Toy Tonics: The Colourful Counter-Culture Reinventing Berlin’s Dancefloor

For years, the global perception of Berlin's nightlife has been shaped by its shadowy rooms, punishing kick drums and back on black austerity. But beneath the city's hard faster mythos, another movement has been quietly growing, technicolor, warm blooded and irresistibly joyful. It's called Toy Tonics and for many, it's “the near dance-music thing from Berlin.”

What started as a small underground gathering has become a full blown cultural force. The crews Toy Tonics Jams, vibrant, phone-free parties steeped in good-vibes house and Y2K optimism, have pulled nearly 350,000 dancers across 440 events in 20 countries. These are not parties driven by algorithms or hype cycles; they are gatherings for art students, designers, young creatives and DIY fashion kids, a community drawn as much to visuals and vibe as to the music itself.

Now their story is captured in a new 20 minute documentary directed by award winning German filmmaker Manuel Werner, charting four years of exponential momentum. From 300 person basement parties to regular nights at Panorama Bar, REX in Paris and London institutions like Phonox and The Jazz Cafe, the film documents a rise propelled not by industry strategy but by a rapidly shifting subculture. In 2025 alone, Toy Tonics will host more than 160 jams worldwide.

The film opens where toy tonics are strongest: the dance floor. The bodies move freely. Outfits clash playfully. No one is filming. Werner's camera enters this world intimately, a community built on openness, colour and connection. It's a world that extends well beyond club culture.

Toy Tonics has become a magnet for the fashion and artworlds, their visual identity as distinct as their sound. Their streetwear drops and pop-art aesthetics have led to pop-up events in Barcelona, Milan and Berlin, collaborations with LN-CC during London Fashion Week, an exhibition at Villa Stcuk (Munich) and Palais de Tokyo (Paris) and since 2023, the official Design Week Milano party, which brings thousands through the door.

Inside the Toy Tonic's Berlin studio, Werner captures the inner circle: DJs, Musicians, Designers, Photographers, a multidisciplinary creative community working as one. Their sonic palette is unmistakable: house with human touch, weaving italo disco shimmer, afro-funk percussion, new wave attitude and neo soul warmth. Its electronic music refracted through a live band spirit.

If anyone understands the cultural cycles of dance music, it's Mathias Modica, Toy Tonics founder and a figure whose influences stretch back to the Y2K indie-dance era. Under his Munk Moniker and through Gomma Records, a label once mentioned in the same breath as DFA and Output, Modica shaped a generation that blurred club culture with art and fashion and a sense of DIY irreverence

According to Modica, 2025 feels like a repeat of the early 2000s. Back then, the dominance of trance and techno gave way to indie disco and a renewed appetite for organic, band-driven energy. Now, he says, “we're at another turning point.”

“Dark, black dressed electronic dance music was at its peak the last few years, but that is starting to fade. A new generation is looking for new moods, more positive vibes, organic energy, kindness and a cultural variety. Simple more soul and open-mindedness.”

What Toy Tonics offers is not a nostalgia, but a recalibration: a new blueprint for dancefloors built on inclusivity, colour and joy. Or as Modica puts it in the film's opening: “people always talk about that vibe, and it's this human touch we bring to it.

Counter culture in spirit and celebration in execution, Toy Tonics stands as the antithesis of Berlin’s all-black uniform, a reminder that dance music can be warm, messy, expressive and deeply human.

If the dark, harder wave defined Berlin’s last decade, Toy Tonics may well define its next. Colourful. Joyful. Open. Wildstyle.