We recently sat down with one of the most promising stars in the Trance scene for a chat. Welcome back, dear reader. As we get closer to the end of the year, things are starting to pack up, and Wrapped interactions are appearing all over social media. But I’m here to say that we are not over just yet. We still have a few surprises in store for you, and one of the biggest, just before the year closes, is an interview Subtrax and I did a little while ago. His story is quite interesting. Though he’s had a relatively short career—having just passed the five-year mark since kicking things off in October of 2020—he has found actual success incredibly quickly. By far, his last two or three years have been his most active. Hailing from Ireland, he is truly kicking things off now, building what is, in the grand scheme of things, a monumental career. He’s already played historical venues, bringing a sound that sits right in the middle of Techno and Trance, simmering the best of both worlds down into a single production. He’s clearly very good at it—so good, in fact, that he’s already scheduled to play Teletech Festival in the UK next summer. But I’m not here to tell you about him, I’m here to be the channel for him to tell you everything himself. From his past and present to his plans for the future, here is our exclusive interview for EDMTunes. Sit back and enjoy the ride. (Please note, the bolded text represents a question, while the paragraph(s) following it represent Subtrax’s answers.) So, first off, huge congrats on everything you’ve achieved so far. I think it’s been quite a year for you, hasn’t it? Yeah, literally just before we came on the call, I put an Instagram story up saying how crazy this year was. Everyone is posting their Spotify Wrapped, I think this year I doubled my stats from last year. We had 3.1 million streams and 776,000 listeners. So, it’s been crazy. I made my debut in Europe, in Berlin, Ibiza. It’s just been a crazy year. Played a lot of big shows, but I’m just ready to go into 2026. Most definitely. Talking about 2026, you were just announced to play Teletech Festival next year so, congrats! What does that mean for you? It’s a huge, huge milestone for me. Teletech started as a small brand in Manchester and they’ve grown into this global brand. They’re doing events in nearly every country in the world. So, if I can even get a taste of that to see how they do things, it would just be amazing. It’s a major milestone. I just can’t wait to play. How do you think — I mean, we’ve got a long way before that — but do you think you’ve got an idea of how you’re going to play or how you’re going to arrange the set? Well, it’s a back-to-back set. The entire stage is made up of back-to-backs. Adrián Mills is also playing there. He’s going back-to-back with Cloudy. So I don’t think it’s just going to be hard techno, which is what Teletech is known for. There’s going to be that bouncy sound. I think going back-to-back with Jodie V, that is our sound. I’ve never gone back-to-back with her before, so I’m excited to see how it goes. Do you often find it a bit tougher to go back-to-back with people, or do you just get on with it no issues? To be honest, I actually really like going back-to-back, as long as the sound is similar. It’s very hard. There are people I know that play hard groove and a lot of old Berlin techno, which is almost like the other end of the spectrum from my 145 BPM bouncy trance and stuff like that. So, as long as there’s a happy medium in between, I think it can work really well. Well, perhaps a good recent song to describe your sound is perhaps the GVN ‘My Feelings’ remix, because it’s got that sort of groove, right? But it’s also got the trance-y, sentimental part to it. Exactly. It’s like a speed garage trance-y remix. I don’t even know how to describe it! I used to describe my sound as, trance-y house with a little bit of techno. So, it was just throwing all the genres into one. The song really describes that. Now, if I may ask, how did that come about? How did it pop into your head to do this remix? Were you approached, or was it something mutual, how was it? So, I signed my track “WFT,” which was my first major track on SoundCloud. It got signed by Stress Records back in 2023. I’ve actually kept in touch with Stress, and they recently signed GVN’s track. Gavin has released on Anjunabeats and a lot of big labels before. He actually lives in the same small town as me, Derry, in Ireland. I didn’t even know who he was; we didn’t know each other. So, it was a crazy coincidence. He reached out to me and was like, “Do you want to collab on this track?”, I was like, “Yeah, definitely”. It was a breakbeat, sort of trance-y sound. I was like, “I think I could add something to this.” And then we decided that we were going to keep his track, which was already sick as it was, and then I would put my own twist on the remix. It was cool to get that out. That sounds interesting. I think it’s happened just once to me that somebody I know from the internet actually lives in the same place as me. But it’s crazy. The smaller the town is, the crazier it is. The fact that he had released on these big labels, and I actually didn’t even know who he was or anything. And I was like, “How is this guy this big and I didn’t know?!”, because there’s not many people in Derry that make music. So, it was a strange realisation that I had never heard of him. He’s a really nice guy, pretty chill. Now, if we can shift the topic a little bit, I want to talk about the evolution of your sound. You are currently doing this sort of faster speed