Sara Landry Talks Coachella, Boiler Room Set, New Music

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efore Sara Landry became a hard techno master, she was an angsty teen in Austin with a calling for underground sounds. She’d sit in the pews of a nondenominational Christian church with her family and begrudgingly listen to sermons and choir hymns. Though she identified as a teen atheist, she watched as the pastor created a spiritually elevated experience for churchgoers. Once she began to pursue music, she wanted to replicate that same feeling in the club scene, so she got a fake ID and found solace under strobing lights and throbbing basslines. 

“I would go to these electronic music events, and I was like, ‘Wow, this is the same type of feeling,’” Landry says, lounging on the patio of a Miami Beach hotel room where in seven hours she’ll take the decks of her label Hekate Records showcase party. “You get all these people who are there to have this experience and to connect to something that transcends language, that transcends the things that our culture and society tries to divide us on: race, age, sex, gender, all of these things, religion.”

More than a decade later, Landry has set out to create a similar atmosphere for fans with her own unique style: witchy warehouse techno. It’s Landry’s use of trance-like chants over blistering BPMs that’s given her the nickname the “high priestess” of hard techno, helping the genre compete with commercial dance music. Her 2023 Boiler Room set, where she played hip-hop edits over crushing kickdrums, got people talking. Then, she headlined the mainstage at the Belgium festival Tomorrowland in July (the first hard techno artist to do so), and months later, she released Spiritual Driveby, her 12-track debut album.

Since then, it’s been all gas, no breaks. Her spring tour is well underway with performances at Coachella this month and a New York show at the Brooklyn Mirage in May. As Landry injects pop samples and rap edits into her head-banging sets, she raises a metaphorical middle finger to the genre’s purists, and makes space on the dance floor for queer and female fans to let loose. 

“I’m playing the main stages of EDC and Tomorrowland and all of these insane events where, usually, if you weren’t a mainstream type of EDM artist, it’s next to impossible to get those slots,” Landry adds. “But the movement has been so strong, and the fans have wanted to see it.” 

Landry is sitting beside me on her hotel terrace, dressed in an oversized hoodie and her signature winged eyeliner. She speaks softly, unlike her breakneck sound, and recounts her last 48 hours: recharging at the hotel pool, snacking on nigiri and sashimi pieces at her favorite Japanese restaurant, and earning the producer of the year award at the inaugural Femmys, which celebrate equity in the music industry. “We were all crying,” Landry adds. “It was really nice to just be with all the girls for a bit and support each other and cheer each other on.”

We meet around two weeks ahead of her chrome-lined Coachella set, and she admits that playing in the desert hasn’t hit her yet. After wrapping a B3B set at 7 a.m in Miami, she packs her suitcase and jet sets to Boston. The next day she’s in Philly. On April 8, she released a tour aftermovie documenting her Eternalism Europe shows, and in September she’ll bring her brooding rhythms to Ibiza. Landry is setting off a sonic boom through dance music, one kick drum at a time. She’s excited to introduce more fans to hard techno and create positive snapshots meant to last long after they’ve left the crowd.

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efore her name graced the Coachella lineup, Landry frequented electronic music events in Austin as a teenager, falling in love with the “noisy chaos” of artists like Skrillex and the complex melodies by Deadmau5. Her love for the genre continued as a student at NYU, and she began to shadow her DJ friends to learn the craft in 2014. After picking up degrees in psychology, finance, and advertising, she returned to her childhood home in Texas to learn sound design while juggling a data analyst job. She played empty rooms throughout the week before launching Klubhaus, her own 100-person warehouse raves.  

“I would go to dubstep shows, I would go to house shows, I would go to trance shows,” Landry says. “I would go and experience these beautiful melodies and this euphoria and I just fell in love with it and wanted to learn to do it myself.”

In 2020, she began streaming her thundering sets and developed a fanbase among young quarantined ravers. Hard techno searches among Gen Z listeners went up during the pandemic, Ronny Ho, Spotify’s head of dance and electronic development says, as they craved music with harder kicks and faster BPMs.  

“I thought Sarah stood out because normally in the dance electronic scene, you’re seeing a lot of players, emerging or established artists from the techno scene, coming from Europe,” Ho says. “But for me, what was the real standout was she was a woman from Austin.”  

Landry credits the new generation, who are now ticket buyers and concert goers, for helping her reach a career high. By 2022, she moved out to Berlin, capitalizing on the industrial sound before making her home in Amsterdam the following year. Flash forward to 2025, and Landry has launched the U.S. debut of Eternalism at Coachella, a high-octane experience described as a “sacred, ceremonial space amongst the highest of BPMs.” She’s carved out her own path, while adding a divinely feminine touch to the male-dominated sound.

