The latest and greatest DJs and producers rising to the top this month. From bone-rattling baile-funk and club-tuned pop to sun-blushed house, wonky electro and beyond here’s August 2026’s list of upcoming talent you should be keeping track of.
Eden Samara is a Canadian-born vocalist, producer and songwriter heavily inspired by the underground electronic scene, navigating a vast array of musical styles filtered through a lens of pop music.
Her previous work includes collabs with artists such as Parris, Call Super and Loraine James. Samara calls herself an “autobiographical artist”, telling DJ Mag, “I’m basically just documenting my life through music.” Her second album ‘Odyssey’ is an amalgamation of personal experience, experimentation and inspiration, pulling from all corners of underground club culture and infusing it with pop vocal flair.
Its name is an attempt to encompass the project’s vastness in terms of genre and content matter; Samara shares, “I wanted a way to contextualise the amount of sonics the album goes through.
I wanted to do something that was sonically a bit risky.”.
With co-production from artists such as Tim Reaper, Comfort Zone and TSVI, ‘Odyssey’ traverses an extensive list of genres, from house and techno to jungle, also mixing in choral interludes and indie rock.
The musical synthesis of the record speaks to Samara’s use of lyric writing and song production as a means of healing, making sense of the “whole kaleidoscope of different sounds and emotions” present within the album.
The upbeat bounce and kick of ‘Punish Me’ is contrasted with Samara’s indrawn lyrics interrogating romantic codependency and power imbalances. This conversion of emotional reflection into something appropriate for a club setting highlights the album’s intriguing balance between personal confrontation and dance-pop euphoria.
The album’s second single ‘Oracle’ is a gripping blend of jungle, gospel and opera, where choppy breaks are interwoven with ethereal vocal harmonies. Think breaks are sprinkled in amongst Samara’s melodic tones in a signature dramatic flair stemming from her background in theatre.
She tells DJ Mag, “I'm always thinking about how we can mix a little bit of theatrics into the dancefloor.” Nights out across Toronto and London also form a large part of Samara’s inspiration, from DIY warehouse parties back in Canada to the psychedelic, community-based event Free Movements at Brixton’s Club Cheek.
Samara also highlights how her friends and fellow artists motivate her own musical process, saying, “We’ve dedicated our lives to music and believe in how much positive impact can be found in the rave.”.
When Cheyanne Hudson played at Horst Arts and Music festival in Brussels earlier this year, she did so with one clear goal in mind – to showcase her favourite Dutch rap and hip-hop in a dancefloor context.
Sure enough, in the space of one jam-packed hour on the Kiosk x The Lot Radio stage, the young DJ braided blistering trap, drill and punk-rap cuts from emerging artists and collectives such as STERREN STRALEN OVERAL, Xeno, KC and YoungRubbi into raucous baile-funk tracks and all manner of warped bass and breaks.
Clips from the set shared online demonstrate how potent this particular cocktail was, and how effortless Hudson made it all look, smiling all the while as gunfingers and moshpits whirled around her.
It all points to the focused mindset that this DJ brings to the table when she plays. “Every move I make is based on the energy that I feel from the crowd at the moment itself, without compromising my music taste of course,” she says.
Hudson’s desire to platform Dutch rap in a setting more accustomed to straight-up club stuff stretches back to her childhood. Growing up in Zaandam and Beverwijk, an early love for pop and R&B grew into a teenage obsession with hip-hop, which eventually led her to concerts programmed by Dutch collectives like SMIB.
This passion continued to fuel her as she learned to DJ herself while in college in Delft, wielding the inspiration of Den Haag hard trap selector Bao G as she started playing at student parties more used to hearing house and techno all night.
It was after programming a party called Create and Destroy in Rotterdam club POING in 2022, where sounds ran from hip-hop to hard techno over the course of the night, that Hudson started experimenting more with fusing these sounds together in her own sets.
In the four years since, Hudson has balanced her burgeoning DJ journey with her studies. Her connection to Horst actually came through an architecture internship she took on with the festival in 2024, which saw her relocating to Brussels and going on to play the event for the first time in 2025.
A residency at Kiosk Radio followed, and she’s since played at notable clubs including Skatecafe and Garage Noord in Amsterdam, Pedion Areos in Athens, and Peckham Audio in London.
An opening set at Dekmantel Festival this year was another standout moment, but what’s exciting her most as she looks ahead is the five months she’s about to spend in Hong Kong, where her mother grew up.
While there, she’ll be connecting with family and the local culture, while continuing to study and hone her craft as a DJ. After that, the road is wide open, and Hudson has seemingly infinite drive.
