Slam on the CDJ: The Best DJ Sets of July 2026

From vintage raves to chopped-and-scattered hardcore, these are the most memorable sets that the last month had to offer.

Art by DJ Short

At the end of the day, it’s all body music. Inasmuch as anything as broad as dance music can be “about” something, maybe it’s about the way a speaker stack rattles the ribcage. That certainly seems to be the case for this column, which—purely inadvertently—focuses on live sets. Objekt and Move D turned up at this year’s Freerotation and charred the dancefloors, albeit with different tinder: one with slow-and-heavy club tools, the other via comparatively skippy house and techno. Simisea went deep on Ricardo Villalobos for a head-spinning live recording, and Brian Leeds’ latest mix as Loidis sees the Brooklyn DJ building worlds out of kick drums and hi-hats, stretching tech-house into all sorts of territories along the way. For their Melbourne Deepcast entry, dance-music duo Very Much Romance turned in two hours of sandblasted rave tools. Live from Horst Festival 2026, Dave Huismans threaded the needle between funk, house, and techno, adobeprincess looked towards the stars, and Yu Su put together a whip-cracking set of techno tracks.

Elsewhere, Brooklyn fixture SAIA soundtracked a sunrise with a million shades of post-post-hardcore stylings and Minneapolis mainstay Jamila put together an hour of techno rollers in a way that recalls her home base. deep creep went all in on slinky nu-school rave cuts for her RA mix, while Mendel went for something decidedly old-school in comparison, all dusty keyboards and busted-DAW house records. Nicolas Lutz’s Dekmantel set sees a long-form DJ going tight, rocketing between heavy and wild-eyed club sounds with ease. Lastly, Camu and Marylou offered two very different visions of what “listening music” could be. The former cooked up an hour of skin-crawling ambient music, drone, and techno; the latter, vertiginous drone and dub that slowly turns to a car-crash of folk musics and field recordings.

Here are some of the best DJ sets July had to offer.

adobeprincess, Horst Festival 2026 // Yu Su, Horst Festival 2026 // Dave Huismans, Horst Festival 2026

In part of a March 2026 interview with DJ Mag, adobeprincess got talking about ‘90s West-Coast dance music, describing some particular favorites as “magical and psychedelic.” That sort of language could easily stretch to plenty of club culture, of course—there’s wizardry everywhere if you’re curious enough—but it’s tempting to make it out as a Rosetta Stone for her work, too. When she’s behind the decks, whether she’s playing rip-roaring drum-and-bass, starlit house music, or tough-as-nails techno, her work is nearly always playful and exploratory, the sound of a dancefloor coated in a thin layer of stardust. That’s true with Horst Festival 2026, too, and it may just be her strongest recording to date. As the set runs on, adobeprincess gradually moves from tracky techno tools to wild-eyed breaks, bridging the styles by way of early-aughts IDM, but this one’s less about any particular genre peacocking than it is about an ineffable sense of joy. Here, adobeprincess laces heads-down club sounds with neon, making something perfectly calibrated for the stargazers in the audience.

Elsewhere at the same festival, Yu Su, a one-of-one London producer and DJ whose material splits the difference between floor-fillers and deep-listening material, went all in on something far more particular, to consistently winning results. Her turn at the Horst decks sees the selector looking towards minimal, loopy, and sprightly techno, tracking four-fours to the sky and back down to earth again and again. The most impressive thing about the set, then, is just how many variations on a theme she finds: at turns minimal, spooked, riotous, jazzy, retrofuturistic, sludgy, hypnotic, and joyfully messy, it’s a light-speed journey through a highly particular vortex, with Yu Su’s careful piloting keeping the whole thing steady throughout. Calling any of it straight-up would be a bit of a misnomer—it’s too playful and sly for that—but it’s certainly not showy, either; instead, this is a veteran celebrating no-shit dancefloor material for two showstopping hours.