thingy, but your Spotify also has some slower tracks, so there must be a story to it. How did you arrive where you are now? October was the half-decade anniversary of Subtrax. I started this back in October 2020. I released my first track, ‘Nite Driver’, where I paid a YouTube channel to premiere it for like £30 or something, just because I wanted to get the track out there. I was always trying to think of ways I could get my name out there, even five years ago when I just started this. But it was a really deep tech house sound. So, do you know Kolter? Before he was called Kolter, he used to go by DJOKO. And he and Chris Stussy did a lot of things. I was first listening to Chris Stussy in 2018 when he had like 20,000 followers on Instagram. So, I’ve always been into that deep tech sound. And then, obviously, when you get into just house, you’re going to discover other genres. And I just fell in love with techno and trance. They’re two genres that have a lot of events in Derry. So, I was always able to go to events and hear that sort of sound. And, well, I started making music, and it just sort of fell into place. Now, how did you arrive at your current sound? You start making music, and you go through a bunch of different styles, but you end up going quite a bit up in tempo from where you started. What was the spark that made you change? Was it a particular gig or something? It’s a good question. I think it was always there. It wasn’t necessarily a specific event that made me just focus on the harder sound, but I think over time, I knew that this was the music that I wanted to make. I really, really love bringing the energy to a live crowd. So, I like having that upbeat trance sound where people can put their hands in the air. And then when the drop hits, it’s just this feeling that you can’t describe. So, I’d say the feeling that it gives whenever I’m playing live, that influenced my path a lot. Now, what I’m going to say is very niche, very specific to science and stuff, but have you ever seen these circular pools in which they start doing these mechanical waves, and when given the right conditions they collide in the centre and have huge spikes? That’s a metaphor of how I see you could do in music right now, because you’re in the middle of two different, but not so different, genres that are actually getting a lot of traction, hard techno and trance. Both are having quite an uproar online, but even more so in the UK. I think that’s an interesting thing. Have you seen some of that movement? Like, did you notice the trends start to change? Yeah, obviously. When we go back to Teletech, they started this movement of hard techno that wasn’t really as popular before them, and they nearly just created this entire movement in the industry. Trance has obviously always been around; it’s one of the founding genres of dance music. It’s been around since the ’90s in Ibiza and stuff like that. So, trance is always going to be here; it’s never going away. I think when they collide, they make something beautiful. So, I’m glad that I get the opportunity to bring my sound of trance to the hard techno world, and people can experience both. I wasn’t aware of how popular this sound was until I went to Tomorrowland Brasil in October, which you would expect to be a super vanilla thing. But they hosted an entire stage dedicated solely to hard techno. And I was like, “Wow.” Yeah. It’s an international sound. Sara Landry is huge in the States, and she’s carrying that sound there. I think people always think, especially in the States, that they’re only into EDM. But in the last two years there’s really been a shift in the momentum in every genre. They’re discovering, I would say, lots more music. So it’s good to see, and hopefully, they can keep going, and other types of music can become popular. Trends were going slower and slower, by ’22, it was like some sort of deep house. And then in the summer of ’23, it was all Afro house all over the world. And then out of a sudden came I Hate Models, 999999999, Sara Landry… that was quite a change. Yeah, it’s like two polar opposites. Out of your entire catalogue, are there any favourite songs of yours? And if so, why? There are, actually. Obviously, ‘WFT’ brought me the most success, so I have to take hats off to that. But the likes of ‘Drive By’ too, which is more of a groovy techno track, just with a solid, catchy vocal that people seem to like. There are lots of house tracks as well. I do love them. I just find it hard to pick a specific track. But I think maybe ‘Energy’ that I just released on Gomboc Records, a label based in Buenos Aires. I think that’s a huge track of mine that may be a little underrated. I’ll check it out, and I’ll check out the label as well. Do you remember a time in your career when you first had a feeling that you had something magical in your hands, like you were making a killer project or you had some sort of sign that you would do well in music? There’s a moment that sticks out whenever ‘WFT’ met TikTok, before I released it. I remember I planned to release it at 6:00 p.m. on a Friday, and I was sitting there at my laptop. I released it at 6:00 p.m., and then I refreshed it at 6:02. And at 6:04, I refreshed it, and it had 200 likes already in four minutes. And then I was like, “Right, there’s definitely something there”. So, it just sort of took off from there, and that was my message, “I just need to keep making tracks”. But it’s hard. It’s hard to recreate something that is connected with people in a way that it’s hard to understand. So, whenever I realised that, I was like, “I’ve