Trance has a problem most genres would kill for: its fans don’t drift. They enlist. And the headquarters of that standing army is a London label named after a beach in Goa that most of the people getting it tattooed have never been to.
Anjunabeats is a London trance label founded in 2000 by Jono Grant and Paavo Siljamäki, the two who’d go on to form Above & Beyond with Tony McGuinness after the three of them cut a remix of Chakra’s “Home” together. (Anjuna is Anjuna Beach in Goa, India, the old Goa-trance pilgrimage spot. The name was a flag planted before any of them had the catalog to back it up.) A quarter century later it’s the closest thing trance has to a flag. Not the biggest dance label, not the richest, but the one with the most devoted crowd. The “Anjunafamily” thing isn’t marketing schmaltz; people genuinely ink this stuff on themselves.
Above & Beyond figured out early that the move wasn’t the drop, it was the cry. Their whole catalog is built on a specific feeling: that lump-in-your-throat lift where a vocal hook, a piano line, and a supersaw chord stack all hit at once and you’re suddenly emotional in a field at 1am with 30,000 strangers. “Sun & Moon” and “Thing Called Love,” the 2011 run of Richard Bedford-voiced singles around the Group Therapy album, aren’t bangers. They’re catharsis with a kick drum. And the Zoë Johnston partnership goes back even further: “Good For Me,” off the 2006 debut Tri-State, was voted Tune of the Year on A State of Trance. They invented the trance equivalent of a hands-in-the-air group hug and then ran the franchise for two decades.
Group Therapy is the whole thesis
The vehicle is Group Therapy: the radio show (ABGT) and the gigantic live events. The name is the tell. They frame the music as communal emotional maintenance, and the gimmick should be insufferable. The records earn it instead. ABGT250 turned the Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington State into a canyon-sized open-air church in September 2017. Then there’s the “Push the Button” ritual, where a fan gets hauled up on stage to drop the beat. It started by accident around “Sun & Moon” on their 2011 US run, when Tony mimed hitting play for a camera, and the next night people turned up with signs begging for a go. Plenty of producers make uplifting trance. A&B turned it into a congregation with a tour schedule.
The roster, with actual payload
Anjunabeats isn’t a one-act label coasting on its founders. Andrew Bayer is the resident weirdo-genius, the guy whose production is too clever for the room and somehow still detonates it: “Once Lydian,” the In My Last Life album (2018), the stuff that proves trance can have actual ideas. Ilan Bluestone is the muscle, melodic trance with the gain turned up. And the deep bench (Genix, Grum, Spencer Brown, Maor Levi, who’s an Anjuna lifer, not a newcomer) keeps the sound evolving without losing the thread. It’s one of the few legacy dance labels where the back catalog and the new signings actually rhyme.
Anjunabeats vs Anjunadeep
Now the part everybody trips on. Anjunadeep is the same family, a completely different room. Above & Beyond launched it in 2005 with James Grant (Jono’s brother and the act’s manager) running A&R, as the home for the slower, deeper stuff that didn’t fit a trance label.
- Anjunabeats = the peak. Hands-up, vocal-driven, emotional trance. The one that wants you crying with your hands in the air.
- Anjunadeep = the comedown. Deep and melodic house, built for the hours after the peak.
That’s the whole distinction, and if you want the deep side’s sound, roster and flaws in full, the Anjunadeep explainer has it. The only thing worth adding here is how the two halves fit. People who only know the Deep side are often shocked the same company puts out full-throttle trance, and trance purists sometimes sniff at Deep as the label going soft. Both takes miss it. (And no, the Beats side doesn’t live at 138 BPM purist trance. A&B mostly run a notch calmer, in the low 130s, which is exactly why the vocals breathe.) Running both rooms is the smartest thing the label ever did: they own the entire emotional arc of a night, from the warm-up to the breakdown to the bit where someone hugs you and you don’t even know them.
That’s the real flex. Most labels have a sound. Anjuna has a mood, in two flavors, and a fanbase that knows every breakdown by heart and plans vacations around ABGT weekenders. Yes, there are matching shirts. Trance also gets pronounced dead roughly every eighteen months, and this label keeps selling out amphitheaters by doing the least cool, most sincere thing in dance music: making people feel something on purpose.
If you’ve never gone in, don’t start with a greatest-hits playlist. Put on any of the big anniversary sets, wait for the moment the whole crowd sings a wordless melody back at the stage, and try to stay cynical. The argument that matters in dance music isn’t who’s coolest. It’s who can make a field full of strangers lose it at the same exact second. Anjuna keeps winning it.