Mark Stefanos
Her set was over but Sara Landry still had a few minutes. It was Oct. 16 at Ace Mission Studios, where a sold-out crowd had gathered for the release party for Divine Intervention, her second album, which arrived that day on her own label, HEKATE. She had time for an encore and reached for a track she hadn’t made — her friend and collaborator Alt8’s edit of Calvin Harris and Florence Welch’s classic “Sweet Nothing,” then climbed onto the decks and danced for the roaring crowd.
“I usually do not get up there,” Landry says a week or so later, during a video call from Amsterdam with LA Weekly. “But I was like, yeah, this feels appropriate. We’ll get up there for a second.”
Ivan V. nearly missed the show. He had pre-saved the album and didn’t know Landry was playing that night until he pressed play on its opening track. “I was like, I gotta be there tonight,” he says. The show had sold out but he found a resale. Originally from Serbia and living in the United States for seven or eight years, he has been a fan of Landry for a while. He had never seen her perform, but he came ready to rage in a tank and gym pants, and danced nonstop with a primal vigor that matched Landry’s 150+ BPMs, burning more calories than he would have in a two-hour HIIT class.
“The way she started, and then she built up the tension in her music, it was otherworldly,” he says. “And this is stone-cold sober speaking. You just feel her music lift you up.”
Lifting people up has become a big business for Landry. Widely known as the “High Priestess of Hard Techno,” just a few years ago she was delivering food for Favor in Texas and making tracks whenever she could find the time. Then came a 2023 Boiler Room set that has surpassed 11 million views, a 2024 appearance as the first hard techno artist on Tomorrowland’s main stage, and, last October, the distinction of becoming the first woman to headline the Sphere in Las Vegas. Her headline shows this year have sold close to 100,000 tickets, in addition to more than 50 festival appearances. Six days before the Ace Mission show, she headlined Red Rocks for the first time.
Divine Intervention spans 14 tracks of hard bounce, psy-techno and psytrance. Landry mixed the album herself, tested the songs in secret and retained ownership of the masters. She is among the most hands-on artists in dance music. Still, she’ll tell you the record made its own decisions, with influence from the Divine. The tension between control and surrender is central to her work.
Los Angeles has been part of the story from the beginning. Landry grew up mostly in Austin, but her first show outside Texas took place here in 2021, at a large warehouse party organized by LA’s premier underground techno promoters 6am Group. “There might be a feeling of kind of like a hometown hero type of vibe,” she says. “Ever since then, LA has just shown up and really ridden for me so hard. I love the crowds there.”
Over Labor Day weekend in 2024, Landry and Insomniac’s Factory 93 transformed a lot beneath the Sixth Street Bridge, around the corner from Ace, into an open-air rave for two sold-out nights. Tickets for the first sold out in less than an hour. During the same visit, she hosted a pop-up with metaphysical shop House of Intuition, where hundreds of fans lined up for tarot readings. Last summer, she played HARD Summer at Hollywood Park, the night after headlining the festival’s pre-party at Exchange LA. She has played Coachella two years in a row, this April bringing Blood Oath, her all-woman DJ collective, to the Quasar stage.
Sara Landry (Photo: Alex Parker)
Most of Landry’s recent Southern California appearances have been at festivals so the intimate album-release show was a change. “We haven’t gotten to do a headline type of venue in LA in a while,” she says. “It just felt like it was kind of time to return to LA for the fans and to do something a little bit more intimate than, you know, a 250,000-[person] city festival.”
Jasmine, a five-year raver from the Valley, has followed Landry through EDC and standalone shows around California. Landry was one of the first artists who made her fall in love with electronic music. “Here we are, full circle,” she says.
Jasmine and her friend Stephanie were both decked in Sara Landry merch, and are both Latina — much like a huge chunk of the crowds who flock to her SoCal shows and hold it down for her.
