdoor set in the last five years, you’ve heard a crowd come apart to this whether you...
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July 09, 2026 at 11:07 AM
1 min read
The dark Tomorrowland tents where you lose track of time
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July 09, 2026 at 11:07 AM
1 min read
DAIRE x Lightforce - Join Me
Read more . . . →Big, unashamed, hands-in-the-air trance is having a real moment again, and Join Me is a fine argument for why. DAIRE and Lightforce build this on a supersaw lead that could strip paint, but the melody is genuinely good: a rising phrase that resolves exactly where your ear wants it to, which is trance’s whole trick when it’s done right. The breakdown around 2:00 goes full emotional, all reverbed vocal and held chords, before the drop slams everything back to 138 and lets the kick carry the rest. This isn’t cerebral music and it isn’t trying to be; it’s engineered for one specific 3am moment when the lights and the crowd and the drop all line up at once. I’ve never managed to be cynical about trance, and tracks like this are the reason why. The nostalgia is baked in, but the energy underneath it is completely real. Turn it up...
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July 09, 2026 at 7:49 AM 1 min read
Voltage - Music Is The Answer
Read more . . . →That vocal sample is older than half the people who’ll rave to this, and Voltage knows exactly what he’s doing dragging it back out. Music Is The Answer flips a house anthem hook into jump-up territory, and the contrast between the euphoric vocal and the gurning bassline underneath is the whole joke and the whole appeal. The drop at 1:05 is pure serotonin, the kind of obvious arms-up moment you’re not supposed to admit you love and love anyway. Voltage builds these things for a specific room at a specific hour, sweaty and past the point of caring, and it works because he commits completely. I clocked the bassline doing three different patterns in the first drop alone, which is more effort than jump-up usually bothers with. There’s nothing subtle here and there doesn’t need to be. Sometimes the answer really is a massive vocal over a heavier-than-necessary bass, played...
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July 09, 2026 at 7:08 AM
1 min read
Poilievre Congratulated the Man Who Just Left Him
Read more . . . →Pierre Poilievre just watched a fifth MP walk out of his caucus, and his response was to thank the guy. Mark Carney appointed Conservative MP Richard Martel — a sitting member of Poilievre’s own team — to the Senate this week, and Martel took the red chair and left. Four Conservatives before him crossed the floor straight to the Liberals; Martel just got the seat handed to him by the Liberal prime minister instead. Poilievre reportedly found out minutes before it went public. Then he put out a statement wishing Martel well, hoping he’d “continue the fight for affordability, growing paycheques, and safe streets in the Upper Chamber.” Your opponent poached a player off your bench and you clapped. Look at what Carney is actually doing here, because it’s not subtle and it doesn’t need to be. He scrapped the non-partisan pretense for Senate seats the same week and dropped...
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July 09, 2026 at 7:08 AM
1 min read
Da Hool - Meet Her at the Loveparade (Hex Cougar Remix)
Read more . . . →Meet Her at the Loveparade is a 1997 track older than a lot of the people who’ll hear this remix, and that riff, the dun, dun-dun-dun of it, is permanently lodged in dance music’s collective memory. Hex Cougar takes it somewhere Da Hool never imagined: a filthy half-time trap flip that treats the original melody as bait before the drop swallows it whole. The genius is leaving the riff almost untouched so the recognition lands clean, then detonating underneath it at 1:22 with a bass sound like a garbage truck compacting. It shouldn’t work. A 90s trance classic has no business turning up in a Trap Nation upload. But the tension between the pristine nostalgic hook and the grimy modern low end is the entire joke, and it absolutely lands. I laughed out loud the first time the drop hit, which is the correct response to something this gleefully wrong....
