What it was like
Every scene has a year that its people will defend to the death, and for a certain age bracket that year is 2012. The records were enormous and slightly stupid and made for festival fields, and admitting you still love them is a small act of courage.
Nicky Romero was one of the architects. The Dutch wave of that era — big rooms, bigger drops, melodies engineered to work at a distance of two hundred metres — reshaped what mainstream dance music sounded like for the rest of the decade. He has kept working through every subsequent fashion, which means the sets now move between the old anthems and whatever he thinks is worth playing tonight.
Hollywood Boulevard on the first Friday of October, doors at ten, going until three.