One night this past February, Marlon Hoffstadt leant against the railing of a terrace in Kreuzberg, stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jacket—blue, fuzzy, oversized—and said to no one in particular that he was feeling nervous.

He didn't look it. Smiling and dreamily lost in thought, he seemed more at ease than just about everyone else at this private rooftop club, most of whom were buzzing around to put the final touches on the night's event: a launch party for Club Heart Broken, the new label arm of the wildly popular Berlin party Hoffstadt puts on with a crew of friends and former lovers—hence the name.

"I have this joke with Matteo," he said, referring to MALUGI, his frequent DJ partner and co-head of Club Heart Broken."While we're playing a gig, one of us turns to the other and says, 'I feel nothing.'"

This joke only works if you know what these gigs are like. Picture a room with thousands or tens of thousands of people, lit by strobes and soundtracked by fast, maximal party-rockers that have become the trademark of Hoffstadt, MALUGI and the other artists in their crew: namely Surf 2 Glory, evin, ferrari rot and Dangerous Dreaming. The tunes are a riot of Eurodance, trance, techno, rave classics, pop edits, bits of speed garage, blog house, grime—anything sufficiently unpretentious, with a meaty kick and a big hook, is on the table. It's pretty much everything the 2010s underground was conditioned to hate, a clear dividing line in the sand for online commenters in the past couple of years.

"Total freakout, complete joy, completely letting go, raise your hands and sing along. Don't be too cool, just play whatever you want," as Hoffstadt puts it. "I sometimes play Scooter. Half of me is ashamed, I can't look the crowd in the eyes because I'm playing 'One (Always Hardcore),' and the other half of me is screaming along. It's so dumb, but so joyful as well. I'm not educating people. I just want them to lose themselves for an hour and a half."

And lose themselves they do. Fists are pumped, hands thrown in the air. There are definitely singalongs, both to Hoffstadt's own songs, especially "It's That Time," and the various chart-toppers he reliably rattles off. (I was present for one too, Alice Deejay's "Better Off Alone"—more on that later.)

No matter how routine this scene becomes for Hoffstadt and MALUGI, it's one where you're going to feel a lot—especially if it's your music, your vibe and, to some extent, you yourself that's making everyone lose their shit. Hence the irony of turning to your fellow DJ, perhaps just as the crowd explodes to one of your own unreleased tracks, and stating, deadpan, that you are an emotionless void.

If that's the kind of scene that makes up half of Hoffstadt's weekends, why the nerves for tonight's launch party? It promised to be a cosy affair. Inside, a regal table was being set for 40 people, with grapes and cheese plopped right on the tablecloth ahead of a multi-course meal of elegant vegetarian fare. Hoffstadt had picked up a few dozen bottles of wine on his way there, charming the pants of the clerk of the shop as he did so. Later on there would be a small party, 200 people or so: half of them invited personally, half of them fans who'd won a raffle.

It was a cold night, and the queue to get in was taking a while. Sensing an opportunity, Hoffstadt went down to the sidewalk with a bottle of schnapps to pour shots for his fans while they waited. Smiling, chatting and hugging his way down the queue, he was revealing an essential non-musical talent: leaning into his semi-celebrity status with a certain warm approachability, drawing his fans in like old friends.

The reason he was nervous, Hoffstadt explained, was that Club Heart Broken's label had become a big deal. Literally. Ever since DJ Daddy Trance went viral a few years ago, major labels had been eyeing Hoffstadt and actively competing to back Club Heart Broken. In the end Hoffstadt and MALUGI went with Sony Music, the second-largest record label in the world. Universal, the largest, had been sniffing around, too.

That won't be surprising to anyone who's paid attention to Hoffstadt's trajectory over the past few years. Since releasing his first edit as DJ Daddy Trance, he's gone from moderate local recognition in Berlin to being one of the city's most famous, well-loved and commercially viable artists in a way that feels antithetical to the metrics by which devotion in Berlin are usually tallied.

