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1 min read
Golden Hour: Three Tracks for the Best Sixty Minutes of Summer
Read more . . . →The best hour of summer is the one right before the sun clocks out. Nobody’s peaking yet, everybody’s grinning, the drink is still cold. Here’s what that hour sounds like when you get it right. 1. Barry Can’t Swim - Dance Dance Dance! Barry Can’t Swim makes music for exactly this window, that gold-light stretch where the day hasn’t decided to become a night yet. The piano loop is stupidly joyful and the whole thing swings instead of thumps, which is a harder trick than it sounds. Twenty seconds in and your shoulders are already gone. 2. Jamie xx -...
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Summer Anthem Season: Five Tracks for Open-Air Stages and Bad Decisions
Read more . . . →It’s the last week of July, the sun doesn’t quit until nine, and every festival lineup you screenshotted back in March is happening somewhere without you. Fine. Here are five tracks built for open-air stages and the bad decisions that follow them, whether you make those decisions in a field or in your kitchen at midnight with the neighbours awake. 1. John Summit - Focus (feat. CLOVES) John Summit spent 2025 quietly turning into a stadium act, and this is the track that did it. CLOVES sounds genuinely wrecked on the hook, and when the low end lands around the...
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It's here again. Weekend two opens today.
Read more . . . →Gates open in Boom in a few hours and the second, better weekend of Tomorrowland is officially on. You either flew to Belgium or you’re doing what the rest of us are doing, which is refreshing the livestream at your desk and pretending to work. Either way the mainstage wants your hands in the air, so I’m not going to fight it. These four are the pure sundown-singalong anthems, the ones with no shame and no subtlety, and today is the one day of the year you’re allowed to love them out loud. 1. Tiësto - Red Lights The Belgian...
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The techno stage doesn't care that you're on holiday
Read more . . . →The techno tent at Tomorrowland is a strange thing to walk into after the mainstage. There’s no confetti and no vocalist begging you to put your hands up, and the drops aren’t telegraphed forty-five seconds in advance. Just a relentless grey kick and a room full of people staring at the floor in bliss. It’s the least Instagrammable corner of the whole site and, on the right night, the best one. Weekend two lands tomorrow. Here’s what that room sounds like this year. 1. Eli Brown x HI-LO - Pyramid Rave Oliver Heldens moonlighting as HI-LO next to Eli Brown,...
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The slow stages at Tomorrowland are where the grown-ups hide
Read more . . . →Not everyone at Tomorrowland wants their organs rearranged. Some people wander off to the melodic and progressive stages, order a beer, and let something with actual chords wash over them for an hour. This is the part of the festival nobody films, because a slow filter build doesn’t play well as a nine-second clip, and that’s precisely why it’s worth being there. Weekend two opens in two days. Here’s the quieter lane. 1. Above & Beyond feat. Richard Bedford - Sun & Moon Fifteen years on and this still makes trance skeptics go quiet. The Richard Bedford vocal does most...
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The hardstyle temple is where Tomorrowland stops being polite
Read more . . . →Somewhere off the mainstage, past the flower crowns and the couples filming their engagement, there’s a stage kicking at 150 BPM with a bassline built to loosen fillings. That’s the hardstyle corner, and it’s the most honest room at the festival. Nobody’s there for the aesthetic. They’re there because the kick hits like a car door and the euphoric leads make grown men hug strangers. With weekend two three days out, here’s the stuff that runs that tent. 1. D-Block & S-te-Fan & Headhunterz - Keepers Of Our Legacy Three of the genre’s founding names on one track, which should...
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Weekend two is the one that actually matters
Read more . . . →Weekend one wrapped yesterday and your feed is already unbearable, full of drone shots and people crying at the mainstage like they invented feelings. Fine. But everyone who actually knows Tomorrowland knows the second weekend is the better one. The DJs have shaken off the rust, the crowd skews more heads and fewer influencers doing a bit for the camera, and the set that flopped on Friday the 17th gets quietly fixed by Friday the 24th. Boom, Belgium goes again this Friday, and here are the five tracks I want the mainstage to earn. 1. Hardwell - Spaceman Hardwell headlines...
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It's here. Tomorrowland weekend one opens today.
Read more . . . →This is it. Weekend one opens today, David Guetta and Martin Garrix and Calvin Harris are somewhere over Belgium right now, and 200,000 people are about to pretend they didn’t pay a fortune to stand in a field. Say what you want about Tomorrowland, the mainstage singalong at golden hour is a real thing that does real damage to whatever cynicism you showed up with. Three tracks built for exactly the moment when the whole field sings the same line back. 1. Axwell Λ Ingrosso - More Than You Know Two-thirds of Swedish House Mafia in their solo years, and...
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There's an Avicii tribute at Tomorrowland this year and I'm not ready
Read more . . . →Quick heads up before the gates open: this year’s Tomorrowland includes an Avicii tribute, and if you were anywhere near dance music between 2011 and 2018 you already know why that lands hard. Tim Bergling more or less wrote the sound the mainstage still runs on, then he was gone at 28. The festival that helped build him is giving a whole moment back to him. Four tracks to have loaded before you’re standing in that field with everyone else. 1. Avicii - Levels The one that started it. An Etta James sample looped over a piano line so simple...
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Tomorrowland is in Belgium and the locals still run the place
Read more . . . →Reminder that Tomorrowland happens in Boom, a Belgian town of about 18,000 that swells to festival-sized every July and then goes quiet again. The polite thing is to respect the home team, and Belgium’s dance roster punches so far above the country’s weight it’s almost unfair. Four locals worth your time, running from radio-friendly to genuinely frightening. 1. Lost Frequencies - Are You With Me Felix De Laet was still a teenager when this became the first Belgian track to top the UK singles chart. It’s a country sample turned into a sunset anthem, and it should be corny, but...
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