Max Styler Was Ready to Quit Dance Music, Now He’s One of Its Buzziest New Artists
Categoria: Musica
The producer's latest EP, I Don't Think I Can Stop, is out today, Aug. 7.
Por Billboard | 07/08/2026
Max Styler had been plugging away in dance music for years, and was considering packing it up. “I was sick of my project and thought like, ‘Maybe I’ll just be a ghost producer in the back end, and that’ll be it, because I can’t really figure out what I want to do,” Styler says. Luckily, before that could happen, the California-born artist had a clarifying conversation with the woman who was then his girlfriend and is now his wife. She told him, he recalls, that “‘You just need to make the music you like to listen to and the music people want to dance to.’ She basically told me I needed to make better music.” The simple advice cracked something open for Styler, who, after taking it, has become one of the buzziest new names in dance music. Since 2022, he’s signed tracks to labels including Spinnin Records, John Summit’s Experts Only and Solomun’s Diynamic. He played his first Lollapalooza last weekend, made his Coachella debut in 2025 and is making fans around the world with the extended sets that are his speciality. (“Four hours or more is perfect,” he says of the ideal length.) Today (Aug. 7), he releases his latest and most expansive EP, the six-track I Don’t Think I Can Stop , out on the Nu Moda label he launched last October . Styler speaks to Billboard over Zoom from the apartment in Paris where he and his wife are living this summer while he plays across Europe, with recent shows including myriad Ibiza clubs and his debut at Belgium’s Tomorrowland. His life in dance music started as a kid in San Luis Obispo, Calif., a sleepy seaside town on the Central Coast. There was, he says, “very little dance music” there when he was growing up, but as a middle schooler he found a whole world of it on SoundCloud. “What connected me and my friends was our love of finding music,” he says. “We were always searching for new stuff the other person couldn’t find or didn’t find yet.” Favorites among the group were the bass house output from AC Slater and Jack Beats, music from Boys Noize and Flume and everything on the seminal Australian label Future Classic. But despite this music discovery as a group sport, Styler was the only one who was like, “‘I’m gonna buy Ableton and try this s–t.” His parents got him a controller that he could plug into his iPod for his birthday, and his mom’s friend’s husband was a local DJ who started taking Styler out to play school dances, weddings and other local gigs. He was saving money for gear and “apart from doing homework and hanging out with friends, I was always self-learning on Ableton and YouTube.” The city’s only dance music promoter at the time was called Collective Effort Events, which promoted shows at a pair of local clubs. Styler smartly saw the promoter as a way in, subsequently sending them roughly a hundre