He's done remixes for Madonna, Charli xcx and Kylie Minogue. His music has been streamed more than 100 million times on Spotify alone. As local lore has it, one edition of Club Heart Broken at Watergate had a queue that snaked across the Oberbaumbrücke and past the Universal Music building on the other side of the river—way beyond what, say, Ricardo Villalobos ever got for the annual New Kids on Acid party at the same club. And this appeal is by no means limited to his hometown. Last October, a 5,000-cap Boiler Room gig in Melbourne left hordes of fans without tickets. They decided to do another party at the same spot the next day. That sold out, too.

Hoffstadt's next chapter promises to be even bigger. He's had offers to produce original music for household name pop artists (none, alas, that can be named here). In a cruel twist of major label politics, one of these got canned after the artist in question won a BRIT Award and reconsidered the club pivot that led them to get in touch. Laying on the couch of his attic flat in Neukölln, Hoffstadt played this one for me. "Such a shame I can't release it!" he said, smiling.

Even through laptop speakers, what I heard was obviously a mainstream club hit, something in the same universe as Eliza Rose & Interplanetary Criminal's "B.O.T.A. (Baddest Of Them All)." As it happens, that UK singles chart-topper embodies much of what Hoffstadt wants for his own music. Released in 2022 on Rose's independent label Rosebud Recordings, it blew up on TikTok and rode a wave of social media ubiquity right into a deal with Warner Records.

Hoffstadt wants to do the exact same thing, but in Germany. As he sees it, dance music in the UK crosses over easily into the world of pop, with club tracks frequently landing in the pop charts. Less so in Germany, where dance music and pop music for the most part remain separate worlds. Hoffstadt doesn't think they need to be. And he's determined to get his own music to the #1 spot on the German pop charts.

This kind of naked ambition hits different coming from someone with Hoffstadt's demeanour. This is partly thanks to what you might call the distinctly German directness of it: what may sound like a boast from someone else is for him a simple statement of fact, with no performance of faux-modesty. He had no trouble, for instance, saying that he's a successful artist who would like to keep getting bigger and making more money—sentiments that are obviously more commonly felt than said.

Despite his popularity and rockstar-ish aura, though, Hoffstadt remains genuinely humble. He considers the other Club Heart Broken artists "much cooler" than him. He has no doubt that MALUGI is the better DJ in their back-to-backs. On a personal level, he seems more interested in other people than himself. When I arrived at his apartment, he asked so many questions about me that, after a while, I had to politely change the subject to the thing I'd come there to talk about.

The unusual arc of Hoffstadt's career may be keeping him grounded. Success came early, then completely deserted him, then came back tenfold a decade later. Born and raised in Berlin, he started going out when he was 15. "I started DJing when I was around 17," he said. "I had my first gigs at Suicide Circus on Wednesday. I snuck into them because I was actually not old enough to be there."

Hoffstadt's primary inspiration was 2008 tragicomedy Berlin Calling, a campy local classic starring Paul Kalkbrenner. For much of his teens and 20s, he followed a path not unlike the one portrayed in that film, with an early, dizzying touch of fame that may have done more harm than good. At 18, he released "Shake That," a song co-produced with Dansson that debuted on the independent label Play It Down, later reissued on Pete Tong's FFRR. A poppy tech house crossover with a hook that sampled Nate Dogg, "Shake That" was a hit. Tong named Hoffstadt a future star.

This went badly for Hoffstadt. Without guidance from any of the seasoned professionals pushing and profiting off the record, Hoffstadt, then a fresh-faced 18-year-old, was left on his own to sort out the rights to that Nate Dogg sample, an extraordinarily stressful and expensive process. And then: nothing. "Short version, people lost interest in me," summarised Hoffstadt. "Not fans, but industry people. I wasn't fulfilling this tech house, deep house kind of sound." Tong's affirmation failed to materialise. (In that decade, at least.)

Though he kept making music and throwing parties, Hoffstadt's 20s were largely a struggle. He experienced increasingly crippling depression and anxiety. At one point, he found himself unable to get out of bed for days at a time. "I went to a day clinic," he said, "got into therapy, started taking medicine."

