W&W

From:The Netherlands

DJ style:“Energetic festival music.”

Best known for:“Crowd interactions, festival mixes and Rave Culture.”

W&W continued their high hit rate in 2024, putting out a parade of festival-grade bangers that followed their huge collaboration with Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike, Tiësto and Dido, ‘Thank You’. “After the release of that song, things really changed a lot,” they say. “We have been around for quite some years now, but this record really hit harder than anything we did before. Our monthly listeners went up by a lot, and more opportunities came up.”

These new tracks included ‘Another Day In Paradise’, a kind of 160bpm hardcore version of the Phil Collins ’80s chart hit alongside Special D, Harris & Ford, and ‘If I Lose Myself’ with Bate, Sonja and Ezra Hazard, which takes on the more recent pop perennial by OneRepublic. Perhaps most impressive was ‘Rave Mozart’ with Vini Vici, a heart-racing blend of relentless hardcore stabs and snippets of synthesised classical music set to a galloping drum track.

W&W played plenty of festivals this year, their natural habitat, including Beats For Love in Czech Republic, Airbeat One, Parookaville and Open Beats in Germany, Ultra Europe in Croatia and Belgium’s Tomorrowland, where they snuck in a version of Crazy Frog’s ‘Axel F’ with the same unhinged amphibian sound effects as the ori

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Faustix

From:Denmark

DJ style: “Big techno.”

Best known for: “Collaboration with Diplo, Faustix, Imanos and Kai called ‘Revolution’.”

Everything about 2024 was big and bold for Faustix. The Danish dance music lifer found a new sound over the course of the past year, where ropey and dramatic arpeggios dart in and out of brash techno kicks and every drop feels like barreling down a dopamine rollercoaster. Each release seemed to push the envelope further and further — from the soaring emotions of ‘Lead Me To Love You’ with vocalist Mougleta to ‘All My Friends Are Hot’, whose cheeky vocal flip (“All my friends are hot and only listen to techno”) was the perfect summer festival anthem. Add to that a teased remix of Belgian Stromae ‘Alors on danse’ and it’s clear that 2024 was, without a doubt, the year Faustix found a whole new groove.

While he’s certainly been busy in the studio, Faustix has also played everywhere — from 13,000 person raves in the middle of Copenhagen to gigs on the Faroe Islands. Faustix, in other words, hasn’t taken his foot off the gas for even a second. And, with each gig and release, he is testament to how much people still love pumping, hard-edged techno.

Fave tune of 2024?

“Dash Berlin ‘Till The Sky Falls Down’, it’s an all-time classic and still gets me