FEATURE: Spotlight: Amelie Lens — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Amelie Lens

_________

I am spotlighting…

one of the greatest D.J.s in the world. Her album, AURA, came out in September. I am going to come up to date with some interviews from this year. I want to start with last year and an interview from office. They spent time with Amelie Lens. One of the best D.J.s in the world. I think that, when we think of the best D.J.s, many would choose men. DJ Mag’s top one-hundred every year does include women, though it is male-dominated. Things are slowly changing, yet their top twenty is still hugely male-focused. In this interview, office sat down with the “Belgian DJ to chat about Tomorrowland, her budding career in fashion... and Belgian fries”:

“How did you experience the music industry as a young woman back when you started your career?

To be honest, this is something I don’t like to talk about, since I see myself as an artist and not a female artist. I like to be treated equally and questions like this are somehow making me feel like I am not. But unfortunately, there is still a lot of prejudice towards women entering the scene. I had to deal with a lot of hateful comments with people telling me I should go back to my kitchen, that there must be a guy making my music… But these things have only motivated me to work harder and be better.

You are touring around the world non-stop. Is there a ritual or specific routine you try to maintain despite all these travels?

Not really, no. I’ve had a hectic life since I was 16 years old, combining work and school and traveling a lot. Thus, I never really had a lot of daily routines. I do try to video call my grandmother, who raised me, every two days, but that might be the only routine I have in my life to be honest.

You have been DJing since you were 18 years old. Was there ever a plan B for your future?

Music was just a passion. I never really thought I would be doing this full-time. I was always working hard and trying to take as much as possible out of life. When I was 16, I realized I could study faster by myself and use the rest of the time to work. So I dropped out of school, studied independently, worked and traveled in the meantime. After I graduated, I was already financially independent and signed up for university, but it was almost impossible for me to pay by myself combined with my job. So, I quit. I found a school that offered event management as distant study, but even this was hard to combine with my job, since I was mostly living in Paris and London, but I had exams almost every week in Belgium. I was already DJing sometimes and making music for several fashion brands.

What does true happiness mean to you, professionally and personally speaking?

I see myself as a very happy person. Even though I had a complicated past, I never stopped smiling and made the best out of it. I guess I’m an optimist—it’s partly my personality, but mostly I think it’s a state of mind. I will always find something good in any bad situation. It’s important to focus on ourselves and not on others and try to be the best person you could possibly be.

Also career-wise, with social media we always see what other artists are doing, and it’s hard not to compare ourselves. But what other people are doing should not matter; I am focusing on myself, always trying to improve myself. So I think that true happiness starts with being happy about yourself. Once you accept yourself, love yourself and you're proud of yourself, you can also accept, love and be proud of others”.

Amelie Lens is not playing sets at the moment, as she is pregnant with her second child. Though she has festival and gig dates booked for next year. She is getting ready to greet her daughter into the world. Maybe the first time I have spotlighted someone who is pregnant. However, when she is back and on the road, go and see Lens. Her new album is tremendous. I did want to get to some press from this year. In August, DJ Mag caught up with Amelie Lens to discuss EXHALE. I am slightly new to this, so it was great reading this interview. As they say in their headline, “Since its first no-frills parties in Belgium a decade ago, Amelie Lens’ EXHALE platform has grown in lockstep with her career into a global ecosystem that’s both supporting and shaping techno’s next generation. Rooted in connection and community, the brand now encompasses a label, events arm and flourishing artist roster, all guided by Lens’ hands-on approach. In conversation with DJ Mag’s Olivia Stock, Lens and label and brand manager Max Tassi reflect on EXHALE’s rise to major force in global techno, alongside a slamming mix of tracks from the label’s catalogue”:

“For all its scale now — the sold-out rooms, the festival stages, the international routing that keeps Lens in constant motion — EXHALE remains rooted in connections like these. “All I’ve ever wanted to do was bring people together through music,” Lens grins, before carefully returning the book to the shelf behind her. Fresh from back-to-back solo shows in San Diego and Austin, she apologises for her tired demeanor, though there’s little sign of it. Dressed in techno-black, her trademark blunt bob framing her face, she lights up as she talks about EXHALE — a platform she has meticulously built over the past decade, but one that often exists in the shadow of the artist behind it. “It’s been a long, crazy journey,” she smiles. “If I think back to our very first party in 2016, I didn’t ever realise what it was going to become... I just wanted to host my own events because I felt like the sound that I like was not very represented in Belgium, and I wanted to make people dance.”