got something”. What is that TikTok marketing all about? What’s the secret behind shifting from one social media to another and things just blowing up? I have no idea. I think there’s a lot of luck involved. The way you word things too, it can get picked up by the algorithm and stuff. I don’t think there’s a specific way to do it. If there was, I wish I knew, because I would just do it. But I think, while obviously being creative is going to help a lot, consistency is key, like in most things. Out of everything that’s come to you via your music career, what’s one thing that you didn’t expect would happen and surprised you for the good? One thing that surprised me? Tracks blowing up, because whenever you’re just first starting out, you’re not expecting things to go as well as they do. So, it’s really refreshing to see that people resonate with your music. I’m still making music for me more than anyone else, because I want to listen to it; I like the music that I make. It’s just a bonus being able to make music for your fans. So, it really means a lot when people resonate with my stuff. And when I first released my track ‘Falling’ on SoundCloud, it was the first track of mine that really got any traction. So, seeing that was nice. Definitely. How’s the process when you sit down in the studio and decide to make a track? Do you start from scratch, or do you go into the studio with an idea already in your head? How do you go about that? It changes every time. Sometimes I’ll find a vocal, sometimes I’ll have this instrumental melody in my head, where I recreate it on Ableton, or maybe I get an idea for a remix. It could be that I’m on a night out and I hear a song playing on the bar, so I type it into my notes and address it as, “Remix this track”. And then I will go to my laptop the next day and try and do a remix. Sometimes it goes terribly wrong and does not work, but at least I put it into the DAW. Do you ever go through burnout? Yeah, a lot. I would say every artist does. I’d say it’s easier for people who are playing physical instruments to be more creative and play spontaneously because you’re just playing the notes there and then. I think for electronic music producers, they have to go on, find a sample, or just type the melody in themselves. I think it can depend, but I do find myself getting burnt out, say, after a period of touring where I’m not in the studio as regularly. I’ll not have any ideas. But then if I go outside and go for a walk or something, I’m hit with a load of ideas, so I’ll go into the studio then. So, I think it’s just about surrounding yourself with positive things and putting yourself in the right environment. Have you ever had a moment in which you sort of abstracted yourself from whatever you were doing, for example, playing or making a song, realising you were living a lifelong dream of yours? What I like to call the “Oh my God” moment. Yeah, definitely. This weekend just passed, I made my debut at the Telegraph Building in Belfast, which is one of the biggest venues in the country. And it’s always been up here in terms of goals for me. And I played there in Room Two, it was packed out the entire time. It was just like, “This is it, this is the start”. And I was saying before to friends and family, I just knew that that was going to be the start of something. And hopefully, I’m right, but it certainly looked like it. I can feel people resonating with what I’m doing now. So, I’m just glad to see that the hard work that I’ve done over the last five years is starting to pay off. It must be one of those legendary things! I believe Europe and UK have those sorts of clubs that run back 30 years or something, and they have quite the weight on your shoulders when you go and play. Yeah, a lot of the time I don’t get nervous for gigs, but believe me, before this one, I was like, “Well, is something going to go wrong?”, or even during the set, I think my headphone wire hit one of the CDJs, so it skipped out for a second. I nearly panicked, but then it was fine. I think you get that in a lot of gigs where you’re going to be nervous going into them, but it’s just about finding your baseline and just knowing that after a while, you’re going to be fine. I’ve been like that most times. Just out of curiosity, how many sticks do you bring to the venues? Two. For a while, it was only one, and then I ran into a problem where it wasn’t reading the tracks. Never again am I not bringing two. I learned my lesson that time. I wanted to ask, now you are, of course, in the music business, but what would a parallel universe you look like? What would you do if you weren’t in music? I’d say I’ve always been a creative person. I did graphic design for lots of years, and also video editing. So, I think I would still be in the creative industry, but probably doing more in an office, doing graphic design, video editing, stuff like that. Gotcha. Now, I want a bit of your opinion on this. The infamous phone debate on the dance floors. Are you for or against the use of cell phones? I don’t think I’m either for or against. I don’t mind people being on their phones, as long as it’s not the entirety of the set. I see a lot of videos of, especially Afro house nights, where people are just standing holding their phone the entire night. Why did you even go there? Just to say that you were there, or are you actually enjoying the song? I like seeing the flashes of people because I know they like the song, so I know that I’m doing something right. But I also like seeing the videos of myself from the crowd’s point of view to see the reaction