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July 09, 2026 at 3:20 AM
1 min read
BROKN - Feel It
Read more . . . →What separates good trap from the wall of interchangeable stuff on channels like this? Usually one weird decision, and Feel It has a couple. BROKN builds the drop around a vocal sample pitched down until it sounds genuinely haunted, then pairs it with a bassline that swings instead of just thudding in place. The result at 1:18 has actual groove, which is rarer in this lane than it should be; most trap drops are content to sit there heavy and static, and this one moves its hips. There’s a snare roll going into the second drop that’s programmed with real care, little velocity changes that keep it from sounding like a machine. I don’t know anything about BROKN and the track gives almost nothing away, but there’s clearly a producer here who sweats the small stuff. Under three minutes, not a wasted bar. The kind of thing that rewards a...
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July 08, 2026 at 11:12 PM 1 min read
501 ft. Belle Humble - HeadRush (beastboi. Remix)
Read more . . . →Belle Humble’s voice is the kind that can carry a whole track on its own, so handing it to beastboi. for a dubstep remix is a small act of violence I fully support. The original HeadRush was already a big vocal moment; this version keeps the top line intact through the first drop, lets you fall for it, then absolutely wrecks the second one with a low end that sounds like it’s chewing through the mix. What gets me is the restraint before the 2:10 switch. beastboi. holds the drop back a full bar longer than you expect, and that half-second of dread is the best part of the whole thing. Vocal-led dubstep usually goes precious or brutal with nothing in between. This threads it, keeping Belle’s runs legible over all that weight, which is harder to engineer than it sounds. It’s been my walking-to-the-bus track for two days now...
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July 08, 2026 at 9:31 PM 1 min read
kiskadee, Jody Wisternoff & James Grant - Friendly Fire (feat. Ren Ocean)
Read more . . . →There’s a bassline in Friendly Fire that walks in on the offbeat and just refuses to leave, and it’s the reason this Anjunadeep cut lodged in my head for a full afternoon. Jody Wisternoff and James Grant have been steering this label’s melodic-house sound for years — Wisternoff was making records before half the Anjunadeep roster was born — and pairing them with kiskadee and Ren Ocean’s vocal gives the track a human warmth the genre sometimes forgets to include. It’s deep house that actually moves rather than just shimmering prettily in place, the groove doing real work under all the atmosphere. Ren Ocean’s voice is smoky and low, sitting right in the pocket, and around 3:00 the arrangement opens up into a breakdown that’s all pads and space before the bassline saunters back in. It’s the sort of record that works at a dinner party and a warehouse with...
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July 08, 2026 at 4:48 PM 1 min read
Justė - Just A Little (feat. Sam Harper)
Read more . . . →Somewhere between a pop song and a dancefloor filler there’s a lane that acts like it barely exists, and Just A Little parks right in it. Justė turns in a confident, radio-shaped piece of dance-pop with Sam Harper’s vocal doing a lot of the lifting. The production keeps things clean and uncluttered — a bouncy plucked riff, a bassline that walks rather than pounds, a drop at 1:30 that’s more about groove than impact. It’s the kind of track that would slot into a summer playlist without anyone thinking too hard about it, which sounds like a backhanded compliment and isn’t meant as one; making something this frictionless is genuinely difficult. Sam Harper’s voice has a nice grain to it that keeps the sweetness in check, stopping the whole thing from floating away. It works fine as background music and rewards actual attention by the second chorus, which is a...
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July 08, 2026 at 4:11 PM 1 min read
V. Christie - Atlas
Read more . . . →The moment that sold me is at 1:40, when the whole track cuts to almost nothing and then rebuilds itself one layer at a time. Atlas is an NCS release, which usually means clean, stream-ready melodic electronic, and this is a very good example of the type without being a slave to it. V. Christie has a knack for a lead melody that lodges itself in your head on first listen, and this one had me humming it in the shower a full day later. The production is glossy in that copyright-free way, but there’s real songwriting under the polish, a chord progression that actually goes somewhere instead of just looping until the runtime’s up. NCS gets dismissed as background music for teenagers’ montages, and sure, but every so often one of their releases has legs beyond the algorithm and this is one of them. The build is patient and...
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July 09, 2026 at 11:07 AM
1 min read
