official kickoff 👑
huge weekend for max styler and nu moda
last week i told you a six track max styler album was coming. it's an ep. i regret the error, he does not regret the six tracks.
solomun and max styler put records out on the same friday. that's not a release schedule, that's a weekend plan.
every title and artist name below is clickable. below: the drop, the first ever contraband of the week, the first ever artist of the week, the label nobody's talking about yet, and a miami date at the bottom you're going to want.
six tracks, two features, zero guest producers. eight months ago he sat on a podcast and said he'd probably never do an album, that nobody listens through ten tracks, that he likes the two and three track thing. then he made six. more below, it's the whole issue.
solomun's first of the season on his own label.
three tracks on their own label, "Senses" through "Connection." and the timing is a little perfect, because clüb de combat are the ones max cut "On Repeat" with back in december 2024. both of them shipping on the same friday, two years on.
2:47 on the radio edit and a 5:13 extended if you want the room to actually open up.
flamme takes the cosmosolar original somewhere else entirely.
the b-side of a two track single with "Through The Fire." it landed tuesday rather than friday, which is the only reason you might have missed it.
mita gami is a legend and this one is not on spotify, not on beatport, not anywhere you can add it to a playlist. it lives on soundcloud and that is the whole point. bill withers underneath, maccabi house on top.
this is the kind of record the contraband crate exists for. 100+ of them on the site, none of which you can stream anywhere else.
track five, and the one that stuck.
the whole ep has been on repeat here, so this is a photo finish, not a runaway. but "Feel The XTC" is the one that sounds most like him. signature max styler, and a massive banger with it. if you only have four minutes this weekend, spend them here.
the first artist of the week, and there was never another candidate.
full disclosure: max styler was my number one artist on spotify wrapped. 742 minutes. top 0.09% of listeners on the planet. so this is not a review, it's testimony.
here's the part nobody puts on the poster. in 2020 he was about to shut the whole thing down. signed to dim mak at eighteen, stayed until twenty six, got the dim mak tattoo, spent most of it making big radio records he didn't actually want to make. his words on the will clarke podcast: he was making music for what he thought people wanted to hear.
two people got him out of it.
the first is his wife. she told him, direct quote, "honestly, just make better music." he calls that the pivotal switch. the vocal on "I Know You Want To" is the two of them. he was making the track as a full instrumental, decided it needed a vocal, and she came upstairs and had the idea inside a second. turn the mic on. the whole thing was finished in five minutes.
the second is his dad. max was sixteen, underage, djing a bar in his hometown with a guy in his thirties, and his dad would be there at two and three in the morning loading speakers into the car. that man went to school for accounting and ran the books for the family hotel in paso robles. today he runs the business side of the max styler project. the same person carrying the speakers out of the bar is the person managing the thing now. that's the whole story in one detail.
then the run. "Resist" on experts only, back when the label was still called off the grid. mark knight teaching him over email to let a track breathe instead of front-loading a hook for spotify. EDC 2024, stereo bloom stage, the night he first looked up and thought this can actually work. calvin harris asking for a "Blessings" remix and sending it back with no notes at all, v1, then having him open at ushuaïa. the do lab at coachella 2025, which pays artists nothing and which he did anyway because it's coachella, and a few hours later vintage culture pulled him on stage in the yuma tent mid "Inferno" to hand him his flowers. new york at knockdown center, thirty two hundred people, sold out two weeks early. tomorrowland for the first time.
and did you guys see the coachella entrance this year? he played the yuma tent himself in april and the official recap catches the walk-in. cinema.
here's the part i keep thinking about. will clarke asked him if he still doubts the career. max said every day. wakes up stressed, asking whether he's doing enough, in the middle of the best year of his life. he said he needs to learn to soak in the wins and then immediately said he knows he won't.
so let's soak one in for him. beatport's number one selling artist in indie dance last year, number two in tech house, and number one on 1001tracklists' top 101 producers, the most supported producer on the planet by the people who actually play the records. that is not a hot streak, that is a reign 👑
congrats to max and to everyone at nu moda. the kid on a two hundred dollar numark controller from best buy, in a small agricultural town outside san luis obispo, with his dad hauling the speakers, is the most played producer in dance music. goat doing goat things 🐐
listen to the ep on spotifyand the clips are ours, not reposts. we were in the room for the do lab debut, the inferno moment in the yuma tent, and two nights at mission ballroom. all five are on his profile.
every claim receipted → groovesmaxxing.com/artists/max-styler.html
ten months ago nu moda did not exist. here is who has been on it since.
vintage culture remixed the first release. notre dame flipped it a month later. solomun reworked "One More" in march. none of those three signed to the label, which is the point. they put their names on a ten month old imprint's record, and that is the harder favor to ask.
then look at the roster. greggio, brazilian, based in london. kryptogram, serbian, based in chicago. viot out of belo horizonte. dvirnuns out of tel aviv. welker, brazilian by way of los angeles. knorst, brazil again. madi in rome with petel. rem siman in melbourne. josh gigante in the uk with ugo banchi in france. plus nico rac, andrew meller, jonathan, mishell, dox, pavel petrov, tyler hill, ad-apt, kuuda and benni ola.
five brazilians. names from israel, italy, australia, serbia, france and the uk. twelve releases in under ten months. nobody builds a roster that shape by signing their friends, and twenty of those artists already had a page on our site before nu moda pressed them, which tells you we are not the only ones who noticed 📈
one more name, because a label this fast does not run itself. julia (@smallbodegacat) handles max's socials and every piece of the label's marketing. the catalogue is growing quicker than most labels manage in three years and the content has never once lagged behind it. the records are theirs. the fact that you have heard of any of them is partly hers. kudos, seriously 🔥
the full label profile → groovesmaxxing.com/artists/nu-moda.html
denver first, as always.
| AUG 15-16 | LCD Soundsystemred rocks · two nights of indie dance church |
| SEP 11-12 | Global Dance Festivalnational western complex · chris lake headlining, ten minutes from home |
| OCT 8 | Madeonmission ballroom |
| SEP 4-7 | ARC Music Festivalunion park, chicago · vintage culture b2b damian lazarus, and ARC After Dark takes over the whole city all week |
| SEP 26-27 | CRSSD Fallsan diego · chris lake b2b disclosure, a once-only set |
| OCT 16-17 | III Pointsmana wynwood, miami · Max Styler b2b Vintage Culture |
and yes we're going to that last one. same two names as the yuma tent moment in 2025, except this time they share the decks. see you in miami 🔥
fresh grooves friday, the curated survivors, split across three lists.
🧃 good vibe juice for daylight and driving.
🚧 bumpy for 1am.
📈 groovesmaxxing is the highlight reel, short on purpose.
the full drop is the unfiltered week, everything that landed in house, techno and indie dance. no curation, no filter. on friday.html, replaced every friday.
every pick above carries a ✅. it means two independent stores agree, or the label said it themselves. release dates in dance music are wrong often enough that somebody should be checking, so we do.
this issue: eight picks, all eight verified against the stores or the label itself. twelve more releases read start to finish while building the nu moda catalogue. two podcasts transcribed end to end. one pick cut.
on the radar and not dated yet: Mishell and Toni B have "Get Messy" coming on Maccabi House, the same crate that gave us this week's contraband. we'll be there for it.
send this one to the friend who still thinks you make playlists by accident.
that is the whole ask.