How Euphoric Sounds Are Back in Underground Sets
Trance is making a bold comeback in underground dance music, blending irony, emotion, and rave nostalgia into a fresh, euphoric sound for a new generation.
3 minutes read
Intro
Once dismissed as over-the-top and cheesy, trance music is experiencing an unexpected underground renaissance. Euphoric breakdowns, soaring synths, and melodic drama are finding their way back into clubs, not ironically, but with a confident, post-ironic feeling that speaks to a new generation of ravers.
This isn’t the polished trance of early 2000s superclubs. Today’s take on the genre is rougher, more self-aware, and hybridised with techno, breaks, hard house, hyperpop, and beyond. DJs are slipping trance edits into sets once dominated by minimal, industrial, or bass-heavy sounds, and the effect is electric.
From Cheesy to Cathartic
For years, trance was a genre many underground DJs avoided, associated with commercial overexposure and emotional excess. However younger producers and selectors are revisiting and recontextualising it, not as a guilty pleasure, but as a genuine source of intensity and feeling.
Euphoric tracks are hitting differently in a cultural moment marked by uncertainty and burnout. Big synth stabs, long builds, and hands-in-the-air moments offer a kind of release that’s unapologetic and cathartic. It’s dancefloor therapy, dressed up in metallic font flyers and glitchy visuals.
Artists Leading the Shift
Names like Doss, Upper90, DJ Heartstring, and Skin On Skin are part of a loose wave of artists reintegrating trance aesthetics into experimental and leftfield dance scenes. Tracks don’t necessarily announce themselves as trance, but they carry the same emotional DNA: dramatic melodic progressions, high BPM energy, and shimmering textures.
Even labels and club nights known for harder sounds are bending toward the euphoric, incorporating trancey breakdowns or dreamy interludes. In sets by artists like VTSS or CCL, you might hear a ravey vocal loop pitched up and layered over an acid line, or a 2001 pop trance hook twisted into something new.
Aesthetic Evolution
Trance’s visual language is back too, but not as a carbon copy. Flyers are filled with Chrome fonts, cartoon flames, and early internet nostalgia. Fashion leans into Y2K ravewear, think neon trims, wraparound shades, and butterfly tops, but layered with irony and subversion. It’s not about reliving the past. It’s about remixing it.
This playfulness reflects the sound itself: maximalist but smart, dramatic but controlled, sincere but with a wink. In a culture fluent in memes and mashups, this contradiction feels just right.
From the Club to the Feed
The trance revival has a digital momentum. Clips from Boiler Room and TikTok often go viral when they capture the moment a euphoric drop lands, emotional, unfiltered, and unexpected. These aren’t pristine trance anthems, but bootlegs, edits, and surprise flips that excite precisely because they blur genre lines and throw predictability out the window.
Online communities have also played a key role. SoundCloud is once again a hotspot for euphoric, fast-paced tracks that straddle genres. Discord servers and Google Drive folders circulate edits of tracks that wouldn’t have fit in a techno set a few years ago, but now steal the show.
The Emotional Underground
At the heart of this revival is a desire to feel more. After years of clinical, minimal styles dominating underground scenes, trance offers something louder, messier, and more emotionally direct. In that sense, it’s a rebellion against coolness, a turn toward sincerity, even if it’s wrapped in camp.
And that emotionality doesn’t always mean joy. The new trance wave taps into melancholy, longing, and nostalgia too. A trance hook from the early 2000s might now feel like a memory of simpler times, reframed through the complexity of today.
Where It’s Heading
Is this just a moment? Or is trance, in some strange new form, here to stay? Like many microtrends in electronic music, its staying power may lie in its ability to evolve. We’re not going back to the gatecrasher era, but we are entering a space where emotional intensity is no longer taboo on the dancefloor.
What’s certain is that trance, once dismissed as uncool, is resonating with a new crowd. And this time, it’s not about fame or nostalgia. It’s about feeling something, together, under the strobe lights.