But why not call it a hat trick? Dave Huismans, who, under a grab-bag of aliases, has been slamming dancefloors for many of the past twenty-five years, hit the “Dark Skies” stage at Horst with an unashamedly sunny performance, ripping through a mile of records along the way. At first, the Utrecht DJ focuses on funked-up house records, all piano soli and ebullient horn sections and lushly laid vocal harmonies. It’s the kind of mix that could go on forever, and for the better—but it doesn’t, and that’s for the best. The real trick of Horst Festival comes in watching how Huismans gradually turns up the heat, folding in broken beat, chopped-and-scattered hardcore, heavyweight Detroit material, and livewire electro into the mix until the whole thing’s positively hair-raising. Even then, though, he never loses that original sense of Devil-may-care joy. Never mind the forays into skin-crawling dub records or mile-a-minute techno—this one’s about stuffing the amplifiers with grins and sunlight.

Camu, Hardcore Chillout 022 // Marylou, Mostra

Ambient music gets a bad—or at least incomplete—rap. Never mind Eno’s oft-repeated origin point: A healthy strain in contemporary ambient and low-BPM music is less sonic wallpaper than it is aural swamp, with each new tone acting as another layer of muck. This is music that’s nominally low-key but, in practice, awfully confrontational. Or, as the Hardcore Chillout Soundcloud page puts it: it’s for “when chilling hurts.” On Hardcore Chillout 022, Madrid DJ Camu builds the kind of deep-listening set you feel in your bones a few days later: World-weary drone, dislocated field recordings, stomach-churning modern classical, purgatorial jazz, molasses-quick ambience. It’s a real slow burner, both structurally and emotionally—it takes a while for 022 to get going, but, eventually, it turns into a real blood-curdler, with each passing rhythm only deepening the malaise. This may be nominally ambient music, but it’s far from relaxed; this is downtempo imagined as a world of dares.

Marylou, who in May turned in one of this year’s finest offerings to date, expanded further on this idea, turning in two hours of hair-raising “listening music” that feels like ingesting a mouthful of smog. The set opens with a curious binary: lighter-than-air, DJ Healer-style synth blurs paired alongside purgatorial bass, neither pushing too hard against the other. It is both beautiful and queasy, and that disorientation seems to be the point. Marylou spends the rest of the mix straddling that line, even threatening to go into some straight-up dance music, eventually—only to crumple the timeline in a remarkable fashion, going from dub to devotional musics without missing a beat. Slowly, the set does start to find its feet, but the picture never turns clearer: techno starts to sound like folk music, and free-jazz drums start to emerge in the field recordings—or are those the birds? That initial confusion never fully lifts, and that’s for the best.

deep creep, RA.1047 // Simisea, Simisea’s Minimalicious Villalobos Focus Set

Is deep creep one of the best DJs in New York? Probably, but she probably wouldn’t say as much. That’s the fun of it: her material is consistently playful, left-of-center, and understated, more likely to bob or weave than hit square in the gut. RA.1047, a long-overdue entry in a long-running mix series, sees the pi pi pi founder winking behind the decks yet again, keeping things at a low simmer for a bubbly and vivacious eighty minutes. In his write-up on RA.1047, Michelangelo Matos danced around calling this “minimal,” so we’ll do something similar here: This is carefully calibrated dance music of the highest order, all heavyweight bass and crisp claps dancing around each other while keyboards sparkle overhead. But it’s so much more, too. RA.1047 livewire techno; it’s creak-and-rattle tech-house; it’s techno as imagined by a band of Max Roach devotees; it’s Ibizan rave tools as imagined by De School devotees. Beyond all that, though, it’s a killer floor-focused set in a career packed with them.

