About
Lineup: Zhu – on the Move (Country, Punk).
The electronic music artist ZHU (Steven Zhu) is one of a handful of performers and songwriters in the genre who continue to push boundaries in many forms of art beyond club and music festival culture. Creating concepts and atmospheric experiences for fans, both sonically and in real life, ZHU continues to demonstrate a fearless pursuit to evolve today’s music through his artistic vision. Beyond being a DJ and producer, many fans associate ZHU with being a live performer, singer and instrumentalist. He delivers indelible live shows and sets using his keen production ability, voice, sleek synth melodies, billowing basslines, and undeniable hooks to create a hypnotic experience that is all-at-once sultry and sinister. On his latest project BLACK MIDAS, he returns to his roots, creating an album of compelling dancefloor tracks set for release April 24, 2026. For songs, ZHU channeled a 2025 cross country journey in a Mercedes Sprinter Van after he was displaced by the Southern California Palisades wildfire. In the fire, his land burned and neighborhood was decimated yet his house and studio structures were spared, although uninhabitable from smoke damage. He spent the entire next year rebuilding everything he had known, including his music. With no home base or studio, he produced music on the road accessing different parts of the country and artists he approached online to create his most recent album and accompanying nightlife warehouse concept, BLACKLIZT. It was a true return to his original dance club roots that started, like so many DJs and producers, in his teenage bedroom. “In the beginning my music was intended for the dancefloor, and was the clubby part of my sound. For me, BLACK MIDAS is a return to why I first made music,” he explains. “Obviously, I've experimented and gone into different genres throughout my career, but I thought it was important for my new fans, my contemporaries, and also the new dance community, to understand that I came from that world from the beginning and am still a part of it. That’s why I made this record. What I'm doing now speaks to my core fans, but also to the core dance fans of today.” ZHU first made his presence known to mainstream music fans when his 2014 single,“Faded” was nominated for Best Dance Recording at the 2015 GRAMMY® Awards. His 2016 genre-blurring debut album GENERATIONWHY followed, with the hit single “In The Morning.” The artist’s rise to prominence happened swiftly and steadily. ZHU continued to evolve with subsequent projects, tours and collaborations including his releases RINGOS DESERT (2018), DREAMLAND 2021 (2021), Musical Chairs Mixtape (Vol. 1) (2022), and THE DAYS BEFORE GRACE EP (2023). For his last 2024 album and tour GRACE he also produced the “making of…” documentary, 24 Hours of Grace, recorded in San Francisco’s grand Grace Cathedral. The film demonstrated his ability to express a narrative across mediums. For BLACK MIDAS, ZHU transports listeners into a different world by creating tracks around late night narratives through sounds, emotions, words and energy he encountered on his van journey. The productions range from deep house to melodic techno and feature collaborations with an array of underground and emerging artists. “Rebuilding is actually a theme on this particular record,” ZHU adds. “The way that I rebuilt was to keep moving, and to keep the pace and not really dive too much into the cerebral parts of the process. Instead, allowing the physical parts, which is the movement and dancing to lead and keep my mind moving forward. Obviously, one aspect was in the club (with the BLACKLIZT parties) and the other was on the road. I was making songs very fast, and if it didn't feel good in the first or second demo, I just kept moving on.” Because ZHU only had his laptop and gear in the van, everything else became an inspiration. “I wrote what I felt really quickly. Everywhere we stopped, we had a camera, some minimal gear, laptops, and speakers. I've never really driven across these places or played the music I've made in real time. I simply made the music in the locations we went through. It was an interesting and inspiring way to create it. Usually you're in the studio trying to envision what something might feel like, but this was actually real life.” There were parallels in the way he was rebuilding his house, and also rebuilding this part of his musical evolution by simplifying everything. “I went back into a very electronic dancefloor… including sounds, the live experience, and all these different places we took the BLACKLIZT parties. It really stripped down to being very minimal and was about movement, energy and people.” ZHU doesn’t see the BLACKLIZT parties as a tour. “We just picked a few places where people came and were asked to wear black to keep everything very unified. When you look around, and everybody is wearing the same thing, there's a sense of unity to it. I think it allowed people to really let go over the set’s
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Zhu – on the MoveHeadliner
Details
Getting There
777 Memorial Dr SE, Atlanta, GA 30316, USA Reynoldstown, GA
Deck parking · street parking