“There’s so much I’m proud of but most of all it’s the community that we have created with EXHALE. I get emotional just thinking about it. A lot of fans travel alone, they meet at events, recognise each other, stay in touch, and come back again. It really is so special.” — Amelie Lens

That sound — fast, physical techno designed for big rooms — became the early blueprint for EXHALE. The first parties were held at Labyrinth club in Hasselt, Belgium, where Lens was already a resident and had the freedom to build the night exactly as she imagined it. Word spread quickly. Soon, the room was hosting some of European techno’s most respected figures, from Marcel Dettmann and Ben Klock, to Ellen Allien and Enrico Sangiuliano, alongside Joyhauser, Milo Spykers, and other rising names from the Belgian scene’s next wave.

EXHALE’s expansion into a label in late 2020 brought the brand even closer to the dancefloor at a time when the Covid-19 pandemic had forced clubs around the world to close. Under the watchful eye of Lens and EXHALE manager Max Tassi, who joins us on the call from his base in Berlin, the imprint found its footing through a steady run of V/A compilations, packed full of cross-spectrum techno goodness, and shaped by the same open-minded curation that has become a signature of Lens’ own sets.

“The first V/A release was in 2020 during the pandemic, and we had a whole lot of events booked for that year that all got cancelled, so the project was actually a perfect way to still give something back,” Tassi explains. “On that first release, we had the artists that were originally booked for those events, plus a few others.”

These compilations are still the backbone of EXHALE, with the series now up to its eighth instalment. Beyond offering a snapshot of the label’s sound at a given moment, they’ve become the engine behind its artist development, with artists like Italy’s Flour — who first appeared on VA004 [2023] with his techno slammer ‘Invasion’ — returning to release expanded solo projects like 2025’s ‘Visitors’ EP and 2026’s ‘Fallen Angel’ EP through EXHALE. As clubs reopened, EXHALE’s packed-out events became a testing ground for the music moving through the label pipeline, helping accelerate the rise of artists like Belgium’s NOVAH and BYØRN, French artist ARDL, and Spain’s BLONDEX from relative obscurity into the spotlight of the European techno scene.

To this day, EXHALE’s label and events exist in constant dialogue. “When I listen to demos, I always ask myself, ‘Will this work at 4AM at RSO.Berlin? At DC10 in Ibiza? In the Atmosphere tent we host at Tomorrowland?’ This is the most important thing, because it’s the line between the sounds that we sign,” Lens explains. “I’ll also question if it works for my sets, because that’s a big part of promotion. I play all the new EXHALE tracks and fans look out for them. It’s so funny as people always know which tracks are gonna be coming out soon on the label, because they will recognise it’s something unreleased that I’ve been playing a lot”.

I am not sure whether Amelia Lens will see this feature, as I think she is stepping away from social media a bit at the moment during pregnancy. I did want to spotlight her, simply because she is one of the finest D.J.s in the world. She is a pioneer and has kicked open doors for other women to follow. Beatportal spotlighted Lens in September. Here, she discussed keeping EXHALE’s sense of community, the long route to her album, AURA, and motherhood:

“Externally, Amelie Lens hasn’t changed much since our Artist of the Month interview six years ago. She has the same dead straight, deep brown hair, the same kind eyes and the same warmth. She’s just as busy – she has to jet off to Malta in a few hours – and she’s just as open, but as we talk it becomes clear that inwardly, a whole lot’s changed for Amelie since that last video call in 2020.

“In general, techno really grew,” she says. “All my shows, including EXHALE, were just growing so fast to a point where we’re scaling back the EXHALE shows while my own shows and AURA keep growing.”

Already wildly popular pre-COVID, Amelie’s brand of techno exploded once lockdown lifted. Young people, pent up from two years of lockdown, unleashed their energy on warehouse dance floors, fist-pumping to a minimum BPM of 145.

In October 2024, EXHALE and Awakenings took over Ziggo Dome in Amsterdam, a 12,000 capacity arena that’s hosted Adele, Beyoncé, U2 and Madonna.

On September 5 2026, EXHALE and AURA will unite in a huge, sold-out open-air hometown show at Antwerp’s Royal Museum of Fine Arts. The occasion is a special one: it’s the official launch party for Amelie’s debut album, AURA – dropping Friday, September 4 via EXHALE Records.

“My vision for this album was to show all aspects of myself,” Amelie says. “The album was definitely not made to be for the charts. I don’t want one big track taking it over. I want it to stay as one package.”

The eleven-track album merges the grand with the intimate, the cinematic with the raw. She takes her listeners back in time to when she was a fresh-faced clubber in Antwerp, neck-deep in the dance floor, besotted with the culture.

“Being in the nightclubs gave me this feeling of belonging somewhere, I felt connection and freedom I had never experienced before,” she says. "That feeling changed my life completely.”

It’s something she’s recreating with this album, taking us from tiny local clubs to gargantuan festival stages. The intro is so cinematic it could soundtrack a Christopher Nolan film. It’s followed by “our frequency”, with escalating arpeggios, hair-raising builds and ecstatic drops, best served with strobe lights and pyrotechnics. It’s an air-tight summary of Amelie’s technical and pacing abilities. She pulls back, holds, then pummels like no one else.