Like its namesake suggests, ‘Morning Coffee’ is a warm, percolating groove that ignites the senses. For Kyle Domingo, aka GUDFELLA, the percussive gem featuring a hazy-voiced Jitwam had a career-jolting effect, too.
The track hit number one on Beatport’s indie dance chart just in time for Coachella, where Domingo brewed up buzz with one of DoLab’s most talked about performances, but even before then, the Filipino-American producer was making his talents known with collaborations alongside tastemakers like Disco Lines and Tiësto.
Despite those early successes, there were moments where Domingo felt disconnected from his creative intentions. Now he views 2026 as his true breakout era, which started with a two-week writing retreat among friends earlier this year where he reforged a sound informed by his multi-cultural upbringing and the urge to stay true to himself.
The GUDFELLA aesthetic is hard to pin, but when we ask Domingo how he personally describes his four-to-the-floor signature, he doesn’t miss a beat. “I just like to say ‘I make really good house music’ and leave it at that,” he laughs.
And he’s just served up more of the good stuff in his latest release, ‘Ride’, another dynamic creation borne from his inspiring UK retreat sessions that hit Insomniac Records in August.
The futuristic heater alongside Yamagucci takes its time to fuel up, showcasing the duo’s complimentary styles across extended builds and intoxicating space-age drops.
At the rate he’s currently flying, it truly feels like GUDFELLA’s shooting for the moon. And from there? We suspect he’ll just keep going. MEGAN VENZIN.
Despite their mononymous and succinct name, a fascinating web of anonymity lies behind London-based duo, Tracey. No particular faces or names are associated with the group; instead Tracey maintain a certain obscurity around their identity to connect with people completely through music and listener interpretation.
Tracey’s discography is playful and eccentric, toying with a multitude of genres including electro-pop, indie, and folk. Their self-titled debut EP was fronted by the dubstep thrum of ‘Sex Life’ featuring Riko Dan, but what seems like a bawdy club anthem was actually intended to be an exploration of the complications and dangers associated with desire.
The punchy and unequivocal hook of ‘Sex Life’ is contrasted with the emotional unpicking done by the remaining songs from the EP, where poignant and sentimental lyrics evidence the inner tensions confronted by Tracey’s music.
The stormy crescendo of ‘Take Care’ and ethereal synths in ‘When I Choose To Be Here With You’ highlight Tracey’s adept consolidation of genres, described by them as “a nod to the different ways we can present sometimes, where one can be brash whilst another can be soft and vulnerable”.
Following performances at Contra and Primavera, as well as their new track, ‘Tranki’, released with Skrillex, Tracey have wrapped up their summer at festivals across Berlin, Amsterdam and Wales.
Produced and often performed on a tantalising array of hardware, Berwick’s music is some of the squelchiest we’ve heard all year. Just take his latest drop for Ste Roberts’ Private Parts label; equal parts squidge, fuzz, and funk, it’s gorgeously grotty and could serve an electro diehard as well as it could someone looking for minimal curveballs.
He hasn’t always been a hardware addict, but after moving to Bristol he became a regular at music tech boutique Elevator Sound, “bought a drum machine and then that was it, I was hooked”.
His ‘Powerflip’ EP for Cyphon Recordings is another must, and he promises more releases are on the way this year, with some collabs in the works too.
Currently feeling inspired by the festivals he’s visited over the summer, the sound systems he’s heard in action, artists like Francious Dillinger, RDS, Kia and Konduku, and long trips with his partner, the artist YouYou, there’ll be chances to catch him DJing and playing his live set throughout the remainder of 2026 too.
Bogotá-born DJ and producer Mav Nuhels, AKA Brenda, makes club music with a distinctly mischievous streak. His releases range from exuberant “plunder-techno” cuts, to fiery tracks that race between bassy dembow, cumbia, baile funk, gqom, electro and deconstructed club.
It's all underscored by playful sound design, and points to an ever-expanding creative vision. “Evolution begins with questioning. Asking where I am situated, what is happening around me, and where the genuinely forward-thinking ideas are coming from,” he says.
In 2025, he joined the TraTraTrax stable with his three-track EP ‘Húmedo’, which featured the zinging collab 'Rápido & Lento ;)' with label co-founder Verraco. His new project Ultrabruma, with Maria Manuela, put out the unmissable 'Sucio' EP last month; an atmospheric, pop-inflected collection of dancefloor heaters.
Performance-wise, this year he has played live at London’s Barbican, as well as joining a Panorama Bar line-up curated by TraTraTrax. "They were two very different milestones, but equally formative ones,” he says.
Right now, Brenda is at the forefront of a new wave of artists championing the game-changing sounds of his home country, and South America more broadly. “I see my place in this movement as that of a DJ and producer willing to learn and unlearn what a Colombian electronic scene can mean.” CLAIRE FRANCIS.
