The most hypnotically bizarre music video I’ve seen in ages begins with a young man peeling the bandages off his surgically enhanced jaws and chin, which jut out of his face like the haunches of a Thanksgiving turkey. The camera zooms out to reveal more people lounging on cream-colored sofas, all of them cosmetically and cartoonishly disfigured, all preening into their phones. Framed by palm fronds, a DJ in a brightly colored bikini top and skirt is immersed in her mixing. “Our whispers float to the ceiling,” coos an angelic voice. “We laugh all our wounds to healing.”
This is the opening scene of SPF Infini 2, a 43-minute visual accompaniment to the Montreal electronic musician TDJ’s 2022 compilation of the same name. Shot in a high-end vacation rental in Tulum, Mexico, the video plays out like a Black Mirror episode about leisure-class narcissists at some dystopian afterparty. Its stomach-turning surrealism recalls the sensory onslaught of experimental filmmaker Ryan Trecartin’s work, or Chris Cunningham’s “Come to Daddy” video for Aphex Twin. Yet what might be most striking about the epic setpiece is its soundtrack. TDJ’s video is steeped in the uplifting sounds of early-2000s trance music—all weightless arpeggios, soaring toplines, and massive, buzzing synth patches known as supersaws—like a Tiësto anthem spun from pure cotton candy.
It’s easy to wonder if this is meant to be a sardonic sendup of trance, long one of electronic music’s most derided subgenres. Like PC Music’s glossily self-aware pop, the music seems to flicker, like a lenticular image, between homage and parody. But while TDJ—aka Geneviève Ryan-Martel—acknowledges that the video is meant to be funny (“They’re looking at me like I’m God,” she says, laughing, of her exalted role as the DJ), she makes clear that there’s nothing ironic about her musical choices: “I’m passionate about trance music.”
Ryan-Martel first discovered the genre when she was about 7 years old, around the turn of the millennium, through a friend whose stepfather brought home a Tiësto CD. “I was like, ‘Whoa, OK, love it,’” she recalls, her eyes going wide under a baseball cap. After a stint making ethereal emo-tronica under the name RYAN Playground on Ryan Hemsworth’s Secret Songs label in the 2010s, Ryan-Martel returned to the sound of her childhood, inspired in part by a collection of treasured trance songs she’d received from a new crush.
Watch TDJ in action at HÖR, an online radio station in Berlin, and it’s obvious that her love of trance is no joke. Wearing a hoodie emblazoned with the logo of Paris’ Casual Gabberz collective—who share her fondness for over-the-top European dance music from previous decades—she blazes through an uptempo set of trance, Eurodance, hardstyle, and even her own colossal edit of M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes.” In SPF Infini 2, she may come off as cool as an ice queen in a crystal palace, but that remove melts when she’s behind the decks for real.
It’s not just TDJ: The sounds and signifiers of Y2K-era trance are everywhere these days, often coming from artists with little previous affiliation with the genre. In Romy and Fred again..’s “Strong,” arpeggios pierce the air like neon raindrops; the xx singer’s diaphanous vocals recall those of Sarah McLachlan in Delerium’s “Silence,” a song made famous by Tiësto’s 2000 “In Search of Sunrise” remix. Rising UK house talent I. Jordan’s new single “M1, M3”—written on the train home after a string of gigs in Manchester, still buzzing on the energy of the dancefloor—rides an indefatigable pogo stick of a bassline and a series of dramatic buildups meant to reflect the artist’s fondness for trance. Russian DJ Nina Kraviz, after peppering her sets with canonical trance hits for years, recently released a psy-trance single, “Hace Ejercicios,” that went to No. 2 on electronic music retailer Beatport’s Top 100.
Then there’s Dutch DJ Young Marco, a fixture of the tastemaking scene around Amsterdam’s Dekmantel Festival. First, he made vintage trance fair game for crate-diggers with 2021’s Planet Love Vol. 1 - Early Transmissions 1991-1995, compiling favorites from the years before the genre devolved into stadium-sized bombast. Now, Young Marco has signed to UK mega-label Ministry of Sound with his single “What You Say?” If the trancey atmospheres inspire deja vu, that’s because the song is built around Imogen Heap’s 2005 hit “Hide and Seek”—a heavily vocoded a cappella that was remixed in its day by trance titans like Tiësto and Morgan Page. In one of those inscrutable pop-culture developments (see: Gen Z’s embrace of Ed Hardy) the terminally uncool has swung back into fashion.
