Eight years since she first graced our cover in the midst of her breakthrough moment, Charlotte de Witte returns to the front of DJ Mag to mark the arrival of her debut album. In 2017, we described her as “techno’s next-gen superstar”. Fast forward to 2025, and she’s more than lived up to that title. In conversation with Claire Francis, the Belgian DJ, producer and KNTXT label founder picks up where she left off, discussing her aim to craft an LP that tells her full story, the challenges that come with fame, and how she finds balance as an icon of the modern techno scene.
Charlotte de Witte is embracing her authentic self more than ever before. Fifteen years into her career, the Belgian techno luminary is at the height of her game. After starting out in 2010, she thundered into the spotlight in 2017 with the same kind of steamrolling momentum that now characterises her colossal sound. That year, in her first cover feature for the magazine, DJ Mag dubbed her “techno’s next-gen superstar”. Fast forward to 2025, and she’s a techno superstar, full stop.
The relentless rise of Charlotte de Witte has seen her dominate some of the world’s biggest stages, from Tomorrowland — where she made history as the first techno artist to close the main stage — to global festivals like Awakenings, Time Warp, Sónar, Ultra, and Coachella. She’s been a regular at revered techno institutions such as Printworks, Fuse and Club Space. Through her KNTXT label, launched in 2019, she’s released a steady stream of acclaimed big-room, acid-tinged techno, while also putting out high-tempo cuts on labels like Drumcode, Novamute, Turbo and Sleaze.
Her creative arc has evolved from her early electro-house productions to driving, blunt-force bangers, like the hornet’s nest frenzy of 2023’s ‘Overdrive’ and the adrenalised, hip-hop vocal-driven ‘Roar’. She’s made dynamic collaborations with her husband, the Italian DJ and producer Enrico Sangiuliano, including their hit remix of ‘The Age Of Love’, and released the dark, modern techno EP ‘One Mind’ with fellow Belgian techno royalty Amelie Lens.
Her newest label venture, Époque, reflects a deeper dive into Belgium’s electronic roots, while her ongoing series of free street parties have brought an old school rave ethos to the streets of New York, Milan and her home city of Ghent. She’s long discarded her former Raving George alias and taken her seat among techno’s top tier, silencing her critics and amassing a fan base large enough to populate a small country — 4 million-plus Instagram followers can’t be wrong. Poised to release her debut long-player later this year, it makes perfect sense that it will be a self-titled album. This is Charlotte de Witte, and she’s here to stay.
“How do you navigate fame, and respect your body and mind, while also being that superstar on stage? There are no guidelines, no one tells you how to do this. You just have to figure it out along the way.”
DJ Mag meets with de Witte in the restaurant of a trendy London hotel on a bright Saturday morning. Looking fresh and unfussy in jeans and a t-shirt, hair still damp from the shower, she’s midway through breakfast. “I should have got up earlier,” she says apologetically. She was cheering on her husband at Junction 2 last night; tonight she’ll take control of the festival’s main stage, The Grid, for a closing set. The pair made a surprise B2B appearance at Portugal’s Boom Festival the weekend before, but it seems fitting to begin our chat by reflecting on her latest career milestone, which also took place that weekend: another history-making turn at Tomorrowland, where she became the first artist in the festival’s history to open and close the main stage on the same day.
The lead up to this year’s edition of the flagship Belgian event was dramatic to say the least, with a catastrophic fire gutting the main stage just days before the festival was due to open. “When we saw the images of the stage on fire, I was actually on a call with my team,” she recounts. “All of our hearts stopped for a bit. We immediately assumed the festival was not going to continue. Because who can build a new main stage in a couple of days? Well, apparently Tomorrowland can.”
Her double performance — opening with a Daybreak set at noon, then returning for a commanding closing performance — marked a wonderfully full-circle moment. After winning a Studio Brussel DJ contest in 2011, de Witte had the chance to open the main stage, and then in 2022, she became the first-ever techno DJ to close it. She says that for those sets, her focus was on finding a balance between presenting a story and pleasing the crowd. “But this year, for my closing set, I had another approach. I wanted to do what I really wanted to do, no compromises.”
