LUCIID | ADE EDITION 2025

There’s a moment in every artist’s life when the stage lights dim and the noise fades, leaving only doubt. For Luciid, that moment came at the height of his success. After charting, touring, and headlining some of Europe’s biggest stages, he would still find himself back in the hotel room, staring at the ceiling, wondering why it didn’t feel like enough. The weight of algorithms, the pressure of trends, and the label of “hard techno producer” left him burned out and disillusioned with the very thing that once gave him life.

Reeluv, his new album, is the sound of pulling himself back from that edge. Rather than dumping the record in one shot, Luciid opted for a waterfall release, allowing each track to breathe on its own. It’s a rejection of the swipe culture that dominates music in 2025, and a demand that listeners slow down, engage with the songs, and form their own connections.

“This is not a quick hit. It’s a collection that brings you on a journey through emotion, energy, and my own personal struggles.”

That journey takes him from doubt to rediscovery, from the suffocating loop of “harder, faster, louder” to a renewed belief in music as something honest, dangerous, and intimate. Reeluv is more than an album; it’s a manifesto, a reminder that real artistry still matters in an industry obsessed with short-term hype. And in reclaiming his own fire, Luciid is inviting others to do the same.

Luciid knew from the start that Reeluv couldn’t be released like everything else. Instead of dumping a dozen tracks in one go, he chose the waterfall method, letting each song arrive in its own time, demanding that people sit with it instead of swiping past.

“My biggest fear with this release is that people would view it at the surface level only,” he explains. “This album is not a quick hit; it is a collection that brings you on a journey through emotion, energy, and my own personal struggles. By releasing it as a waterfall, it allows the listener to analyze each track and make a meaningful connection to the music instead of scrolling until they find something that matches their mood in the moment.”

In a landscape where attention spans barely last a chorus, Luciid’s approach is almost rebellious. “I want people to feel an emotional connection to each song, and the only way to do that is not to overwhelm them with 10+ tracks. A lot of the album will be a completely new experience for my fans, so why rush it? This album reflects a time in my life when I didn’t know what the future brought, so why should the listener know?”

That uncertainty sits at the core of Reeluv. The title itself is a confession that, at one point, Luciid lost it. He lost the fire, the obsession, the reason he started in the first place.

“I never liked being labelled a hard techno producer, but over time I noticed myself blending into this scene and losing my creative spark,” he admits. “I became just another DJ playing and producing the hardest music just to remain relevant. Even after playing the biggest stages, I’d go back to the hotel and feel unfulfilled, sitting up all night thinking about what I could have done better. That guilt was heavy. I had everything I dreamed of only two years before, so why wasn’t I happy?”

The answer was simple but brutal: he had fallen out of love with music. Reeluv became the way back in. “I really struggled with this and definitely entered a dark place in 2024, but that’s what brought about Reeluv. It’s a body of work I’m proud of because it forced me to reconnect with the only thing that really matters, the music itself.”

The reconnection wasn’t easy. At first, every session in the studio felt like a fight with doubt.

“I remember being halfway through writing ‘Sakura’ and thinking, ‘Who actually gives a shit about this? I should be making content right now. I just took a break from social media and focused my entire energy on creating something amazing, with no rules and no boundaries. It went from being a challenge to sit down for an hour to being hard to leave the studio after 10. That’s when I knew this album was different. It reignited something inside me; it reconnected me with my younger self. And my PC became inseparable again. This wasn’t just making tracks; it was falling back in love. A rebirth. A reeluv.”

Growing up isolated in Ireland, Luciid had no scene to shape him, no blueprint to copy. It was a matter of instinct, trial and error, and hours spent locked away with his laptop. That purity stayed with him for years, until the weight of global attention pushed him toward trends he didn’t even like.

“I think over time I adapted my producing more to suit the dancefloor, taking inspiration from gig videos I saw from other DJs,” he admits. “I was completely in the mindset that I had to make a track that would demolish a dancefloor. In the hard techno scene, everyone was competing to make the hardest, goofiest track just to stand out. I fell into that, too, but even then I tried to keep some integrity. Now I couldn’t care less what people are doing. I’m making music you can sit with, music that locks you in and makes you forget about your problems. If people want to hear that in a club, even better. But I will not let my productions get swayed into trends again.”

That change in attitude also forced him to redefine what success even means. He’s already had Beatport Number Ones, sold-out shows, and festival slots most DJs dream of. But none of that felt like enough.

“Real success for me now is to create a loyal fanbase who can be open-minded and interested in whatever musical route I take,” he says. “I’d rather have a smaller group of people who truly understand the music than a million people who only listen to me because it shuffled next on their playlist. I want to be respected as a musician, not just a DJ.”