“4am at RSO” stands out as a love letter to Berlin nightlife and endless weekends in its subterranean warrens, hypnotised by hard, fast, industrial techno.

The only collaboration on the album comes from fellow Belgian powerhouse Angèle. Meeting at the intersection of peak-time techno and contemporary pop, “run” combines Angèle's ethereal vocals with Amelie’s driving, 4:4 textures. If one of the tracks on this album were to hit the charts, this would be it.

The album ends with “whatever you do,” another vocal-infused techno slammer, showcasing Amelie’s fun, vibrant side and ending on a high note.

If there’s one artist that can influence people, it is Amelie Lens. In the six years since we last spoke she took over an issue of Vogue Netherlands, one of very few DJs to make that crossover. She spent a year with their journalists, letting them into her home for a shoot, inviting them on tour, and curating a music-focused magazine that uplifted new artists and candidly shared the realities of being a female touring techno artist.

She was one of the first major DJs to proudly play with her baby bump on show back in 2023. And she’s been open about her miscarriages and the lack of infrastructure in dance music to support women through these kinds of devastating events.

Vogue magazine dove into these experiences. “Just being a woman in a very, very male dominated scene and going through pregnancy and miscarriages twice,” Amelie says. “I felt really lonely. Just the toilets show they really don't care about women. These horrible DIXI [outdoor, portable] toilets with no hand wash, while I was at big risk of infection. So this was very, very important for me to speak about.”

In recent years, Amelie’s become notably louder, utilising her voice and influence in dance music to highlight issues close to her heart. When allegations of sexual assault emerged against several techno artists in March 2026, she released a statement.

“We are tired,” she wrote. “The dance floor is our home and the backstage is our workplace, but neither feels safe for us.”

Amelie says that becoming a mother to a baby girl in December 2023 made her realise she needs to fight for a better world for her daughter.

“[Motherhood] really, really changed me a lot as a person,” Amelie says. “It changed my whole life, all my priorities. I become so self-aware, because I'm constantly thinking, how is my daughter gonna see me? What is my daughter gonna think? This makes me more ambitious.”

Amelie, who is now pregnant with her second daughter, says she never quite felt ready to share an album. “You cannot plan creativity,” she says. Plus, she needed those years of experience to fully live the story she wanted to tell.

It’s only now, after 12 years of touring the world, building multiple business empires and kicking down doors for women in dance music and beyond, that she’s finally ready to share her journey with the world”.

Although Amelie Lens is now stepping away from touring and focusing on her expectant daughter, when DJ Mag spoke with her recently, she was still performing. Lens wants to change how the industry views women and pregnancy. Changing attitudes. She also discussed how she has found confidence to do things her way. Lens also talked about ongoing industry sexism. This is someone who is affecting change and is a role model for so many women:

“Lens has been here before. When she was pregnant with first daughter Kiki in 2023, she toured up until two months before her due date. “I think sometimes you feel like you have to pick one or the other. But I was lucky enough to not have to,” Lens tells DJ Mag a couple of days after the show in London. She’s back home in her Antwerp studio, draped in a baggy, black ‘AURA’-branded t-shirt, and reflecting on the latest chapter in her life and career with a frankness softened by genuine warmth. “With my first pregnancy, I think many people assumed, ‘Oh, she’s going to be taking a step back’. I remember even someone I used to work with being like, ‘Maybe you’re going to want to focus more on motherhood and step away from music for a while’, and I was like, ‘What? No... Why would I do that?’

“Of course, you don’t know how you’re going to feel during pregnancy and after you give birth, but for me, I just became crazy ambitious,” she continues. “I want to be an example to my daughters and show them that they can have it all, too. I didn’t give up my dreams to have them — I took them with me. Kiki was by my side on the main stage at Tomorrowland Winter, and I was eight months pregnant with her when I played to 15,000 people at the Ziggo Dome.”

“I don’t know if there are many jobs that are totally flexible around these things, but I think ours would be the very last one because there are not even children allowed. The two worlds are so far away from each other, and I think that’s OK — but what is not OK is not even thinking about us.”

The decision to keep working was the easy part, Lens says. The harder part has been navigating an industry that isn’t designed even remotely with pregnancy or parenthood in mind. With so few high-profile examples of pregnancy in the techno scene, she found herself having to “really educate a lot of people” along the way. “Which is crazy because it’s such a normal thing. We all came from someone’s belly!

