Skrillex Made His Dekmantel Debut Back to Back With RHR
Skrillex made his Dekmantel debut on 31 July 2026 with a solo set and a back to back with RHR at The Loop, the clearest sign yet that the line between mainstream and underground has gone.
Skrillex has spent the better part of fifteen years as the loudest name in almost any room he walks into, so his first booking at Dekmantel, the most purist entry on the European festival calendar, was always going to land as a statement of intent. On Friday 31 July he made his Dekmantel debut at The Loop, playing a solo set and then folding into a back to back with RHR, the Sao Paulo producer whose fingerprints are all over his forthcoming record.
The pairing is not a novelty booking. RHR, real name Roniere Santo, grew up in Diadema on the edge of Sao Paulo and builds tracks that smash baile funk, Miami bass and chest caving techno into one hybrid he only half jokingly calls Frankenstein music. His breakthrough EP GIRIA arrived this year on the Berlin avant garde label PAN, and its closing cut, SYRINX, is the Skrillex collaboration that fans had been chasing since he first tested it under a different name during his 2023 Coachella and Red Rocks sets.
The story behind the two of them is almost too neat. Skrillex slid into RHR’s Instagram messages cold in 2022 after catching one of his rowdier sets, and the studio sessions that followed fed both GIRIA and Skrillex’s next album. A back to back at Dekmantel is the logical stage for that friendship to go public, in front of a crowd that treats the dancefloor as scripture.
Not everyone in the Amsterdamse Bos was convinced. A slice of the Dekmantel faithful reads a name that once headlined arenas as a mainstream Trojan horse, and the 2026 lineup, which also carried DARKSIDE, Helena Hauff and Ricardo Villalobos, made the contrast impossible to ignore. Skrillex answered the only way that matters at this festival, by reading the room rather than trying to conquer it.
From where we sit, the interesting part is not whether Skrillex is allowed into the underground. It is that the underground no longer owns a clean border to defend. A Berlin experimental label puts out a Skrillex feature, a Sao Paulo funk producer trades records with a former dubstep figurehead at The Loop, and nobody in the booth seems to think a rule was broken. The purism was always more about intent than pedigree, and on Friday the intent was in the right place.
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Sources: Dekmantel Festival 2026 programme (The Loop, Fri 31 Jul, 18:00 to 19:30); DJ Mag, Recognise 112: RHR; Beatportal and EDM.com on the GIRIA EP and SYRINX (PAN).