It’s not that trance ever went away; it remains a thriving, popular scene with its own ecosystem of artists and labels. But these revivalists are coming from outside the trance scene. Their adoption of the form feels akin to the zoomer embrace of drum’n’bass, in which a new generation of listeners disconnected from insider traditions is putting its own spin on classic breakbeat sounds.
Trance, whose vast commercial success in the 2000s paved the way for the EDM boom of the 2010s, has long been maligned for what critics see as its spectacular excess and its paucity of good taste. Uptempo, relentlessly melodic, and unabashed in its pursuit of transcendent emotion, the music often fell prey to maudlin overreach. Its bigger-is-better ambitions (packed stadiums, a breathless obsession with superlatives) and Jesus-posing DJs made the music ripe for ridicule. “It has a lousy image,” says Dutch curator, writer, and label owner Arjan Rietveld. But a few years ago, Rietveld, who discovered his homeland’s trance scene as an impressionable pre-teen before graduating to techno and experimental electronic music, began feeling nostalgic. “I would have these odd moments during the day where I would turn up some trance on YouTube, and it gave me so much joy and energy,” he says. “It’s this feeling that you can’t get from any other genre.”
He ended up publishing a book called Hypnotised: A Journey Through Trance Music 1990-2005. Part oral history, part annotated discography, part spirited defense, Rietveld’s book isn’t just a document of a critically neglected scene; it’s an attempt to translate the transcendent feeling of its peaks, to capture “the actual beauty of trance.” The problem, he says, is that the scene has come to be defined by its worst elements. “The majority of people perceive trance as this kind of music they’d hear on TV or the radio around the turn of the millennium—the hypercommercial supersaw sound with cheesy vocals and distasteful video clips—which is surely not the best that trance had to offer.”
This isn’t the first time that trance has reared its head beyond its stereotypically laser-kissed stomping grounds. In 2013, Yeezus collaborator Evian Christ kicked off a long-running event series called Trance Party that mashed up Eurodance anthems with cutting-edge club music (and scads of confetti). Around the same time, his fellow Warp signee Lorenzo Senni began using the genre’s tropes in counterintuitive ways, creating pointillistic anthems that were all build and no drop. But where those projects carried a whiff of mischief, the new wave of trance feels like a more earnest and direct homage. Perhaps it’s a generational shift, as artists who first discovered electronic music from their friends’ stepdads’ Tiësto CDs begin to look back on their own musical upbringing. Maybe it’s just that people are jonesing for all the euphoria they can get right now.
“I’m a very sensitive person,” says Ryan-Martel. “When I started TDJ, the world was so dark, I felt like everybody needed some light. Trance is the perfect music to just project yourself and dream for a minute, to let yourself go.” Rietveld agrees; he sees trance as a natural corrective to the omnipresent darkness of styles like techno and more experimental styles of club music, not to mention real-world woes like climate change and the pandemic. “People want positive energy in their lives,” he says. “Trance music offers just that.”
Danish DJ Courtesy, aka Najaaraq Vestbirk, founder of Copenhagen’s Kulør label, also predicts trance is ripe for a revival. “There’s a shift coming,” she says. Vestbirk, now in her thirties, discovered electronic music as a preteen from the Faithless CDs in her older sister’s car. She recalls the shocked reaction when she played a lone trance cut in her 2018 Boiler Room set at Dekmantel. Yet today, her HÖR sets have earned play counts in the hundreds of thousands—one of them has nearly a million—with their soaring leads and epic pads, while her Mixmag Cover Mix last summer was made up almost entirely of vintage anthems from artists like Paul Oakenfold and Ferry Corsten. Like Young Marco’s Planet Love compilations, she steers clear of anything too schmaltzy, focusing instead on leaner, housier, or more acidic variations on the form, as well the atmospheric strains that informed her own attempts, as a producer, at what she’s termed “ambient trance.”
