Max Styler Was Ready to Quit Dance Music, Now He’s One of Its Buzziest New Artists

Max Styler had been plugging away in dance music for years, and was considering packing it up.

“I was sick of my project and thought like, ‘Maybe I’ll just be a ghost producer in the back end, and that’ll be it, because I can’t really figure out what I want to do,” Styler says.

Luckily, before that could happen, the California-born artist had a clarifying conversation with the woman who was then his girlfriend and is now his wife. She told him, he recalls, that “‘You just need to make the music you like to listen to and the music people want to dance to.’ She basically told me I needed to make better music.”

The simple advice cracked something open for Styler, who, after taking it, has become one of the buzziest new names in dance music. Since 2022, he’s signed tracks to labels including Spinnin Records, John Summit’s Experts Only and Solomun’s Diynamic. He played his first Lollapalooza last weekend, made his Coachella debut in 2025 and is making fans around the world with the extended sets that are his speciality. (“Four hours or more is perfect,” he says of the ideal length.)

Today (Aug. 7), he releases his latest and most expansive EP, the six-track I Don’t Think I Can Stop, out on the Nu Moda label he launched last October. Styler speaks to Billboard over Zoom from the apartment in Paris where he and his wife are living this summer while he plays across Europe, with recent shows including myriad Ibiza clubs and his debut at Belgium’s Tomorrowland.

His life in dance music started as a kid in San Luis Obispo, Calif., a sleepy seaside town on the Central Coast. There was, he says, “very little dance music” there when he was growing up, but as a middle schooler he found a whole world of it on SoundCloud. “What connected me and my friends was our love of finding music,” he says. “We were always searching for new stuff the other person couldn’t find or didn’t find yet.” Favorites among the group were the bass house output from AC Slater and Jack Beats, music from Boys Noize and Flume and everything on the seminal Australian label Future Classic.

But despite this music discovery as a group sport, Styler was the only one who was like, “‘I’m gonna buy Ableton and try this s–t.” His parents got him a controller that he could plug into his iPod for his birthday, and his mom’s friend’s husband was a local DJ who started taking Styler out to play school dances, weddings and other local gigs. He was saving money for gear and “apart from doing homework and hanging out with friends, I was always self-learning on Ableton and YouTube.”

The city’s only dance music promoter at the time was called Collective Effort Events, which promoted shows at a pair of local clubs. Styler smartly saw the promoter as a way in, subsequently sending them roughly a hundred emails with his music trying to get their attention. He didn’t hear back for years, and then one day, he did.

“They were like, “This is sick; we like this. We can’t get back to every email, but we’ve been listening to everything.”

In 2013, the promoter put Styler on as an opener for Above & Beyond. He was 17 years old and “a ball of nerves. By the time I actually finished the set, I felt nauseous from how nervous I was.” While he’d been booked to play the afterparty, he was in fact so sick that he had to cancel.

And yet the night was a breakthrough. A member from the promotion team became his manager, who sent his music out to labels, with Styler signing a long-term deal with Dim Mak shortly thereafter. He stayed at the label for eight years.

“I’ve described it like going to music college,” he says of the experience. “I was discovering my sound and what I liked to make while honing my skills.” The label deal ended right as the pandemic did too, by which time Styler had moved to Las Vegas to work as a producer, finding that this proximity to the Strip opened doors. It was around this time that he was considering quitting, feeling the music he was making was “creatively all over the place. No one knew what to expect from me, and I coasted under the radar for such a long time.”

That all changed following the advice from his partner, when his music started feeling purposeful and unique to him. “Things got really exciting again, because I was inspired again,” he says. After first meeting Summit and his managers Holt Harmon and Parker Cohen in Las Vegas, Styler signed his first track to Summit’s label (then called Off the Grid). “That put me on to such a huge new audience that hadn’t known me before,” he says. “John was such a huge supporter of what I was doing when I was figuring out this new sound.”

The sound is a sort of sleek, stylish indie tech house that’s nuanced and often sublime, but still bangs. The style is exemplified in tracks like “Love Forever” and “Close My Eyes” from the I Don’t Think I Can Stop. The project brings together tracks that are a few years old with music made in the last few months — with the title nodding to, Styler says, “the club nights that feel never-ending. I really wanted this EP to to fit with where I’m at mentally with my DJ sets.”

While Styler has many of the world’s most crucial festivals on his resume, he says his speciality are these club shows, which provide “endless time compared to festivals, where you’re lucky if you have two hours.” A four hour window gives him time to play everything he wants, with his sets always changing via the trove of music sent to him through his label. “I’m constantly testing out so much new music every weekend, which is exciting for me.”

He says the support from Solomun has been especially important in building his name internationally, “because as an American artist, it’s not super easy to get out of playing the U.S. I see a lot of people get stuck in the U.S.” As he’s taken major inspiration from many French, German and other international artists, “I think my music found its way out of the U.S. and that’s helped me grow the project in a more global way.”

With upcoming sets at LIV Las Vegas, Brazil’s Rock In Rio, Experts Only Festival in New York, Portola in San Francisco, Breakaway Utah, III Points in Miami, Festival Vaivén in Mexico, Seismic Dance Event in Austin and EDC Thailand, he’ll be international for the foreseeable future. He’s not really a partier, but says the sleep deprivation and lack of routine inherent in the lifestyle is hard, a challenge he mitigates by making time for exercise and training himself to take naps. (“If you can’t sleep on planes, you’re kind of f–ked.”)

“I’m in a good place right now, and I want to continue exactly what I’m doing,” he continues. “I want to be relentless with the music I put out and continue to travel the world and have the shows get better and bigger and see new places and keep releasing music I really love.”

With the sun setting over the French skyline behind him, he’s also aware of how much of this dream has already come true.

“I’m in Paris because I make music for a living. What is life?”