News / hardcore
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1 min read
Defqon.1 is this week and the labels just emptied the armory
Read more . . . →Gates open at Biddinghuizen this week and the release schedule clearly knows it. Every label with a stake in the weekend dumped its heaviest stuff in the last few days, so right now your feed is about 90% kick drums and a guy screaming about a sacred oath. Here’s what actually clawed its way out of that pile: five fresh drops that’ll go off in the field before the anthem even hits. 1. Adaro & Unresolved - Original Gangsters (Raw and Mean) Two rawstyle lifers who somehow never made a track together until last week. It’s exactly what “no hypes,...
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1 min read
Power Hour is the worst hour of your life and you'll fly across the planet for it
Read more . . . →Four days out, so let’s talk about the dumbest, best tradition Q-dance ever invented. Power Hour. Sixty minutes of the hardest, fastest edits they can get away with, the whole RED crowd packed in like it’s the last hour the species gets. Your heart rate has no business being where it ends up. People genuinely plan their entire weekend around being in that crowd at that moment. Here’s the kind of chaos that lives in that hour. 1. Sub Sonik - Aftermath Sounds exactly like what’s left of you afterward. The kind of track Power Hour was built to weaponize,...
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1 min read
Defqon.1 is 5 days out and these are the 2026 IDs that'll actually go off
Read more . . . →Five days. The wristband’s been sitting on my kitchen counter since the lineup was still a rumor, and now it’s real. Every other festival this summer is trying to sell you a sunset and a seltzer sponsor. Defqon sells you a field full of people who drove from four countries to scream at a kick drum. So here’s the new stuff from this year, the tracks that are going to do damage on the mainstage, not the catalogue classics the whole field already knows by heart. 1. Primeshock & Villain - Deep Dive Technically this is the Relevatez anthem, but...
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1 min read
Defqon.1 let a meme collective close the mainstage and honestly, good
Read more . . . →The strangest booking of Defqon.1 2026: GPF, a collective whose entire brand is treating gabber as the world’s loudest inside joke, get the RED mainstage on Sunday. That’s the ceremonial closing slot, normally handed to a hardstyle institution with a decade of history behind it. This year it goes to the people making uptempo bootlegs of pop songs. I’m fully on board. 1. GPF, DJ Gollum, BassWar & CaoX - I Want It That Way (Uptempo) Yes, it’s the Backstreet Boys. Yes, it’s pushing 180 BPM and completely sincere about being ridiculous. The whole point of GPF is that you...
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1 min read
The women running Defqon.1's hardest stages
Read more . . . →Hardcore gets typecast as a boys’ club, and the people actually closing these stages keep proving otherwise. A couple weeks out from Defqon.1, here are three who have spent years setting the pace instead of following it. 1. Miss K8 & Tha Watcher - Reflections Miss K8 came out of Ukraine and turned into one of hardcore’s most bankable headliners. “Reflections,” the Harmony of Hardcore 2025 anthem with vocalist Tha Watcher, is two women owning a festival’s entire identity for a year. 2. AniMe - In The End AniMe has been a fixture of Italian hardcore for years, and in...
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1 min read
Uptempo: 200 BPM was the floor, not the ceiling
Read more . . . →Uptempo is what happens when hardcore decides that slowing down is for cowards. It’s the fastest, most aggressive corner of the Defqon.1 site, kicks distorted past the point of melody, and the crowd that shows up for it knew exactly what it was signing up for. A couple weeks out, here’s where the speed lives. 1. Riot Shift - RUNNIN Riot Shift has turned into one of the sharper names in this lane, and “RUNNIN,” out in October, is relentless in the way the title promises. 2. N-Vitral presents BOMBSQUAD & Dimitri K - Energy Drink The BOMBSQUAD alias is...
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1 min read
Frenchcore: the genre that decided hardstyle naps too much
Read more . . . →A few weeks out from Defqon.1, and if the mainstage hardstyle isn’t doing it for you, frenchcore is both the answer and the warning. Faster, rollier, 200 BPM and climbing, built on a kick that gallops where hardstyle stomps. Defqon hands it real estate every year because the people who love it do not love it quietly. Three to start with. 1. Dr. Peacock & D’ort - Frenchcore Lullaby Dr. Peacock basically built the modern frenchcore audience, and “Frenchcore Lullaby” is him being funny about it. Nothing here is putting anyone to sleep. 2. Billx - Jump Now Billx came...
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1 min read
Defqon.1's hard half: where hardstyle is the warm-up
Read more . . . →Defqon.1 hits Biddinghuizen at the end of June and most of the coverage fixates on the mainstage hardstyle. Fine. But the reason this festival makes every other summer lineup look soft lives one stage over, where the kicks stop being polite. Hardcore, frenchcore, uptempo, the harder end of the site. If regular hardstyle already feels too gentle for you, here’s your map for the rest of the week. 1. Angerfist - The Nightmare Man Angerfist has been the face of Dutch hardcore for two decades and “The Nightmare Man,” out last November, is him doing the thing nobody does better....
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1 min read
Rebelion gets a full stage at Defqon.1 and they've been building to this
Filthy Rave is filthy and it is a rave. Rebelion and Warface doing exactly what it says on the tin and asking zero further questions.Read more . . . →Get the tee →Support the blogWhat if your laundry was also a personality? -
1 min read
Rawstyle vs euphoric: the two camps you're walking into
Read more . . . →Three weeks to Defqon.1 and if you’re new to this, hardstyle has a civil war inside it. Rawstyle is the darker, harder, more industrial side — distorted kicks, aggressive energy, not interested in making you feel things in a warm way. Euphoric is the other thing: massive melodic builds, soaring vocals, the stuff that makes people raise their hands at 3am and mean it. Defqon.1 has room for both and so does the lineup. Here’s what each side sounds like. 1. Brennan Heart - Interstellar Brennan Heart is closing the Spotlight this year — the closing set of the entire...
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