of people. So yeah, neither nor but yeah, the likes of what happens with Afro house nights, not a fan. Sadly, Afro house is the victim in this case, because it’s going to be a different sound in a couple years’ time, but it’s just where the masses are going right now, and they are kind of messing things up. That’s it. Also, I think there’s music made for radio, there’s music made for festivals, and there’s music made for clubs, and I don’t think a 125 BPM house track is going to be right for the clubs. It’s just my opinion. I just feel like people need energy in the club, and I think that’s what trance and hard dance brings. And well, the second opinion question I have for you is, is there any point in releasing albums today with how the marketing industry is, kind of bleeding, into the music scene? It’s something I’ve always wanted to do. I just think there’s a time and place. I really like the way John Summit did his, where he collaborated with all the artists that he had worked with in the past. I think that’s a really cool idea. I always said I would wait until it would be worthwhile doing it, so I would obviously have a big enough fan base that it would be possible for me to do it, because an album is a big thing, a lot of work goes into it, so it needs to be worthwhile. So, I think down the line, definitely, definitely possible, but probably would be another way out. If you could go back in time, say ten years or even five years, any number of years, and meet your past self, is there anything you would like to tell him? Perhaps a piece of advice or something that he was too worried about that he shouldn’t? Put yourself out there. Don’t be afraid of what people are going to say. Something I used to struggle with a lot was people’s opinions and what they all thought of me, because people tend to judge you for not doing similar things to them. And I just wish I had realized sooner: it doesn’t matter. Because until you’re successful, people are going to give you a hard time. That’s part of the journey, always. And anything that you do, you’re not going to be the best right away, and you just have to keep working until you’re up there. Yeah. Opinions are something quite rough. I’ve heard it from a few people. I’ve heard it from myself as well, because I also struggled with it. At least I used to. I don’t really care about it now, at least not nearly as much. I’m saying! And I tell my little brother to do the same: don’t care what people think, because they’re always going to find a reason to say something. And the sooner you realise this, the sooner you will be happy and do what you’re doing. And now one of the closing questions. You’re five years into this project. How do you see the next five will go? How would you like to look back in five years from now and say, “Oh, I’ve made it”? As long as I’m progressing every year, as long as I’m hitting my goals that I’ve set—like at the end of this year, I’ll set goals that I want to hit by the end of next year—as long as I’m doing that each year, I’ll be happy. I always said I just want to tour the world. I just want to play everywhere. I want to be one of the biggest DJs in the world. However long it takes me, I think I definitely can be. But I want to enjoy myself along the way. I want to enjoy other parts of life along the way, because I hear a lot of people who do jobs like that they feel like they’ve missed out on a lot of things in life. So, outside of DJing, I want to be able to do things, you know what I mean? I want to play festivals, I want to play big club shows, do my own arena shows and stuff like that. So, five years from now, hopefully, I’m somewhere around that level. Amazing. Funnily enough, on a recent interview of mine, Mark Knight looked back and said if he could change one thing about his career would be that he didn’t completely enjoy the process, he locked in and ran blindly to get where he wanted. Says he missed gatherings and such along the way. And now, final question. Suppose there’s someone in our audience who looks up to you, your music, and wants to follow the steps that you’ve taken to get to where you are right now. What’s one piece of advice you would give them in order to succeed in music? It’s a marathon, not a sprint. So, it’s going to take time. You’ve just got to put the work in. You’ve got to believe in yourself. And if you get writer’s block—probably burnout—just take a bit of time, go for a walk, come back to it. Because you’ve obviously got the talent; you’ve got the motivation to do it in the first place. So, just believe in yourself that you can come back to it, and you’ll do it. If you believe yourself enough, you can do it. Well, thank you. I lost count of how many questions we did, but it was very good. Yeah, it was good, man. Thank you very much for having me on. I appreciate it. As you can see, that was quite the ride. One of the things I love most about working in press is opening up a space for people to come in and share their stories, diving into deep and interesting topics along the way. It’s always a pleasure to get inside the mind of an artist to see what we can learn. In my case, I always walk away from an interview having learned something new, and I truly value that. I love being the channeler that brings these insights from the artist’s world directly to you. Thank you for joining us, and we’ll see you very soon. Stay tuned for more news and updates on all the different kinds of Dance music moving the world right now, here on EDMTunes.[INTERVIEW] Subtrax Talks Production, Teletech, Career, And More
The Interview
Final Words