“Many people still feel like pregnant women should be on the sofa, not working,” she continues. “It’s definitely a cultural thing that I’ve experienced while touring. Some places really want to protect pregnant women and expect you to be in bed. So when they see me on stage, they’re like...” She mimes being shocked and horrified. “It is difficult to get all these opinions from everybody on your pregnancy when I’m very educated on all the decisions I am making. I think I saw six different doctors just to be sure.

PHOTO CREDIT: Daniil Lavrovski

They’re basic things, but they highlight how little the scene is set up to accommodate pregnancy. “I don’t know if there are many jobs that are totally flexible around these things, but I think ours would be the very last one because there are not even children allowed,” Lens continues. “The two worlds are so far away from each other, and I think that’s OK — but what is not OK is not even thinking about us.”

From Belgium’s club circuit to the biggest stages in techno, she has spent much of her rise navigating the particular scrutiny that comes with being a woman in electronic music. “A few years ago, there weren’t that many women DJs, so we had this big almost spotlight on us...” she shares. “I was so conscious all the time about what I wore, how I acted and moved on stage, what I posted online, all of these details, and I’m pretty sure that male artists don’t really think about it, at least not to the same level.”

That scrutiny can quickly turn into something more sinister when a new artist starts to make a name for herself. “It’s great that there are so many more of us now, but I can also still see that every time someone new is coming up, she gets all the hate,” Lens continues. “I see the comments and I’m like, ‘OK, here we go again...’ You know, ‘You don’t mix yourself’, or something about her body. And then after she has ‘proven herself’,” she rolls her eyes, “it eventually eases up. And then the next one comes through, and she gets all the hate again. It’s just disgusting.

“Also the endless comparisons, I feel this is also something that is mainly being done with women. I’ve never seen a male artist come up and people saying, ‘Oh, he’s better or worse than this other artist’, or ‘Stop trying to be so and so’.

“I’m very close with many of the upcoming female artists in techno, and quite often they will call me because they know I’ve been through the same, and I always tell them, ‘It’s going to stop I promise. It’s just this period when you’re breaking through, and all the eyes are on you’.”

“Unfortunately, I can say with 99% confidence that every woman in our scene has experienced something. It might be abuse of power, intimidation or sexual harassment, but we all have our stories."

The hostility she describes online is only one part of a much bigger problem. In recent months, a wave of allegations of sexual harassment, assault and abuse of power has emerged across the European techno scene, with women coming forward about experiences both inside and outside the workplace. Some of the allegations have prompted artists to be removed from festival and club bills, while others continue to be booked. Meanwhile, METOODJS, an independent organisation supporting victims of sexual violence in electronic music, has reportedly received hundreds of testimonies from people across the scene.

Lens has spoken publicly about the issue before. In February 2026, she shared a statement addressing the lack of safety women experience both on the dancefloor and backstage. Since then, the conversation has only grown, and so has her frustration with how little action has been taken. “Unfortunately, I can say with 99% confidence that every woman in our scene has experienced something. It might be abuse of power, intimidation or sexual harassment, but we all have our stories. And that’s really fucked up, because it’s all of us. It’s not just a small percentage. We’ve just normalised it.

“I’ve personally had several incidents with male artists backstage or in the DJ booth. And literally, I’m at work — this isn’t me partying. Even if it were, that wouldn’t be an excuse, but this is my job. I also know so many DJ colleagues who have had really horrible things happen to them — really bad things — and they spoke about it, but nobody believed them. It was a real mindfuck for me, because for all those years I thought, ‘If I ever have the courage to speak up about these artists, something is going to change’. And now I’ve realised that it doesn’t. People hide it, agents know, and now with these allegations going public everybody knows, even the fans, and nobody does anything. That’s really, really wrong”.

I am going to end things here. By the time I publish this, Lens may have given birth. I guess she is going to be spending precious time with her daughter. Though you know she will be back at festivals and dancefloors next year. A fixture of summer festivals. AURA is a terrific album. This is what DJ Mag said: “Hard techno exploded when lockdown kids were released back into the wild with a newfound thirst for maximalism. Amelie Lens soon became their poster girl, her supersized sounds the perfect antidote for lockdown ennui, and the scale of her arena shows is suitably mind-blowing. Until now, the only thing missing from her CV was a debut album — ‘AURA’ plugs the gap with the force of a supernova. While mostly hard and fast from front to back, there’s important nuance and narrative across the 11 tracks that give the album legs. Take ‘4am at RSO’, a deeper, more atmospheric ode to time the Belgian spent submerged in Berlin nightlife. ‘run (w/ Angèle)’ and ‘whatever you do’ have trance overtones and uplifting vocals that befit the infinite festivals Lens plays. ‘our frequency’ is a signature blend of everything: sultry whispers, consuming bass and explosive drops, all laced with escalating arpeggios designed to get hands in the air. She might go hard, but Lens never lacks heart”. If you have not connected with Amelie Lens and her incredible work, then you really…