Landry’s own family roots reach into Mexico City. Her grandmother was born there, and her mother raised her on a wide range of music, speaking Spanish around the house. Her father is white, and her fair complexion often leads people to assume she is, too. As she told De Los, claiming that part of her identity can feel complicated when other people question it. She reps it anyway. She speaks up for immigrant communities online, keeps a folder of Latin techno tracks with Spanish vocals and Latin percussion for the right moment in a set, and recently worked baile funk drums into a new track.
She travels to Mexico regularly — she headlined a solo show in Mexico City this year and is scheduled to play Ultra Mexico in a few weeks. The food is part of the draw. “I could literally live on tacos,” she says. “So the lack of taco here is heartbreaking at times.” In Texas, she says, the chiles are easy to find at H-E-B. “In LA, they have them everywhere.” Amsterdam requires more searching. “I’m going to start making tamales here or something,” she says. “But I have to bring the spices back.”
Sara Landry (Photo: Tyler Joe)
In conversation off the decks, Landry is articulate with the same precision and expansiveness of her music. She speaks to us from her studio, a guest bedroom she has cannibalized. There’s a desk, speakers and a computer holding every track she’s made. “I’m fully independent,” she says, “so I can kind of do what I want.”
That freedom comes with a patient, piecemeal process. Pop albums are often assembled in rented rooms, with labels bringing in a rotating cast of writers. Landry made hers over roughly a year, working across several continents. The first ideas took shape during Amsterdam Dance Event in 2025, when artists on her label were in town and stopping by her house for what she calls idea sessions. “Decon,” with Godtripper, began there, as did “Get Inside,” with Alex Farell and SIKOTI. She continued working on material with Godtripper during a tour stop in San Francisco. In Melbourne, she booked a studio with Ali James, a young Australian producer who had been sending her music for some time. They wrote “Energy” in one session.
The album’s opening title track grew out of a connection that had been years in the making. Landry had admired Electric Universe, the German psytrance producer, for years before reaching out through Instagram DMs. She invited him to her home during ADE for dinner and a studio session. His son, also a producer, came along and played her music he had never shared with anyone. “I was like, this is amazing,” Landry says. “This is really forward-thinking.” She signed him on the spot.
Then there’s the work that happens after the initial ideas take shape. A track might sit at 85% finished for eight months. Landry will return to it, push it to 99% and send the latest version to her collaborators over WhatsApp. “Hey, what do you think? I made these changes.” Tracks can contain a hundred separate elements, and getting all of them to sit right takes time. She mixed every song herself. Before anything goes to mastering, she takes it into a DJ set and tests it.
“I am never somebody who’s on the mic, like, ‘This is unreleased music,’” she says. Instead, she works a new track into one of the sections of her set and watches how the crowd responds. The audience has no idea who made it. “If it’s my stuff and we don’t tell anybody, then it’s just an ID,” she says. “Exclusive IDs. You can only hear them during my sets, and then they get released later.”
Most of the voices on the album belong to Landry, too. She estimates that she performs about 90% of the vocals herself. The spoken-word passages and chants on the title track are hers “from top to bottom.” Her process starts with a phone recording. “I just do them in my voice notes, which is bad audio engineering,” she says. “But if I’m going to run it through a vocoder anyway and glitch it out, it doesn’t need to be perfect.” She records an idea, AirDrops the file to herself, chops it up and gets to work. She has also started working with a vocal coach to correct some habits and develop her technique. She says she’s a soprano and hopes to sing more on record. “The voice is an instrument much like anything else,” she says.
Sara Landry (Photo: Alex Parker)
Ask her to name her genre and she laughs. Divine Intervention moves between the bouncy, rubbery hard bounce sound that has been circulating widely, hard techno and psy-techno, and full psytrance. She experimented with schranz, the punishing industrial style, early in the process but abandoned those tracks when she couldn’t find a connection to them.
“I don’t even know,” she says when asked how to classify the album. “And I think that that means that I’ve kind of done my job as an artist and a tastemaker.”
Fan Stephanie wanted people to recognize the production work behind the music. “People don’t give her enough credit,” she says. “She produces her own fuckin music, and she’s badass at it.”