It’s a rare honesty in a culture obsessed with metrics, and it explains why Reeluv feels like such a personal reset.

Of course, no conversation about Luciid is complete without Paro Hour. The track became a viral weapon, a cornerstone in the rise of hard techno. What many don’t realize is that Luciid never set out to become the face of that sound.

“Ironically, I made that track as a test to see how people would react. I was never a hard techno producer, and to be honest, I fucking hated it. However, I take a great deal of pride in it. That track changed my life. I went from minimum wage after university to living my dream, traveling the world. People tell me it was their first experience with the scene, and I love that. But my message is simple: open your mind the same way you did with Paro Hour. Give smaller artists the chance to be unique, and give yourself the challenge of listening to something outside your comfort zone.”

Every scene eventually hits a breaking point, and for Luciid, hard techno has already reached it. What once felt like rebellion is now formula: the same kicks, the same screeches, the same empty drops on repeat.

“Hard techno has become stale. There are only so many hard kicks, screech drops, and heavy metal vocal samples you can squeeze in before the music becomes recycled garbage. Right now is the golden age of recycled garbage. To make a top track today, you need at least five fake drops, zero mixing skills, and a few Serum 2 presets. Every event books the same DJs, playing the same tracks. Unless you’re on stage, jumping around for the cameras, you’re not a headliner. I can’t blame promoters because that’s what sells, but does that feel like a scene that’s thriving or one hurdling toward collapse?”

It’s blunt, but it’s the frustration of someone who has seen both sides: the creativity that sparks a movement, and the industry machine that grinds it down.

With algorithms dictating who gets heard and short-term hype suffocating long-term artistry, the obvious question is: how do you survive? Luciid isn’t pessimistic. If anything, he sees the cracks as an opportunity.

“When music becomes repetitive and commercial, there’s always space for a new scene to emerge. That’s how electronic music has always worked: trends come and go, but something fresh always replaces them. The artists who survive are the ones who don’t just follow whatever is plastered across social media. They carve their own vision and stick to it.”

It’s that conviction that makes Reeluv more than just an album.

For Luciid, Reeluv isn’t another step in the hype cycle. It’s a reminder of why he started making music in the first place and what he wants his audience to take away from it.

“I want people to feel an emotional connection after hearing a track from Reeluv,” he says simply.

And that’s the heart of it. Beyond algorithms, beyond labels, beyond BPM arms races, Luciid wants music to matter again, both to himself and to the people who give it life on the dancefloor.

LUCIID’s Reeluv feels less like an album and more like a manifesto. It rips through genres and eras with zero hesitation, stitching together the relentless energy of drum and bass, the raw kick power of hardstyle, the vocal drama that defined the late 2000s EDM boom, and the euphoric lift of early 2000s trance. The result is something that sounds both nostalgic and brand new, a reminder that electronic music is at its best when it refuses to sit still. The kicks are built for the warehouse, brutal and uncompromising, while the basslines roll with that d’n’b urgency. On top of that weight, LUCIID throws in vocals that hit straight in the chest. They have the same immediacy that once carried festival anthems across fields of a hundred thousand ravers, but here they are reshaped with nuance and restraint. The voice is not decoration; it is the emotional center of the record.

Then there is the trance DNA. Those long breakdowns, shimmering pads, and melodic arcs that once defined the genre's golden years are woven throughout. Just when you think the album is locked into aggression, it pivots into moments of pure release. It is that push and pull between intensity and uplift that makes Reeluv feel so alive.

This is not a retro project, and it is not an exercise in nostalgia. LUCIID is not trying to resurrect the past; he is delivering the best of what electronic music has offered in the last twenty years and firing it back into the present with fresh intent. It is as much a love letter as it is a challenge, daring listeners to open their ears the way they once did when they first discovered something new. Reeluv stands out as a record with vision. It pays respect to history without being trapped by it, and it hits with the kind of unapologetic force that only comes from an artist who has fallen in love with music all over again. This is LUCIID at his most dangerous and his most sincere.

At the end of the day, Reeluv isn’t just Luciid’s album; It’s the sound of someone stepping off the conveyor belt, rejecting the rinse-and-repeat model, and choosing honesty over hype. He’s been at the top of the charts, on the biggest festival stages, and inside the hamster wheel of hard techno’s rise, and none of it mattered until he found a way to fall back in love with music.

That’s why this record matters. Not because it will dominate Beatport, or because it fits neatly into the playlist economy, but because it feels human. And in a scene choking on speed, algorithms, and recycled drops, humanity might be the hardest thing to fake.

With Reeluv, Luciid isn’t asking for approval. He’s daring us to slow down, listen, and remember why we cared about electronic music in the first place.