The mainstage burned. The love didn't.

Two days before Tomorrowland opened its gates last month, their mainstage burned to the ground. All of it. The fire broke out during an effects test and took a year of craftsmanship in one afternoon.

Most festivals would have refunded the weekend and called their lawyers. Tomorrowland’s crew looked at the ashes and built a replacement stage in roughly forty-eight hours. The gates opened on time. Four hundred thousand people came anyway, and most of them will tell you it was one of the best editions ever.

I watched all of this from a couch in Orange County, which is its own kind of heartbreak.

Here’s what got me, though - not the fireworks. The care. Tomorrowland doesn’t even call the crowd ticket holders - they call them the People of Tomorrow, and the whole operation behaves like it means it. The carpenters, the caterers, the person checking wristbands: everybody builds like the audience deserves their best work, and you can feel it through a phone screen. We’ve all lived the other version - $19 water in a parking lot while security reads you like a threat - so hear me on this: the difference isn’t budget. It’s whether the people building the thing love the people walking into it.

The sound coming off those streams was its own kind of hopeful. Techno owns Europe right now - it is functionally the continent’s pop music - and it’s filling bigger rooms over here every year. Threaded through all of it, that unmistakable squelch from the 90s: acid is back, and if you don’t know the origin story, it’s the best one in dance music - Roland built the TB-303 in 1981 to imitate a bass player, and it failed completely, until Chicago kids twisted the knobs wrong and invented a genre. The most important instrument in this culture’s history is a defective bass machine somebody refused to give up on. Forty years later, everybody wants that sound again.

And the most exciting sets aren’t choosing a genre at all - look at who’s leading: Indira Paganotto folding psytrance into techno, Miss Monique stretching progressive until it glows, Amelie Lens and Charlotte de Witte steering the whole hard-and-melodic wave. Techno, trance, progressive - the walls between them are coming down, and it’s mostly women swinging the hammer.

Someday I want to feel that mainstage in person. Until then the homework is simple, for every US promoter and for us most of all: build rooms like you love the people in them - everything else is production value.

And if Belgium is far, good news: the same love fits in a room of eighty people. We checked.

All photos: Tomorrowland Belgium, official press images.

Update, October 2025: two months after this went up, Lens and de Witte played a b2b literally titled “Trance Meets Techno.” Called it.