Landry didn’t write the album in sequence. Six or seven tracks were usually in progress at once, and she worked on whichever one was “coming through” that day. She knew she wanted the bounce toward the beginning and the trance at the end, so she built the songs in blocks with that larger arc in mind.
Once the tracks were finished, they seemed to find their own places. “I wish I could explain it in a way that sounds less woo-woo,” she says, “but it really is the truth that the album kind of decides what it wants to be and comes into being on its own.” Hence the title.
Landry’s public persona has long drawn on the sacred. She named her label after Hekate, the Greek goddess of witchcraft, and her personal hypnotist voiced the prelude on her 2024 debut, Spiritual Driveby. Asked about faith, she doesn’t hesitate.
“My relationship with the divine itself is very strong — my relationship with organized religion is not,” she says. She didn’t grow up with much religion and describes her own practice as pagan, drawing in part on the Wiccan idea that the divine reaches each person in the form they are best able to receive. “I’m of the belief that with every single religion, we’re all talking about the same thing, just with a different name and with a different story,” she says. “Different sides of a kaleidoscope.”
She often returns to physics when explaining the connection between music and spirituality. Sound travels in waves. At the scale of a festival sound system, those waves move through the body. Landry argues that sacred music has served a similar purpose across religious traditions, and that a well-built club night can create a comparable experience.
“The feeling of unity that you get when everybody is tuned into the same sort of energy source,” she says. “I don’t think it’s unlike religious transcendence at all. I think it’s two sides of the same coin.”
That belief shapes the atmosphere she tries to create. “I try not to put anything dark out in a set,” she says. “Because I know that people come with open minds and open hearts.”
Sara Landry (Photo: Alex Parker)
She hopes her shows offer a reprieve from the slogs of a disconnected world. She describes, “a safe space that allows people to escape whatever they’re feeling in their day-to-day lives or allows them to understand and tap into the feeling that we are so much larger than social media, that we are so much larger than politics, that we are so much larger than office jobs, that we are so much larger than capitalism — all of these things that I think tend to plague us on a day-to-day level.”
The music and the shows come together, letting the crowd “tap into the humanness that divinity reminds us of, and also the interconnectedness and the feeling of oneness that music provides us.”
Her private spiritual practice goes further. She describes a strong connection to Sekhmet, the lioness-headed Egyptian goddess, and says she has undergone hypnotherapy with a healer based in Cairo. One trip she still hopes to make is to the temple at Karnak, in Luxor, where a statue of Sekhmet is said to come alive for visitors. She has dreamed about being inside it. “Time isn’t necessarily linear either,” she says. “That’s just our perception of it.”
The fans don’t need to share her theology to understand the feeling she’s describing. After the Ace Mission show, people who had been dancing hardest reached for the same comparison: church. A few called it therapy. Landry appreciates the connection. “It’s nice,” she says. “It’s really beautiful and special to be able to be a part of a space like that.”
Sara Landry (Photo: Alex Parker)
The business side of Landry’s career has been especially busy this month. Ten days after the album arrived, music publisher Kobalt announced it had signed her. Ten days before that, her company, Landry IP LLC, filed suit against her former managers in Manhattan federal court. The complaint accuses The Night Department, the firm she signed with in 2023, and an affiliate of continuing to use her name and the HEKATE brand after she ended the relationship in August 2025. It also alleges they sought half-ownership of her music and label. The Night Department, which filed its own suit against Landry in the U.K. in July, denies her allegations.
Landry declined to discuss the case, but on the principle that may have guided it, she had plenty to say.
“The whole ethos of the record label to begin with was I wanted to start an imprint where I could do what I wanted, where I could release what I wanted, and where I had complete control over my own music and my master recording rights,” she says. HEKATE operates independently, without a larger label above it. “I think it’s very important for artists in the long term to own their master recordings.”
She remembers how much even a small payment meant when she was starting out. “Receiving a surprise royalty check, how much of a difference that could make,” she says, “even if it was like a couple hundred dollars.” Electronic producers spend years developing their skills, often for relatively modest returns. “It’s not making Ariana Grande pop royalties,” she says. “Every dollar really does matter there.”