Avoiding a repeat episode of that intensity remains an ongoing process for Hoffstadt, one that requires firm boundaries. Most importantly, he tries to play only every other weekend, plays in the daytime as much as possible to stay rested, and doesn't hesitate to cancel gigs if he needs to.

"I made progress," he said, "But you're never safe. If I got into a serious burnout, it wouldn't be one show cancelled—it would be a whole year, or half a year. So if I need to cancel I just cancel. Those are the boundaries I set." This, by his own description, can make him "annoying" to work with, but he doesn't mind. "I'm nice to my team, I'm nice to the people I work with. And if a promoter gets mad about that, if you say, 'I need a break,' and the promoter doesn't accept it, maybe it's not the right promoter to work with."

The pandemic coincided with a low point of Hoffstadt's depression. By summer of 2020, he felt more disconnected than ever from Berlin's music scene, so he decided to switch things up. "I had become a dad," he said. "I finished my bachelor thesis. I got a job. Then I put out this one 'Day 'n' Night' edit, and it blew up. I said: 'OK, one last chance, and if it's not working, I'm just gonna get away from music.'"

That was the first release from Hoffstadt's new alter ego, DJ Daddy Trance. The original "Day 'n' Nite," by Kid Cudi and Crookers, is a blog house anthem from 2008—Hoffstadt's honeymoon era of teenage raving. Originally released for free on SoundCloud, DJ Daddy Trance's "Day 'n' Night" has since been officially released on Virgin, a sub-label of Universal.

For Hoffstadt, this track embodied everything it seemed you couldn't do as a Berlin club artist. It was cheesy, poppy, emotionally unhinged; unsubtle in every way. It was also the most authentic music he'd ever released, guided only by his own instincts, with no regard for how it would be received or how it would impact his career. Which, he figured, was over anyway.

What made it such a hit? One of the fans in line outside the Club Heart Broken release party stated it like a universal truth: "It's so happy."

No doubt, DJ Daddy Trance rode a particular early 2020s energy, where eagerness for uncomplicated communal experience met a wave of online fans who had spent the pandemic experiencing music alone. By the time the world emerged from strict lockdowns, Hoffstadt reflected, he already "had a certain amount of knowledge and skill set. But a big part was luck. People wanted this trance sound, and it wasn't just me making waves with that. People had been in a very bad mood for a very long time, and for a long time they couldn't go out to raves. All of a sudden, they wanted some uplifting release. TikTok also did a bit of work there."

Hoffstadt is frank in framing himself and his music as part of what he calls "TikTok techno," the kind of music that translates well into short clips on social media platforms, bringing in swathes of younger fans and making many tracks go viral. But that doesn't mean he's not conflicted about the phenomenon. He is, after all, the former promoter of a party called Savour the Moment, which encouraged attendees to forget about their phones for the night.

The denial of dance floor connection began to trouble Hoffstadt around the time "when people started Shazaming music in clubs instead of just going to the DJ and asking for the track ID," he said. "I met so many nice people with similar music taste through clubbing. That's why I was so against this phone thing in the club. I even saw people using Tinder in the club. Like... open your eyes! Look around! There are a lot of people in this room! The social barriers are so low! Just go with the flow."

Still, Hoffstadt feels it would be snooty to gatekeep a digital-native demographic for any blindspots they may have when it comes to rave's culture and history. Instead of looking down our noses at them, he said, the older generation should share their perspective and welcome them in. "There's a lot of talk about [how] new people don't understand the values, which can obviously be the case," he said. "But it's up to people who do understand values to share them with them."

NUTZEN

NAHER

NEUIGKEIT

Hoffstadt is undeniably media-savvy. He studied journalism and PR and has worked in marketing. When I asked whether he had a defined social media strategy, he quoted one of his university professors, who defined "the three Ns of marketing: Nutzen, Naher, and Neuigkeit." (In English, these translate roughly to "usefulness, familiarity and newsworthiness"). The idea is that every marketing message—or, in Hoffstadt's case, social media post—should have these three qualities.