Vestbirk believes that the shift is partly generational. A new wave of clubbers doesn’t have the same prejudices about trance that the old guard did. And the artsier end of the scene is bored with techno, which—in its overground, festival-filling incarnation, with an emphasis on formulaic structures, identikit sound design, and gaudy spectacle—has become as stale, commercialized, and ridiculous as mainstream trance once was. She tells me about a recent gig in Spain where disgruntled clubbers, displeased with the colorful music she was playing, typed “TECHNO” into their phones and shoved the screens in her face. She offers the scene around Swedish music-and-fashion collective Drain Gang’s YEAR0001 label as a counterexample. “They’re super young, they listen to really proper 2000s trance sounds mixed in with hip-hop. This is the new generation, new producers, new music, and they’re cool as fuck, basically, because the people are so open-minded, musically. Whereas the so-called rave scene is actually really close-minded.”
Don’t discount the role that fashion plays in shifts like these, adds Vestbirk. The trance revival is also part of a broader revival of Y2K aesthetics, which is itself just the latest manifestation of a never-ending cycle of retro trends. “What goes up, must come down,” she laughs.
And as with fashion, questions of taste—who supposedly has it, who doesn’t, and where the dividing line is—are inevitable when discussing trance. Certainly, when considering its early years, the genre is a litmus test for the narcissism of small differences, given that the music shares 99 percent of its DNA with forms of house and techno that are far more critically lauded. Perhaps part of the problem is that trance unselfconsciously employed sweeping emotional gestures and sentimental affect in a way that other genres didn’t. Trance is unabashedly music for the masses.
But as much as its bigger-is-better ambitions made it an object of easy ridicule, they also fended off the snobbiness that tends to define underground scenes. That spirit of populism ties in with a broader shift in club music that Chal Ravens recently analyzed in DJ Mag, in which the sounds of Britney Spears and Spice Girls have infiltrated the formerly stone-faced inner sanctum of underground dance music. She cites a recent night at Berlin’s Panorama Bar in which Polish-born, UK-based DJ Marie Malarie dropped a dance mix of Rednex’s 1994 techno-country novelty hit “Cotton Eye Joe,” to an apparently rapturous reception.
Leftfield club producer turned leftfield pop songwriter Avalon Emerson knows a thing or two about sneaking cheeky Eurodance anthems into her sets: She dropped Dutch dance-pop act Alice Deejay’s perkily bittersweet 1999 hit “Better Off Alone” in her New Year’s Eve set at Panorama Bar, a risky gambit. (The club’s denizens may be famous for their sexual libertinism, but they’re also famously impatient with music that deviates from accepted notions of coolness.) Emerson turned around and did it again last month at New York’s Nowadays. For her, “Better Off Alone” is a legitimately great song, regardless of whatever associations people may have with its genre. “It’s incredibly famous, everyone knows it,” she acknowledges, “But maybe they’ve never actually heard it on a real club sound system where you can feel what that bassline physically does to the air in your chest, or how that sawtooth lead cuts, or what it feels like thinking about the complete story that just those two lines of lyrics tell, and how it all hits you when you’re already feeling a little tender after so many hours dancing.”
That context matters, Emerson adds. Part of the magic, she believes, came down to when she decided to play the song: at the tail end of hours-long sets full of ambitiously eclectic selections including hyperpop pranksters Two Shell, deep-house icon Romanthony, post-punk legends the Slits. By pulling it out like an ace from her sleeve, she created a provocative contrast with everything that had come before it. When the vibe of the room is right, dropping a song that populist, that unambiguously nostalgic, can feel almost like a trust fall, strengthening the bond between dancers and DJ. In a situation like that, a little trance can go a long way.
However, she cautions, any revival solely predicated upon easy nostalgia and gimmickry is bound to fail. “Filling sets with massively popular, lowest-common-denominator dance music of any kind is bad and corny,” she says. “It’s our job to know more songs than the average bear, and to have the taste to know when and how to play them—or not.”