Kicking off under a frenzy of lasers with her acid remix of Sangiuliano’s ‘The Techno Code’, and incorporating numerous classic tracks alongside her own new material, the performance was watershed stuff. “I knew my closing slot was going to be only 60 minutes long, so I wanted it to truly represent what I think I stand for. I wanted it to be a full-on techno set. For the first 40 minutes I played the most stripped-down techno tracks that I have in my rekordbox. It made me feel very proud of myself, because of the story I was able to tell.
“In the last 20 minutes, I went a little faster,” she continues. “I played some more ‘fun’ tracks, just to give the people that extra bit of energy. It was easy to know what to do. It felt natural. It was a massive honour. And if I was to do it again, I would try to tell the exact same story, like I did this time. I wouldn’t change anything.”
The release of de Witte’s eponymous debut long-player on KNTXT in November will mark another opportunity for this prolific producer to tell her story, her way. With a staggering 25 EPs under her given name, beginning with 2015’s ‘Weltschmerz’, she says the album format really allowed her to present “a 360-degree approach to my journey through sound”.
Where many of her EPs have been conceptual, here the theme is Charlotte herself. The album, comprising 11 tracks, has been a work in progress for years. The final tracklist was whittled down from an initial selection of 15 compositions, some that had already existed in rough form as contenders for her EP releases. “I knew that I wanted to try to tell the full story of where I come from,” she explains. “So there’s deep, hypnotic techno, I have peak-time techno, there’s a bit of ambient in there, and a breakbeat song in there too.”
The album opener and lead single, ‘The Realm’, has already become a staple of de Witte’s sets. It’s punchy, euphoric and stamped with all of her hallmarks: a thick, zinging acid line, driving kicks, an eerie textural palette, and spectral vocal fragments. Elsewhere, ‘Vidmahe’ dips into a psy-techno groove, with a vocal line built from Indian mantras, echoing her 2021 track ‘Soma’. The fantastically high-octane ‘The Heads That Know’, with its insistent snare and hi-hats, and vocals from Welsh drum & bass artist Comma Dee, is something of a throwback to her 2023 hit ‘High Street’.
“I feel that in a sense, on the album, there is nothing really ‘revolutionary’ in there,” de Witte asserts. “I think it’s very much a reflection of stuff I have done in the past. I didn’t want to step out of the techno zone — on the contrary, I wanted to dive deeper into it.” Alongside Comma Dee, other new collaborators include Lisa Gerrard on the techno hymn ‘After The Fall’ — “she has one of the most unique and beautiful voices on planet earth” — and Alice Evermore on the ambient closer ‘Matière Noire’.
It’s a diverse but cohesive album that captures all of her strengths, structured with the intuitive flow of an all-night-long set. In many ways, it bottles the kind of techno that has made de Witte such a globe-conquering success. It’s accessible enough for the newbies, the techno-curious, while also evoking enough classic sonic touchstones to satiate the scene veterans and die-hard ravers. “I’m happy that it represents the club culture where I come from, and my story,” she reflects. “And it takes the pressure away from that thought of, ‘Is BBC Radio going to play this track?’ Because that’s not the aim. In an ideal world, I want DJs to play the music, and I want people to just lose themselves on the dancefloor. It’s made for the floor, and I hope it conveys that emotion.
“I know that there are a lot of eyes on me, because I have big numbers on social media, and a big following,” she continues. “So I feel that is also why it’s so important to stay as true as possible to my beginnings. That means my beginnings 15 years ago as a DJ, but also what got me into DJing in the first place. I want to use the platform that I have, that I have created, to go back and show where I came from, and what that type of music did for me. How much it changed my life.”
“I’ve always struggled with being famous. It never came naturally to me. I love being on the stage and making people happy… But at the same time, it always throws me off if people come up to me on the street.”
