News / uptempo
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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
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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