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 clocked the title or not.
3. Stephan Bodzin - Singularity
Live, Bodzin conducts this thing like an orchestra, hands in the air, no laptop in sight. The lead melody is genuinely beautiful and the low end could move furniture across a room. Proof techno doesn’t have to be grey to be serious.
Find the dark tent. Thank me at sunrise.