There must be something in the water, though. Simisea, another critical New York selector, went deep on perhaps the best-known name in minimalism over at the SLINK club night—and, again, he found so much more than just that idea. The Minimalicious Villalobos Focus Set is precisely what it promises, to be sure, but in going so long on a single name, it can’t help but expose his sheer range. Here, it’s slinky jazz-funk belters; there, it’s click-and-rattle minimal-techno sample flips; elsewhere, it’s creeped-out spoken-word, or it’s shepherd-tone freakouts, or ‘80s pop classics as heard from the bottom of a miles-deep well. For all the styles and sounds on display, it’s all clearly the work of the same producer: it’s sly and specific in equal measure, with hyper-crisp drum programming offering the foundation for a million carefully calibrated jokes and rug-pulls. It helps that Simisea mixes it all with an appropriate level of care, letting blends run long and stretching grooves out for as long as the floor can bear. Villalobos is an out-and-out legend at this point, of course, and this is as great a primer as you’re likely to get.

Jamila, Carbon Sound // Loidis, Sustain Release 2025

In the interview accompanying her Carbon Sound mix, Jamila puts it straight. “I think DJing is very vulnerable,” the Minneapolis DJ says. “And it’s kind of cringe [...] It’s like, ‘Hey guys, I like this song, and I hope you like it too.’” That focus—on vulnerability and collective joy—betrays her approach to the dancefloor; a great Jamila set is floor-forward, focused on the unique elation that comes once there’s enough sweat. Carbon Sound, then, is blessedly more of the same: An hour of techno tools with a skip in their step, of four-fours and ping-ponging synth lines and vocal samples laid just so. It’s not “minimal,” exactly, but it’s unabashedly function-first dance music, the kind of stuff liable to go off on any properly calibrated soundsystem. Scan around and you’ll find all manner of highlights—a creeped-out industrial stomper here, a post-Prince machine-funk cut there, the hand-drum whirlwind that closes out the session—but no particular track feels like the point. Instead, Carbon Sound is about something far more elemental: The art of keeping a dancefloor moving, one “cringe” at a time.

If one hour isn’t enough for you, why not run it back for three more? Brian Leeds—a.k.a. Huerco S., a.k.a. Autobouncer620, a.k.a. Pendant, a.k.a. Loidis, and on and on—has been shedding his skin for years at this point, but, as Loidis, he seems to have hit a groove. His best sets under the handle feel like a lucid-dream take on Beatport, all tech-house grooves purpose-built for soundsystem lifers. On Sustain Release 2025, Leeds goes deep on that vision yet again, tunneling ever deeper into the decks with low-slung rhythms that promise eternities. As with the Jamila set, no particular cut seems to be of unusual importance; this is music for the long haul, not for the peacockers. But this one goes wider, slipping into almost-amapiano, early-aughts IDM, disco-house belters, spiderwebbing synth workouts, and plenty more besides. Since he pivoted back to 4/4 records as Loidis, Leeds seems to have struck a kind of dancefloor gold, and Sustain Release 2025 shows that he’s found a rich vein indeed.

Move D, Freerotation 2026 // Objekt, Freerotation 2026: Year of the Sandworm

Freerotation, a members-only festival in Wales, has earned a mythic reputation: This is one for the heads, for the freaks, for the lifelong ravers. (It should come as little surprise that one of this century’s finest mixes is from those very halls.) If these two sets are to go by, 2026’s edition was no different. In his recording from the festival, Heidelberg DJ Move D reaches into his crates and pulls out an armful of rave artillery, By and large, he leans towards no-nonsense house and techno tools, but it’s rarely so simple: he’s liable to slide into a bit of shuffle-and-skip two-step on a moment’s notice, and he spends the set teetering between starlit club records and something far more abyssal, balancing bright-eyed synths with menacing sub-bass throughout. The set’s hardly showy, but it is immaculately engineered and clearly intended for wide-eyed ravers—on those metrics, it’s a smashing success.

Objekt, on the other hand, aimed for an entirely different target. In the liner notes for his Freerotation mix, the Berlin DJ put it plainly: in the midst of a heatwave, “Sloooow seemed like the only reasonable choice.” That’s for the best: he’s at his best when he’s working with tracks that are sludgy, playful, and a bit out-there. So it is on Year of the Sandworm, which finds the selector trudging between a hundred shades of bass weight: vertiginous dubstep, zero-BPM sort-of-electro, headspinning electro, hard-drum freakouts. As the set runs on, he finds his way towards some kind of apex, whose hardcore freakouts and MC firebreathing recall the heights of his Essential Mix—but even that high wears off, and, given a few minutes, he’s back in the muck. Normally, to hear someone go this slow and heavy you’ve got to camp out in Portland, so catching Hertz doing it on the other side of the world is a real treat. Year of the Sandworm, put bluntly, is an extremely particular vein of DJing pulled off at a world-class level.