Techno, which originated in the late Eighties and Nineties in U.S. cities like Detroit and exploded in the European club scene, has largely been a boys’ club. The genre’s purists have occasionally turned up their nose at Landry’s playful approach to the underground sound. When she first moved to Berlin, she played, mostly, by the rules to not upset the scene’s techno originators. “I couldn’t have too many wild card moments where I would risk pissing off the techno bros and they wouldn’t want to book me,” she says. She’s also had her share of fun. Her 2020 bass-boosted remix of Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP” went viral in the European DJ scene. And at her 3 a.m. solo set during her Hekate Records showcase, she played ritualistic chants over straight kicks before upping the ante with a hard techno mix of Charli XCX’s “Guess.” 

“It doesn’t matter if I talk about my 11 years of DJing experience, my 10 years of self-taught production experience, they don’t care,” she says. “They just see the way that I look and see that sometimes I’ll play one pop track in a set of 60 tracks, and that’s what people get upset about.”

She’s learned to stay out of the comments, where trolls accuse her of being an industry plant or overnight success. When she was about 50 pounds heavier battling hormonal issues, online users came after her weight. Following her Boiler Room set, some commenters assumed her show was prerecorded (which she confirmed was not the case). Techno vets Amelie Lens and Charlotte De Witte have coached her to ignore social media warriors and to focus on the support she receives from fans. 

Hard techno whiz Shlømo, who considers himself a big brother to Landry, witnessed her talent when they worked on the track “Play With Me.” It took two afternoons to record, with Landry writing and recording the lyrics in the time it took Shlømo to take a leak. “I came back from the toilet and she was finishing recording,” Shlømo, 37, says. “That’s her own voice on the track and it was like, ‘Wow, that fit perfectly.’ After the first afternoon, we made 90 percent of the track.” 

Despite the track’s blowup, the hate comments persisted, and online users badgered Shlømo about whether he ghost-produced it. Landry took to TikTok in December to set the record straight, giving viewers a crash course on her story as a DJ. 

“I historically have gotten a lot of hate online, but I’ve noticed that hate is really only from older, miserable dudes who don’t get it,” Landry said, before taking a drag from her vape. “The girlies and the gays, who are the drivers of culture, get it.” 

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fter 15 months of writer’s block, she released Spiritual Driveby in October, packing the project with meditative messaging, 4/4 kick drums, and sensual rap verses. The album’s title, which shares a name with the closing track, stems from a session she had with Grammy-winning producer Mike Dean, where Landry asked Dean’s wife Louise Donegan to hop on the mic. She made a joke calling the recording session a “spiritual driveby,” and the name stuck.  

As a self-proclaimed witch, or energy worker, her sets, ranging from 60 minutes to several hours, can be broken down into three parts. She kicks it off with high-frequency industrial tracks and screaming synths before adding in angelic cries and ceremonial chants. She compared the final sensation to savasana, the final resting posture in yoga. 

“The tracks that people really connect with the most [are] not my distorted grimy drumming tracks,” Landry says. “It’s the tracks that tap into some sort of feeling or emotion or evoke something higher. It’s the tracks that cause that feeling, that SpongeBob ascending meme, which is the mood board for me always.”

On Spiritual Driveby’s “devotion 396hz,” Landry enlisted her hypnotherapist to provide vocals and on “Chaos Magicka,” psycore artist Godtripper sampled glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, over drum loops. (Godtripper is signed to Hekate Records, which gets its name from the goddess of witchcraft.) “When we work in the studio, we’re always taking into consideration healing frequencies and certain tones and keys that will induce healing on the dance floor or for the listener,” Godtripper says.

As Landry moves up the electronic music ranks, she’s considered towing the line between commercial dance bangers and industrial techno. She namedrops electronic figures like Gesaffelstein, a French producer who worked on Charli’s Brat and Lady Gaga’s Mayhem, and aspires to have a similar producing credit.

“To see now how closely pop music and electronic music are getting, to me that’s really exciting, as somebody who loves both,” Landry says.“So, I would love the opportunity to do something like that, to mix it up, keep things different, and spread my wings creatively.”

Landry’s music will always remain rooted in the underground club scene, similar to the warehouses she escaped to as a teenager. As she creates her witchy warehouse techno, she encourages new listeners to give the genre a fair shot. 

“If I’m not your cup of tea, totally fine,” Landry says. “I can refer you to 25 female artists who might be, but don’t write us off. Give everything a fair chance. Come with an open mind, and you might be surprised at what really speaks to you.”