“I joked to my team that I felt like a debutante,” Sara Landry says of her 2025 set at Coachella — “the first big crossover festival I did where it wasn’t just people in the dance or hard dance world. It felt like my presentation to the wider music industry.”
But instead of a gown, Landry donned a metallic bodysuit. And instead of waltzing to the strains of a string quartet, she played beats at brain-cooking BPMs for a massive crowd in the Sahara tent, DJ’d the after-party for Lady Gaga’s headlining show later in the weekend and pulled together an unannounced b2b2b2b called Blood Oath with a bevy of female artists on the experimental dance-focused Do Lab stage.
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It was a belle of the ball moment for Landry and the hard dance genre she champions. Born in California, raised in Texas and now based in Amsterdam, she came to prominence in the post-pandemic dance scene after cutting her teeth at the Austin warehouse raves she produced and played in the late 2010s. She’d discovered the hard end of the electronic music spectrum through labels like the United Kingdom’s Perc Trax, and her fascination with the sound solidified during a 2019 trip to the industry gathering Amsterdam Dance Event.
“At that time [these types of artists] weren’t coming to Austin, and I didn’t have the budget to book anybody, so going to ADE and experiencing it in the crowd was special,” she says. “That’s what really got me into pushing into the harder sound.”
After originating in Detroit during the 1980s, techno splintered into a flurry of subgenres — hard techno, schranz, industrial and gabber among them — that were then largely fostered in the 1990s European underground. Three decades later, Landry is at the vanguard of next-gen artists delivering these subgenres to new, and newly massive, U.S. audiences.
“Now me and the DJs I came up with in the European touring circuit are all playing Insomniac festivals and these large events in the States,” she says. The difference between Landry and the artists she cites (like Nico Moreno, I Hate Models and TIAN) is that she is, as she puts it, a “homegrown American act” who was “one of the first people to tour [the United States] with the sound, which put me in an amazing position of being a tastemaker.” In 2024, she became the first hard dance artist to play Tomorrowland’s main stage.
Concurrently, hard dance has made major gains: SoundCloud’s 2025 Music Intelligence Report cited hard techno, hardtekk and schranz among the most active genres on the platform and Splice’s 2025 genre report placed hard dance among its fastest-growing genres.
“Splice has a lot to do with it,” Landry says of the music creation platform and sample pack marketplace. “You have these young producers between 17 and 25-ish who don’t know about the original genre divisions that happened in the ’90s, where gabber is different from hardcore, which is different from hardstyle and so on.
“Because of Splice,” she continues, “a lot of people making what used to be hard techno are making hard dance in general because they have hardstyle samples or influences. There are five or six different things that fall under hard dance that are now all mixed together, which some people don’t like, but which I think is creatively really cool.”
As she works on “a ton” of new music, Landry will bring the hard gospel to her Ultra Music Festival debut in March, before returning to Coachella in April for a bigger edition of Blood Oath, where she plans to assemble a crew of marquee and rising producers who are her peers in this latest evolution of American electronic music.
“We don’t really give a s–t what it’s called,” she says with a laugh. “We just want to make cool and interesting music.”
This story appears in the March 7, 2026, issue of Billboard.
