Antwerp, BE · techno

Amelie Lens

4 festivals played ↓

Belgium's techno figurehead — relentless, hypnotic peak-time sets that carried her from Antwerp warehouses to the genre's biggest global stages.

Amelie Lens was born in Vilvoorde, Belgium, in 1990 and raised by her grandmother from the age of five, after her mother's death. She studied at art school in Antwerp and grew up listening to Nine Inch Nails, Underworld, Boys Noize and Ellen Allien. A visit to Dour Festival at fifteen turned her toward electronic music and its history.

Before DJing full-time, she worked as a model in London, Paris and Milan, walking for Jean Paul Gaultier and appearing in campaigns for H&M. She kept mixing in her free time under the name Renée, her late mother's name, holding a residency at Hasselt's Labyrinth Club from 2013 and playing bass-heavy minimal techno.

She left modelling in 2014 to focus on music, releasing her first track, "Exhale," in 2016, followed by releases on Pan-Pot's Second State and a collaborative EP on Involve Records. In 2018 she launched her own label, Lenske, which releases her own work alongside records by other artists in the same orbit.

Her sound is built on driving kick patterns, looping acid lines and vocal fragments, favouring sustained intensity over sharp shifts in mood. Live she leans on a Pioneer RMX 1000 effects unit, and in the studio she works with Ableton Live and an Elektron Analog Four synthesizer and sequencer.

She curates her own EXHALE parties, which have expanded from Hasselt to London's Fabric and festivals including Creamfields, OFFSonar, Dour and Extrema, and she has become one of the more visible figures in the current wave of European peak-time techno, playing clubs and large outdoor events across Europe and beyond.

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techno