"Whenever I post something I try to give people something new," he explained. "Like, here's my new song. That's Neuigkeit. The Naher is that I'm in the studio, I'm real, they see I'm working at it right now. Then there's the Nutzen, like, 'Are you ready to hear this at DGTL Festival next weekend?' So then people are like, 'Play this two weekends later when you're in my city!' You have a call to action."

For many artists, self-promotion is a chore, one taken on begrudgingly and unnaturally. For Hoffstadt, it's another channel for creativity. This goes beyond social media. At the moment, he's fantasising about renting out billboards in Ibiza, without having a party on the island.

"You know how in Ibiza you have these big posters by the road like, 'Armin van Buuren!', or, 'Loco Dice!' Big artists with their commercial branding at Ushuaïa and whatever. I have this urge to just put big posters of myself winking, with a caption like, 'Daddy's coming home!' or something super arrogant like this, without even having a show, just to drive these promoters crazy. Where's he playing? What's he thinking?"

He smiled and looked into the middle distance. "It's obviously a very cash-intensive plan."

@marlonhoffstadt What a vibe this was last weekend in Munich. Definitely going to be a bar tender if DJ is not working out! #djdaddytrance #dj #trance #munich #trance #festival #openair #marlonhoffstadt #malugi @MALUGI ♬ original sound - Marlon Hoffstadt

The branding and messaging around Hoffstadt's various projects tends to be sharp. This is thanks in part to his friend and labelmate Dangerous Dreaming, who writes a lot of the copy and messaging for Hoffstadt and his projects. Where so much promotional text is stilted or flat, his is fresh and funny. One in particular that caught my eye: "Techno forum's most-hated DJ."

"There's a story behind it," Hoffstadt said. "There was a post on Reddit, on the Berghain group. It got deleted, but somewhere we have screenshots. Something like: which DJs would you want to see play in Berghain or Panorama Bar this year? Someone wrote 'MALUGI and Marlon Hoffstadt.' Then someone wrote, 'OMG please not.' We screenshotted that and were thinking about doing our own back-to-back series called 'OMG Please Not.'" This was, Hoffstadt smiled, a moment of quiet accomplishment. "I thought it would have hurt me more, but actually I couldn't care less. That was such a nice feeling."

It's tempting to see DJ Daddy Trance as part of a broader evolution within Berlin nightlife. Since its birth as a raving hotspot in the early '90s, Berlin has been famous for the heroic length and lawless atmosphere of its parties. Nights often go for more than 24 hours and pay no heed to the calendar of the working stiff; in the summer, it would be possible to spend every moment of a given week on a Berlin dance floor. This changes the ritual of clubbing in a unique way: rather than offering a brief release from an otherwise normal week, nightlife becomes a second life, a parallel reality one can occupy for long periods of time.

Years ago, a lifelong Berliner I spoke to mused that, in order to succeed, Berlin parties had to offer not just good music and atmosphere, but a portal into this other world. This is something that even a place like, say, Club Der Visionäre manages to create: despite being tiny and mostly outside, its sleepless afterhours are easily seen by normal citizens on a Sunday stroll.

Hoffstadt grew up in that culture and loved it. But what he's offering now, and what made him famous is, is its exact opposite: a few hours of unhinged release, preferably finishing before midnight. Something closer to a concert than a club night.

"You know, I've spent time at Club Der Visionäre as well," he said. "I've had plenty of minimal moments where I listened to more or less the same kick drum, hi-hat and clap for ten hours and I was out of my mind, like, just lost somewhere. I can enjoy that too. But, for me, for what works and what I enjoy most, is one to two hours of pure ecstasy."

He leaned forward and honed in: "The idea is to have events where you're allowed to feel a lot. Underground club culture—the nice old-school tech house, deep house, minimal—is something you build up for hours, with maybe a few peaks. A good afterhours set just keeps people dancing. You can have the craziest sets from the most talented DJs, but they don't necessarily need to make people freak out. Every kind of music has its own position, its own room. The feel-everything vibe is something we felt was missing. Or at least there's just not enough of it in the scene."