Sipping on her cappuccino, de Witte muses on the thorny topic of techno’s seemingly unstoppable metamorphosis from the underground into the realm of superclubs, celebrity-status headliners and mega festivals. “It wouldn’t feel natural for me if I was to force a collaboration with a pop star, let’s say. For me, techno is underground music at its core, and it has become quite overground already. I’m trying to protect this balance.”
We’re talking about techno, but that sentiment could well apply to her career too. In person, de Witte is a delight. She speaks frankly, with an easy warmth. She laughs a lot, flashing her wide smile. Throughout our interview, she’s relaxed and unflappable, though when it comes to the concept of fame, we sense a hesitation, a chink in the armour. Fame is, she admits, “a more sensitive and difficult topic”.
“I’ve always struggled with being famous,” she reveals. “It never came naturally to me. I love being behind the decks and making people happy. It’s so incredible: what I can do with this job, and that so many people are spending money buying tickets to see my shows. But at the same time, it always throws me off if people come up to me on the street. It’s like, ‘Oh right, I’m Charlotte, the DJ’. I’ve had so many talks about it with my psychologist! ‘How do I give this a place?’ It’s so weird.”
Does she consider herself an extroverted person by nature, or more of an introvert? “I would say introverted. I think when it comes to social media, I just know how to play the game very well.” Is it a game? “It’s a tool. A tool of communication. But there are certain tricks that you can apply to communicate better, or to try to reach more people. So having good content, knowing what to post, knowing how to use your captions, what thumbnails to use… they are all tools that can help you. And I’m good at using those tools.”
It must be unnerving to be recognised all the time? “Some people really love it. I wish I did love it a little bit more. When I’m at a festival it’s easy, because I’m there in my role as a DJ. But I’m also more than a DJ. I’m also just a person with friends and a family. And sometimes when people come up to me in very private moments… I want to be friendly, because these people are friendly. They love me. Which is also…” she looks perplexed. “I haven’t found the perfect way to deal with this yet.”
She hesitates, then adds, “sometimes it makes me feel a bit like I’m a product, and not a human being anymore. I don’t want to complain too much about it, because I’m such a lucky person. But if I had known, in the beginning, that this would be the consequence… I would have still gone straight ahead, but I would have thought about it twice. And this will never go away. In my immediate circle, my friends, my family, everyone is dragged into this.”
Does she wish she could have been anonymous? Maybe she should have worn a mask, like DJ Stingray? “Sometimes! But I also do realise that it’s my face, my facial expressions… it’s just the price you pay. But what I’ve learned to do now, instead of saying yes every time someone asks for a picture with the risk of being visibly awkward about it, is I’ve learned to say no.” It’s a learning curve, setting boundaries, but that isn’t always easy, she says, “without coming across as a bitch.” She smiles dryly, “And people can be very quick to label you as a bitch.”
She’s dealt with her fair share of detractors over the years, but de Witte knows how to take things in her stride. From accusations that she uses a ghost producer “I’ve always struggled with being famous. It never came naturally to me. I love being on the stage and making people happy… But at the same time, it always throws me off if people come up to me on the street.” to keyboard warriors nit-picking over her setlist, it’s fair to say that at the peak, techno is still very much a man’s world, but de Witte is having the last laugh.
We point out that in a recent online news piece announcing her forthcoming album, one platform described her as a “veteran” techno DJ. At 33 years old, it’s hard to think of her that way, but in truth, de Witte has been in the game for a decade and a half, with a career progression that artists twice her age could only dream of. “If I look at Richie Hawtin, Adam Beyer, Carl Cox, Sven Väth, those are the legends,” she says. “But I’m also not fresh on the scene anymore.”
She describes a particular moment, shortly after the Covid pandemic, when that realisation dawned on her. “So many new artists popped up after Covid, and hard techno really became a thing. And I realised, ‘OK, I’m 30 now. I am also not the “hot young thing” anymore. I’m in the sweet middle! Nice’.
“I don’t feel the need to desperately prove myself anymore. That gives me a lot of tranquility and peace.” Rather than taking the bait of the haters, she has kept her head down and worked incredibly hard. Her longevity has proved the critics wrong. Does she feel validated by that? “Totally. And even more so because I’m still here, and now all of a sudden I’m also very loved. I made it through!
