MARTIN GARRIX
From: The Netherlands
DJ style: “Euphoric and energetic.”
Best known for: “Energy.”
(DJ MAG) Martin Garrix has reached the pinnacle of the Top 100 DJs poll for the fifth time in a row, matching the record of trance god Armin van Buuren. For the 28-year-old, it’s a landmark moment. “I’m in the list with all my idols — I look up to Armin, I look up to Tiësto. To be in there with those guys is very surreal,” he tells DJ Mag over video call. “My No.1 worry when I entered the list, and topped the list, was that it could only go downhill from here, so it’s very special we’re back at the No.1 spot.”
When he speaks with DJ Mag, Garrix looks a little weary, which is not surprising, as he’s just returned to the Netherlands after his residency at Ushuaïa Ibiza last Thursday and back-to-back gigs in Dallas and Las Vegas over the weekend. Nevertheless, the consistent poll winner is smiley and talkative, taking his time to answer some of our questions carefully, especially on the issue of A.I. and phones being banned on the dancefloor. It’s incredible to see the trajectory of Garrix’s career so far, from his beginnings DJing as a teenager, being chaperoned to play gigs by his dad, to becoming the World’s No.1 DJ.
“I would have a portable DJ setup, so I would play weddings and school parties,” he remembers. “I started touring when I was 15, which was kind of scary, but my parents fully supported it, they joined whenever they could, and they trusted that I was happy and I knew what I was doing, even though I had no clue what I was doing.”
It’s been a year of firsts for Garrix. At Glastonbury, one of his favourite bands, Coldplay, covered his song ‘Breakaway’. When he found out they were going to do it, he was astonished. “I got a text message from Chris Martin saying how much he loves the song. I was like, ‘What the fuck?’ And then they cleared the song for the show, and they still perform it in the tracklist of their tours in stadiums. It’s a good step to hopefully working together with him someday.”
In-between a hectic gig schedule of festival and club shows, Garrix has been taking time to learn to fly. He’s loving the experience of flying a plane, and hopes to get his pilot’s license soon. “I just started. It’s kind of crazy when I’ve spent almost half my life on airplanes, now I’m learning how they actually work. But it’s nice, it’s a lot of fun.”
Over the summer, there were plenty of banner shows, chief among them his Thursday residency at Ushuaïa Ibiza, his seventh year at the world-beating venue. To play there still feels special for the Dutch DJ, who snuck into the club on his first visit to Ibiza to see Swedish House Mafia, at the age of 16. “It’s such a legendary place,” he says. “The first time I was there, I sprinted in and pretended that my parents were in the restaurant and got past the first security layer, then sprinted into the audience. They’ve tightened the security since then!
“That was one of the best nights of my life. To be able to be part of Ushuaïa Ibiza is crazy, and it’s so fun, ’cause every week there is a different crowd, a different vibe,” he continues. “If the humidity is higher, if the wind is coming towards me, it effects the sound. There are so many things in play that make every week completely different. I’m doing my last one this Thursday, and then I’ve done 15 weeks.”
Other memorable shows included a four-night stint at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, an arena venue in San Francisco (“because we sold more nights, we got to bring more production, so it was really special”), and a run of events in South America that included stops in Chile and Colombia. Last summer alone, Garrix could be found playing festivals and clubs in Greece, Switzerland, Romania, Hungary, Canada, the UK and France — yet he still managed to get into the studio, releasing the track ‘Smile’, a collaboration with the singer from Swedish-American band Carolina Liar, Chad Wolf. Garrix rented a convertible and did a road trip in the US with Wolf, filming it for the music video, which happened to coincide with some Stateside club shows. When they were due to perform the track live at OMNIA in Las Vegas, Wolf’s car broke down in the Nevada desert, and he only just managed to make the gig in time. “It didn’t seem that he was that scared, he thought it was very funny,” Garrix recalls. “The singer Chad is one of the most positive, joyful people to be around.”
There were several more collabs this year, from the pop-flavoured ‘Wherever You Are’ with DubVision and Shaun Farrugia to the heavier, harder ‘Biochemical’ with Seth Hills and ‘Breakaway’ with Mesto and WILHELM. Garrix previewed 12 new tracks at Budapest festival Sziget and posted the set to YouTube, claiming to have plenty more tunes that are just waiting to be finished.
“I have a lot of unreleased music I’m now in the process of finalising, but for me to finalise a song, the last 5% always takes the most time,” he says. “I’m very quick with drafting a rough idea, but then to properly finish it, I have to be in my own studio with my own gear that I know and trust. The last few years I’ve done not that many pop songs, a lot of club and festival songs, but I want to balance it out more again, between aggressive Garrix and more accessible Garrix.”
The most hotly-anticipated of them all is a song called ‘Gravity’, which Garrix has teased but has yet to put out. “I premiered it in March, and every other song I’ve released since then, one of the main comments we got was, ‘When is ‘Gravity’ being released?’ I’m very excited to put that out.” His last album, ‘Sentio’, was out in 2022, and while he claims to always be working on a follow-up, he’s not sure whether he should just focus on singles instead. “I just need to figure out if I want to release it as an album, or stay single-based. The way people consume music is very different now,” Garrix says. “I produced ‘Sentio’ as an album that you could play from the beginning to the end. Who knows, I want to premiere a bunch more festival and club stuff either at the end of this month, or Ultra Miami next year, and maybe tie it in with a new album, but that’s a club album, I also want to do a more pop album.”