Nicolas Lutz, Dekmantel Mix 513

When Nicolas Lutz has been in this column in the past, it’s been for his long-form sets—ten hours here, six hours there. That’s no coincidence. He’s at his best when he gets time to go long, blending slowly and building his way towards some kind of delirium. So Dekmantel Mix 513, which runs a comparatively scant two hours, might arrive as a bit of a shock: If the appeal of his world-building lies in its breadth, why cut the map short? But the set, joyously enough, lands instead as a speed-run of sorts through his style. Here, Lutz mixes hot and quick, cranking things up fast and leaning into rave-ready tools throughout. What’s most striking, then, is the sheer weight of this thing. It never quite gets into, gabber or breakcore, say, but it’s plenty hefty nevertheless: Lutz moves between new-beat slammers, breakbeat belters, sludgy trance, and skin-scorching acid with ease, diving down a million blind alleys and pulling up just as many shades of club-ready elation.

Mendel, MDC.328 // Very Much Romance, MDC.329

The Melbourne Deepcast is reliably great, to be sure, but it’s best in the summer. (The hemispherical irony isn’t lost, but bear with it.) The finest MDC sets tend to be playful, loose, and stuffed with joy, the kind of recordings that wouldn’t mind a million-dollar soundsystem but that would work just fine at a backyard barbeque. If that’s the criteria, then the podcast’s crew pulled off a killer one-two in June. First, there’s Mandel’s entry. Here, the Berlin DJ pulls together ninety minutes of house-music rollers. It’s wonderfully tactile stuff, full of hand-drums and kicks and hi-hats dancing around each other while lo-fi synths noodle along in the background, and it helps that Mandel blends like a seasoned veteran, teasing out rhythms within rhythms while keeping things elegant. This one’s for the beach-towel crowd—its biggest fault, in truth, is that it doesn’t run longer.

Two weeks later, the next Deepcast looked across the globe and found something a touch tougher. Very Much Romance—“Humble legends of the Bay Area underground,” per the liner notes—hand in a live session for their offering. The two-hour slammer is jumpy and a bit pugnacious, matching the kind of sweat you’d look for on a great night out. By and large, the duo zero in on blissed-out house cuts and airy breakbeats, gradually ramping things up until it turns to an out-and-out swelterer. Eventually, that means looking towards 2-step scorchers, screwface garage, piano-house screamers, and all manner of Ibizan beachside classics. In sum, MDC.329 isn’t exactly reinventing the wheel, but who cares when it spins this well? This is rave-music historiography executed to a tee.

SAIA, Honcho Podcast Series 143

How would you soundtrack a sunrise? It’s tempting, perhaps, to lean towards slow-and-low sounds, towards jazz or minimal techno or ambient music. But, as the sun rose on Ridgewood in April, Brooklyn DJ SAIA opted for dubstep. Honcho Podcast Series 143, ripped from the Nowadays decks from 6-9 a.m., isn’t the sound of a dancefloor coming to life, exactly—the party had been going for nine hours at that point—but it is the sound of a club flooding with sunlight. SAIA spends the session backflipping between vintage-flavored rave tools and new-school screamers, giving equal space to progressive house, chopped-and-slammed R&B, confetti-blasted trance, and old-school house rollers. From the jump, SAIA makes it clear they’re less interested in genre or ideology than in sheer momentum; they weave between styles and histories but rarely let the energy lag for long. That said, the closing—where, after two hours and change of zig-zags and rug pulls, SAIA finds their way back to disco and old-school house tracks—feels like some kind of homecoming: one possible origin point, perhaps, for the open-hearted joy they’d been blending with all morning.