I got a taste of that vibe at the February edition of Club Heart Broken, which was also Hoffstadt's 30th birthday bash. The party was at Prince Charles, just around the corner from where the label launch had happened. The atmosphere, though, was very different.

The DJ booth is sunken in the floor at Prince Charles, in what once was a pool. A few platforms had been added in and outside the pool to create a dramatically multi-levelled dance floor, so that at any moment your field of vision was filled not just with the shoulders of the person in front of you, but different people at different heights in every direction. The booth, set against a lattice covered in ivory, puts the DJs at the centre of the action rather than on the edge of it.

When Hoffstadt and MALUGI came on, the energy jumped abruptly. Between the two of them, there is a lot of variety in the music. Over the course of their three-hour, mid-to-high 140 BPM, multi-genre smoothie of a set, I heard speed garage, hard house, progressive, electro house, trance, techno, Eurodance, happy hardcore, acid—the whole lot. Virtually any piece of music, of any genre, can lend itself to a high-energy club edit in their hands. It's extremely consistent, but you never really know what will happen next—except that it will be fast and thumping. MALUGI is the more eclectic of the two. Hoffstadt does Hoffstadt, which everyone is there to hear.

From the second I arrived it was obvious I was seeing something I'd simply never experienced in a Berlin club: crazy, unguarded joy, a room with every single person dancing, including at the bar and in line for the toilets, an explosive reaction to every new hook. It was infectious and exhilarating.

And yet, something was missing. At Club Heart Broken, the real world hadn't been entirely left at the door. People came in groups of friends and didn't seem interested in speaking to strangers. As energetic as the crowd was, they were also a little uptight—territorial about their spots on the dance floor and easily irritated when someone, say, squeezed by to rejoin their friends. Most people around me were crazily hyped up, but also, somehow, hadn't completely let go. They appeared, as one friend put it, like "ravers who hadn't transcended."

I wondered if this was a harbinger of things to come. Berlin's 24/7 party culture came from a completely unique moment in history. Well into the 2000s, more than a decade after the Wall fell, Berlin remained cheap, anarchic and full of people without nine-to-fives—at least compared to most European cities. Today, things are different. Rents have risen more than 70 percent since 2006. Most of us have jobs and things to worry about on Monday. Many people feel daunted by club timetables they used to take for granted (with headliners typically starting around 4 AM at the earliest and parties usually running past dawn). Hoffstadt said he prefers day parties because, as a dad, he can't sleep in, and staying up all night wipes him out. For sure, the city's multi-day parties feel as full as ever. But could Hoffstadt's straight-life version of clubbing be a key feature of Berlin's future?

All of which brings me to that "Better Off Alone" singalong. The whole issue of pop music in dance music is more divisive than it needs to be: I enjoy high-BPM trance edits of chart-toppers, and I actually like this particular song. Somehow, though, this moment felt too simple, too unsurprising, too unearned—and, for me personally, too plainly reminiscent of the awkward school dances where I first heard it.

I was hearing a song I could just as likely encounter in a taxi en route to the club, at a reasonable hour on a Sunday evening, in a crowd of well-dressed, well-rested and not-even-particularly-sweaty people. Had I closed my eyes, I could have been at a commercial bar in the business district of any number of cities. I was rooted in the real world—far more so than I'd like to be in a club.

All that said, I did, in fact, sing along. It would've been hard not to. With eyes open, this was actually a sight to behold, one I'd never seen before: rowdy dance floor transforming briefly into a super-charged karaoke, everyone belting out the words with hands in the air. Up in the booth, Hoffstadt put his hand on MALUGI's back and whispered something in his ear. I wish I could say it was "I feel nothing," but I couldn't hear it, and it was clear they felt something.

In a blur of beaming faces, my mind flashed back to something Hoffstadt had said when reclining on his couch a few weeks earlier: "There's no guilty pleasure. There's just pleasure."