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The profile · researched 17 September 2026
Amelie Lens spent ten years on singles, then put an album in front of a museum
The Belgian techno DJ released her first full-length record, AURA, on 4 September 2026 and played it the following night to 14,000 people outside Antwerp's fine-art museum — while pregnant with her second daughter and running a label she started as a club night.
Vilvoorde, Dour, and a late start
Amelie Lens was born on 31 May 1990 in Vilvoorde, north of Brussels, and was raised by her grandmother from the age of five after her mother died. She went to art school in Antwerp, the city she still calls home, and traces her interest in electronic and industrial music back to her teens.
The turn came at Dour Festival in 2005, when she was fifteen. A stretch of work as a fashion model followed before she began DJing around 2013 under the name Renée — her late mother's name — and picked up a residency at the Labyrinth Club in Hasselt. In 2014 she dropped the alias, started working under her own name, and committed to music full time.
That timeline matters for what came later. Lens was in her mid-twenties before she released anything, and the run of parties, records and festival bookings that followed was compressed into a decade rather than spread across two.
EXHALE, which began as a room
Her first record, the Exhale EP, arrived in 2016 on Lyase Recordings, and early work with Pan-Pot's Second State imprint followed. The name stuck to everything else she built. EXHALE started in 2016 as a party series tied to her club residency, became a full record label in 2020, and now also carries a radio show and a roster of regulars including Pan-Pot, 999999999, Airod, Milo Spykers, Ahl Iver, Regal and Farrago. She founded a second imprint, Lenske, in 2018.
EXHALE nights have run at fabric and Drumsheds in London, RSO in Berlin and Shelter in Amsterdam, and taken over stages at Tomorrowland, Awakenings and Amsterdam Dance Event. The most sustained version was in Ibiza: after a first season at DC-10 in 2022, the 2023 run took over eleven consecutive Wednesdays from 26 July to 13 September, with Ellen Allien, Marcel Dettmann, Dubfire, Chris Liebing, François X, Adiel, Clara Cuvé, Kobosil, Dax J and SPFDJ among those booked across the summer.
The label's compilation series is the part of EXHALE that does the talent-scouting. VA005 landed in July 2024; VA006 followed in April 2025 as a fifteen-track set featuring Alex Farell, GALLØ, Molothav, Noemi Black and AKKI — mostly names without much of a profile outside the EXHALE orbit. Lens has been explicit that signing on the strength of a record rather than a following is the point of running it.
AURA
On 27 February 2026 Lens released 'Falling Into Acid Dreams', marking ten years since her first EP. Three months later, on 21 May, she announced that a debut album would follow, led by the single 'our frequency'. AURA came out on 4 September 2026 on EXHALE, eleven tracks, digital and a gatefold double 12-inch pressed on blue and white vinyl.
The record opens with a file-name joke — 'aura_v4_final_intro.wav' — and moves through 'our frequency', 'run', 'the only one', '4am at RSO', 'drift away', 'a track at 150bpm', 'falling into acid dreams', 'come closer', 'the energy is us' and 'whatever you do'. The Belgian singer Angèle is the only guest, on 'run'. The spread is wider than her twelve-inches have tended to be: 303 acid lines, industrial low end, a couple of slower and more atmospheric stretches, and her own voice used across much of it.
Lens described the album at announcement as "the most honest version of myself I've ever shared", and framed it as a survey of the whole arc rather than a snapshot — "from playing tiny local clubs to standing on huge festival stages, becoming a mother, building EXHALE, and learning how to balance it all in life". At release she put it more simply: "AURA is about the connection between the crowd and me." She had wanted it, she said, to sound "emotional but still powerful, uplifting but raw".
Where she is in September 2026
Lens entered DJ Mag's Top 100 DJs poll at No. 59 in 2020 and had climbed to No. 30 by 2023, having topped out at No. 5 in the magazine's Alternative Top 100 in 2020. She married the DJ and producer Sam Deliaert, who records as Farrago, in the summer of 2022, and their first daughter was born in December 2023.
On 29 June 2026 she announced on Instagram that she is expecting a second daughter this winter. She has been candid about the cost of the last few years: in August 2025 she wrote publicly about two miscarriages, one of which happened on a flight to India, and about playing booked shows through both — "no one even knew I was pregnant, which makes it feel like I cannot tell anyone what I am going through." This time she cut the schedule back rather than working around it, telling Belgian broadcaster VRT in July that she had adjusted the touring calendar on learning she was pregnant, and that "as a pregnant woman, you shouldn't put your dreams aside."
The practical result is a short diary. Four dates are on sale: A.i. Warehouse in Washington DC on 18 September 2026, ReelWorks in Denver on 19 September, Gloria Molina Grand Park in Los Angeles on 26 September and the Uber Eats Music Hall in Berlin on 2 October. Beyond that the calendar is largely clear until the AURA show is booked into the SonarClub stage at Sónar Barcelona for a 90-minute slot from 4am on Saturday 20 June 2027.
The AURA show, and what it replaced
AURA is not only a record. It is also a visual production Lens developed with High Scream Studios, built around shadow, light and movement and designed, in the show's own framing, to accompany the music rather than compete with it. It is the first time her sets have had a fixed piece of staging that travels with them instead of whatever the promoter's rig happened to be.
The album and the show were joined up in her home city. On 5 September 2026, the day after AURA came out, Lens played Leopold de Waelplaats, the square directly in front of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, to 14,000 people — the first event of that scale ever staged there, run with the City of Antwerp as part of its Chaos in the City programme. The event ran from 2pm to 11pm with support from Regal, ANNĒ and Herton; Lens played for three hours at the end, and once it was dark the museum facade became the projection surface. She called it "something we could never have dreamt of" and credited the EXHALE crowd for it.
The festival version has been running since midsummer. She closed the Freedom Stage — the tent with the rotating ceiling screens — on the final Sunday of Tomorrowland 2026, having already played De Schorre in Boom on 19 July during Weekend 1, and gave the closing set over almost entirely to AURA material weeks before anyone could buy it.
The show, now
A Lens set in late 2026 is a DJ set with a production attached: AURA, the visual show she built with High Scream Studios around shadow, light and movement, which is meant to sit behind the music rather than run the room. Club and warehouse bookings — the four on sale run from A.i. Warehouse in Washington DC on 18 September to the Uber Eats Music Hall in Berlin on 2 October — are typically two hours or more; the Antwerp album show on 5 September ran three. Setlists now lean heavily on AURA, with 'our frequency', 'whatever you do', 'falling into acid dreams' and 'run' all appearing in her Tomorrowland closing set weeks before release, threaded through the fast acid and hard techno she is known for. EXHALE regulars open: Regal, ANNĒ and Herton warmed up the Antwerp show across a nine-hour afternoon-to-night bill. She is playing through a pregnancy, has trimmed the diary accordingly, and said closing Tomorrowland's Freedom Stage in July was "the best feeling in the world".
Researched from en.wikipedia.org · beatportal.com · djmag.com · musictech.com · djmag.com · djmag.com · sonar.es · weraveyou.com
Pictures
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons, credited
Rayukk · CC BY-SA 4.0