Landry says she wants to offer artists on HEKATE the kind of arrangement she wanted for herself: fair terms and ownership of their work. “I’m very passionate about setting people up for success,” she says, “and I’m very passionate about protecting my musical rights and protecting my creative freedom.”
Occasionally, self-described “techno purists” (who, in this correspondent’s opinion, often lean more toward “cornballs”) have criticized Landry’s pop edits that have led to commercial appeal. She says she rarely pays attention. “I’m sure there’s backlash,” she says. “I don’t really pay attention to it, because I think that the entire musical ecosystem really is a funnel.”
Sara Landry (Photo: Alex Parker)
She explains it through a hypothetical fan. Someone discovers her more commercially accessible tracks and comes to see her on the main stage at Detroit’s Movement festival. Afterward, they buy a ticket to the after-party, where the support act is DAX J — “grindy, classic Berlin, purist underground techno,” she says, and one of her own early heroes. The fan has never heard of him. They start digging through his catalog, his label and the events around him. Before long, they’re buying tickets to underground shows and records on Bandcamp.
“If I am the entry point for some people, that’s great. That’s amazing,” she says. Fans who discover the music and buy tickets help sustain the scene. If she can point them toward smaller acts, that “allows somebody else to fund their life and live their dream off of their art.” She also remembers the LA promoters who gave her that first show outside Texas. “6am does great stuff. They really put the underground on.”
It’s not a hypothetical with real-life fan Jasmine. Sara Landry was the rabbit hole that got her deeper into the genre. “Her journey, my journey — it’s been intertwined, honestly,” she says.
Landry is a fully captivating performer, with her lively dancing and stunning visage cutting in on the big screen interspersed with her psychedelic visuals. Watching her from the crowd, you can get entranced.
I ask her what’s going through her head when she’s doing a show. “Honestly, nothing. It’s very nice to have the silence,” she says. A former athlete, she compares performing to being in execution mode — like a horse wearing blinders, focused on the CDJs in front of her and the crowd beyond them. “It’s not like I’m up there like, ‘Oh, fuck, I forgot to move the laundry along,’” she says. “Those thoughts just don’t even occur to me.
Away from the decks, she has a harder time listening to her own genres for pleasure. Electronic music sends her brain into what she calls “music math mode.” She gravitates toward pop instead, with playlists that include Ariana Grande, Addison Rae, Tyla, Zara Larsson, Megan Thee Stallion, Doja Cat, Tate McRae, Britney Spears, Charli XCX, Gaga and Sabrina Carpenter.
Her touring schedule remains relentless. When we spoke, she had just finished seven straight weeks on the road and gone directly into hosting during ADE. Next up was a multi-week run of North American festivals, Ultra Mexico, her first trip to Dubai, a December stretch through Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic, followed by a New Year’s run in the U.S. After that, she plans to take most of January and February off to write and spend time in her Amsterdam home, a place she says she rarely gets to enjoy. “I have a very good life here,” she says. “I’m very lucky.”
But back to LA, Ace Mission and that encore. For the duration of a set, Landry gives herself over to the room. When it ends, she has to find her way back.
“I do very much lock in,” she says. “It’s almost like I black out. I’m in the zone for the set, and then I’m off, and I’m like, okay, what just happened?”
She ends the night with a touching speech, and for a second chokes up as she thanks the crowd. A girl next to me holds her hands prayed together over her mouth and has tears behind her sunglasses.
Ivan V. stands there stunned, the first time he’s been still all night. “She sets it in so great, she transitions to her hard hits, and then trance in the end,” he says. “It’s absolutely insane, I just cannot believe it. I can’t wait to come back next time.
“This was a perfect day and night for me.”
“Divine Intervention” is out now. Follow Sara Landry on Instagram @saralandrydj.
Sara Landry on the October 30, 2026, cover of LA Weekly. (Photo: Vika Petlakh @stillvika; cover design: Mark Stefanos)