“I think that’s one of my biggest accomplishments,” she says. “To realise that I’ve pulled through, I made it. You didn’t all like it, you had your doubts. But look, I’m in it for the right reasons. Not because I have boobs. Or because I’m sleeping around with every promoter. Who knew!” she laughs, rolling her eyes. “So yeah, it does feel good.
“And I feel very lucky because I made it out of Covid,” she continues. “That was a big shifting point. Many of my colleagues didn’t make it, they just vanished. It was the end of a lot of people’s careers. It changed everything. Music changed drastically. I feel now the hard techno thing, in my opinion, is coming to an end. It’s not what everyone is raving about.” Her prediction for the future of techno is that “we’re heading into very interesting times.” She points to a resurgence of a slower, more groovy, stripped-down style that’s emerging as a counter to the hard-and-fast mantra of recent years. There’s also her personal desire to look back for inspiration, rather than always pushing forward.
Black and white photo of Charlotte de Witte performing to a huge crowd in a club
“So many new artists popped up after Covid, and hard techno really became a thing. And I realised, ‘OK, I’m 30 now. I am also not the “hot young thing” anymore. I’m in the sweet middle! Nice’.”
“I was really struggling to find new music to play, so instead of looking for new tracks, I started digging back and playing tracks from 2013 — Gary Beck, for example, or Len Faki, who always provides,” she laughs. “So I think that’s also a reflection, at least for my sets, of where things are heading. I’m in a phase where I’m not as interested in stuff that’s coming out nowadays, because, well, techno has become the new EDM. We’re absolutely there. It can be very commercial.”
Enter her Époque label, which de Witte launched in 2024 with her own muscular remix of Push’s 1998 trance classic ‘Universal Nation’. A platform for reviving buried-treasure club cuts from the ’90s and early ’00s, Époque operates with reverence for the past — long-lost classics are reworked for new audiences, placing them into a contemporary context.
“Indeed, that’s the goal of Époque,” she affirms. “And to also try to honour the people that are remixing old tracks. When I remixed ‘The Age Of Love’ with Enrico, we really wanted to pay our respects, and release it on the existing label. We could have just as easily licensed the sample and released it on our own label. But out of respect for the original producers and the original label, we wanted to have a more honourable approach.”
Dance music past and present runs deep in de Witte’s veins, having grown up surrounded by Belgium’s storied electronic music pedigree. She began hitting the clubs in her teens and has never looked back. The pull of the dancefloor, she says, “really grabbed me and it’s holding me tight. That is still my biggest motivator.” She describes with some regret the loss of her anonymity on the dancefloor, her high profile negating the ability to dance like no one is watching. She was delighted to find herself lost in the crowd at Boom Festival, “dancing to psy-trance at 155 BPM”. “It is so liberating to stand with other people around me,” she beams. “It’s so primal. It’s one of the most beautiful things out there, to gather with people, listen to loud music, feel that bass, feel that drum, and to dance to it. It’s incredible.”
Bringing back that feeling of togetherness is something she’s championing with her city takeovers and street parties, a concept that began in New York in 2023 and has become a key part of the album launch campaign, taking on a profound significance for de Witte. The first event in Ghent saw over 13,000 people turn out for their hometown hero; in Milan, she attracted 8,000 eager ravers. Another party also took place on the Williamsburg Bridge in New York, with further dates planned for Los Angeles and London.
The reaction to these events really touched her, she says. “This is a mission. If you talk about a mission in life, it’s not about being No.1 on Beatport, or scoring a radio hit. The mission is to truly get people together, and not just when they’re paying for tickets. I want to try and give something back, in a very simple, humble way — the best way I can, which is to play music.” She’s proud that the parties have also painted electronic music culture in a positive light. After the Ghent event, “it was clean, everywhere,” she observes. “Everyone picked up their trash, everyone left with a smile. There were no fights. No incidents, no nothing. To show that linked to electronic music, which is often seen in a more negative light, that was such a positive thing.”
