Amelie Lens: Radical Cones of Sound

In honor of Women’s History Month, we are throwing some shine on the most influential female industry figures who helped pioneer electronic and dance culture.

Amelie Lens isn’t fucking around. The great new Belgian hope seems to be bringing what audiences want right now: harder, deeper, more muscular sounds. While she may be newer on the international circuit, she can rock a mainroom with a classy selection of aggressive acid, techno, and rave-inspired bangers and is essentially in the process of “breaking out” as we speak.

The model, DJ, and producer has had to “grow up fast.” Approached by a talent scout at a festival when she was 15, “I started working full-time as a model when I was 16 or 17. I was self-employed, financially independent, and traveling a lot. I did miss the fun years at school, I lost many of my friends, I had to miss my family and boyfriend while being alone in Paris for weeks or even months. But it was all worth it,” she told I-D in 2014.

Her heady, underground-leaning selections seem to work equally well in a warehouse as they do on a massive festival mainstage, and she makes it look effortless.

Amelie Lens programs her own night at Belgium’s venerable Labyrinth Club, where she’s paid dues and cut her teeth. In the last two years, she’s gone from local DJ to internationally recognized for her dark, serpentine sets and moody releases on labels like Second State, Elevate, Drumcode, and Lyase. Her heady, underground-leaning selections seem to work equally well in a warehouse as they do on a massive festival mainstage, and she makes it look effortless.

She hasn’t done a ton of press in English yet, but her own words seem to sum up her approach and ethos—as both a producer and a DJ—pretty well:

Amelie Lens is a very discerning Belgian. She has an obsession for telling stories through radical cones of sound. She exhausts search engines looking for new material to create the narrative. Constantly defining the parameters within resources and time, she plots to unleash well-timed, dramatic and super-tense climaxes.

Amelie has led a charmed life already, for sure, but one can imagine we’ll be hearing more from the young artist whose biggest years seem like they are still to come.