This closing phase of 2025 is giving the electronic music world an unexpected moment between past and future: exactly what Tiësto delivered at Dreamstate SoCal
No trance fan, most likely, has remained indifferent to what has been happening in the scene over the past few days: #trancecomeback has become the most used hashtag to celebrate Tiësto’s return – now anything but subtle – to a sound much closer to trance, after more than fifteen years spent between EDM and house productions. All electronic music website and social media correlated, ours included, are currently struggling to talk about anything else.
We have already retraced the steps that, throughout 2025, led him to the release of his new single, which came out last Friday at the end of a week-long countdown: Bring Me To Life, featuring the Finnish-Swedish singer FORS, seems to embody the idea of a new chapter for the DJ and producer from Breda. What starts out like a vocal dance/EDM track quickly turns into a dreamy trance pad, eventually exploding into a progressive-trance drop: all the elements point toward what many have already called a true return to trance.
In this frantic end of the year for trance fans – and not only them -another highly anticipated moment, since last summer, was his trance set at Dreamstate SoCal, held over the weekend of November 21 and 22: the set fully lived up to expectations, offering a preview of what appears to be his new vision of dance music: a return to trance, yes, but reimagined in a modern way.
On the same day Bring Me To Life was released, Tiësto also hinted, quite visibly, at the arrival of a new album, presumably dedicated to this renewed embrace of trance and progressive sounds. The announcement sparked a wave of positive, enthusiastic reactions from fans, DJs, and producers alike. It’s very likely that we already heard some of the upcoming tracks during his Dreamstate set: a performance filled with emotion, blending new music, new versions of his most iconic classics, historic trance anthems, and fresh remixes of his legendary tracks by other artists.
Although hearing him play pieces like Adagio for Strings or his legendary remix of Delerium – Silence is not new (he has been doing so for some time, even before announcing his return to trance),this set managed to create a sense of temporal ‘realignment’ with his past and, in turn, with ours, with our own nostalgia as trance lovers, from those days when – twenty years ago – we were still teenagers.
Naturally, alongside the enthusiasm, a debate has also opened up regarding how “real” this return actually is, especially among fans more attached to the idea of pure, intricate and sophisticated trance, the kind that defined Tiësto and the genre itself over twenty years ago: but today it is difficult to draw sharp boundaries, we live in an era defined by transformation and hybridization between genres, and the fear of “losing” something often makes us want everything to sound exactly as it once did.
Many were also hoping to hear new music beyond the freshly released single: and indeed, Tiësto opened his Dreamstate set with several unreleased tracks that will most likely appear on the new album coming in 2026. Although we cannot yet know the full idea of new work, we can summarize what we heard like this: it is trance and progressive music, even if it is not – and does not claim to be – the Tiësto we knew more than twenty years ago.
The feeling is that the new year could take us even further, into an era connecting the past and the future of trance music … and we can’t wait !