With a lot of ground to cover, getting through her breakfast has been slow going. She doesn’t complain about being interrupted by our stream of questions. “Good eggs, good salmon, avocado,” is her verdict. “All the good things.” One of the nicest things about being a travelling artist is the food, she says. “Eating around the world, all the local flavours.” She laughs, then admits, “Before I started DJing, I didn’t even know what an avocado was. I’d just never had it! And I once bought one for myself, and got home, and was struggling so hard to cut through the stone… I had no idea. “I love very simple things. I’m not a big fan of overly complicated dishes. Like Italian cuisine, it’s very much about the produce, finding good ingredients. So good thing I’m married to an Italian guy!”
It’s her husband, her team and her friends who form de Witte’s community and her biggest support network. “And my parents, because without their support none of this really would have happened.” But when it comes down to community within the scene, she says that when she was starting out, one thing she really felt she needed was a label for her music that felt like home.
“Enrico, for example, had Drumcode in his early years,” she explains. “Adam Beyer was one of his mentors. He went to Adam’s house, they talked about music, they exchanged ideas. I never really had someone who took me under their wing. Up until the point where I just decided to make my own label, KNTXT. “After starting KNTXT, something that I really try to do is support young talent,” she continues. “I try to give them the best possible platform to have their music heard. Thanks to my numbers on social media, I’m able to push the music a bit more.”
KNTXT is now home to releases from a clutch of artists that de Witte describes as “destined for greatness”, including Alignment and Acid Asian. One of KNTXT’s biggest success stories is the Spanish psy-trance sensation Indira Paganotto, who released her ‘Himalaya’ EP on the label back in 2021. “Indira is now completely doing her own thing. You’ve gotta give the babies their wings and [let them] fly away! I’m very happy for her,” she says.
Breakfast over, and a second coffee on the go, our time with de Witte is wrapping up. Before we leave her, we take a little trip down memory lane to her first DJ Mag cover, joining the dots between then and now; what has changed and what has stayed the same. Firstly, how does she balance her personal and professional life? “I’m not doing 22 shows a month anymore like I did in 2017,” she says. “I have a husband and a life at home. I have two dogs and two cats. I want to be at home. I have a private life now!”
Funnily enough, back in 2017 de Witte joked “about the rigours of her lifestyle, chiefly it preventing her from getting a pet”. Now, of her furry family, she says “the dogs were planned, the cats just showed up in the field. They were two super-skinny, black little gremlins. I was like, ‘Aww, welcome guys! Come on in’. They’re my joy and happiness,” she beams. In another quote from her 2017 cover interview, she shared the belief that “you can’t stand still in this business”.
Does she still feel that way? “Good question! I think my attitude has shifted a bit. I can imagine myself saying that eight years ago, when I was aiming for doing a show at Coachella, for example. Back then I wasn’t even thinking about closing the main stage at Tomorrowland. I also never thought that techno could become that big. They were all things that I never thought possible. Now that I’ve experienced all of that, rather than trying to push it even further forward, what I want to do is protect it, and solidify it. “Finding a balance was and is still the biggest challenge,” she continues. “How do you navigate fame, and respect your body and mind, while also being that superstar on stage? There are no guidelines, no one tells you how to do this. You just have to figure it out along the way.”
When you find yourself at the top, where do you go next? For Charlotte de Witte, it’s about staying true to herself, and never losing sight of her initial vision. “When I think about what is next, it’s more about finding a balance. Like last weekend — I was closing the main stage of Tomorrowland, then a couple of days later I’m playing in my home town of Ghent, unannounced at 7am, in front of a couple hundred very drunk, beautiful people,” she laughs. “And then a couple of days later I’m doing a back-to-back at Boom Festival, where I felt total liberation to dance. “So if I think of what is next, then I think that would be a good package. Still getting the chance to do those very important, high-profile shows, but at the same time, also going back to my core. If I can do that, and have weekends like that for the rest of my life, bring it on.”
