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The profile · researched 23 September 2026
Five summers at DC-10, and a record with her own name on the sleeve
Chloé Caillet spent a decade in rock bands before house music, and the better part of five years building a queer party into a label. On 25 September 2026 she releases Dance Again on Ninja Tune — the first record that asks to be judged as her writing rather than her selection.
Guitar in Bristol, raving in Paris, first booking at Soho House
Caillet was 34 when DJ Mag put her on its cover in July 2026, and the route to that point ran through three countries and a string of bands that had nothing to do with house music. She was born in New York and grew up between New York, Paris and the UK, to French, Italian and Spanish parents. She has said she decided at five that she wanted to be a rock star. As a teenager in Bristol she taught herself guitar and spent a short spell in a rock band, and she later studied jazz piano in the English countryside.
The dance music arrived through Paris, where she started raving at 14 in the Ed Banger years. Back in New York in her twenties she took the music business programme at NYU, interned at Republic Records and worked as music director for a hotel company. That last job produced her first DJ booking, at Soho House. She has pointed to the LCD Soundsystem and DFA period in New York as the thing that made electronic music feel like it belonged to the same world as the guitars.
The training shows in the mixing. Complete Music Update noted that she mixes in key and thinks in harmonics, which is why her sets tend to move in long harmonic arcs rather than in blunt drops, and why the rolling basslines and open, bright synths hold up under daylight at a festival.
From a self-released single to Ninja Tune
Her first release as an artist was the independent single Love Ain't Over in 2021. An EP followed on CircoLoco Records, tied to Rockstar Games, and she recorded a BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix. Mixmag named her its top breakthrough DJ of 2022 and DJ Mag listed her among its artists to watch for 2023.
The commercial turn came in 2025. The One, made with Luke Alessi and released in April 2025, gave her a first Beatport number one. Her remix of Jocelyn Brown's Somebody Else's Guy went further, finishing as Beatport's best-selling house track of 2025 and reaching the UK top 20 — a rare crossover for a club record built out of a 1984 vocal.
Ninja Tune signed her in 2026. Lemme Dance, made with Myd and steeped in French touch and electro, arrived in July 2026, followed by Bad Bara, Change with Luke Alessi, and After Dark. All four sit on Dance Again, released on 25 September 2026 as a seven-track record — the seventh being a Midnight Mix of Bad Bara — pressed to a 140g 12-inch alongside the digital edition. Caillet has described the project as a deliberate attempt to get back inside her own head as a punter: every song, she said, is a note to a time in her life when she was just a raver on the dancefloor, not in the DJ booth. Compared with her earlier club tools, it carries far more vocal and played instrumentation.
SMIILE: a queer party that turned into a label
Before SMIILE there was XTRA, a collective Caillet co-founded with three Spanish friends that ran queer-centred nights in Pacha's Funky Room in Ibiza, with lineups weighted towards queer, female and non-white artists and a soundtrack that took in baile funk and club-adjacent urban records as readily as house. At the time she framed it plainly: it was the first time in a long while that the queer community there had a room of its own.
SMIILE launched in 2023 on the same premise and has since grown into the more substantial half of her working life. SMIILE Records opened in January 2024 with 12 Inch Acid, widened its roster from autumn 2024, and added a vinyl imprint, SMIILEWAX, in March 2026. The party ran in Barcelona, Stockholm and Ibiza across summer 2026, with the Ibiza edition on 8 July marking its third consecutive year on the island.
The label matters for how she is read now. It is the reason she is described as a promoter and A&R as much as a touring DJ, and the reason the Alessi collaborations keep recurring — he is a SMIILE regular as well as a co-writer on Dance Again.
Where she stands, September 2026
She has now played five consecutive summers of CircoLoco at DC-10, the 2026 season included, which is the closest thing the Ibiza circuit has to tenure. Around it, 2026 has been a year of very large rooms: EDC Las Vegas and Saint Laurent's Met Gala afterparty in May, Coachella, Parklife in Manchester on 21 June, Paradise City in Belgium on 27 June, Audra Festival in Kaunas on 4 September, and UK festival bookings at Creamfields on 28 August and Lost Village on 30 August. Earlier credits include Berghain's Panorama Bar, fabric, the Do LaB stage at Coachella, Madison Square Garden on a Swedish House Mafia tour, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and the closing ceremony of the Paris Paralympics.
Radio has become part of the routine rather than an occasional favour. She launched a monthly BBC Radio 1 Dance residency in 2026 and keeps a slot on Rinse FM, which gives the SMIILE catalogue and her own unreleased material a regular outlet between tour weekends.
The back-to-back has become something of a signature. The most talked-about of 2026 was a four-way at Ultra Miami's Resistance Megastructure with Solomun, Four Tet and Mau P — four DJs on one booth who share almost no repertoire, which is roughly the point.
The rock record she keeps talking about
Dance Again is not the destination. Caillet has been open that a full-length is taking shape behind it, and that it leans on the part of her history the club records have mostly kept out of sight: singing, songwriting and played instrumentation, with the intention of bridging rock and electronic music rather than alternating between them.
The more consequential part of that plan is how it would be performed. She has said she wants to start playing live again, and that while being alone on stage has its merits she is looking forward to expressing the music with a group of people. No live band dates have been announced, and until they are, the touring operation remains a DJ one.
It is a genuine risk, and she is taking it from a position of unusual security — a residency she can return to every summer, a label she owns, and a booking sheet that does not depend on the album landing. Whether the rock record works is an open question; whether she can afford to try is not.
The show, now
The show is still a DJ set, not a band, and Caillet's stated working rule is a three-hour minimum — she builds slowly and dislikes being handed a short slot. The club version is the one to see: at The White Hotel in Salford on 20 March 2026 she played from 2am to 5am, and the Manchester and Ibiza rooms let her run the full arc from disco and funk through rolling house into harder, percussive material, with Latin and African percussion doing much of the work in the later hours. Her own records are worked in rather than showcased, and Come Back 2 Me is the track that turns up most often in logged sets. Festival slots compress all of that hard: she played Audra in Kaunas at 3.30am on 4 September 2026 and Portola in San Francisco at 3.45pm on 26 September, with a late club set at Public Works the same night. Staging is minimal — booth, lights, no production narrative — and the variable element is who is standing next to her, because back-to-backs have become a large part of her calendar, including a four-way with Solomun, Four Tet and Mau P at Ultra Miami's Resistance Megastructure in 2026. Bills she appears on are usually loaded with peers rather than support in the conventional sense, and the SMIILE nights she curates put her own roster on before her. Immediately ahead: two nights at Depot Mayfield in Manchester on 2 and 3 October 2026, Fabrik in Madrid on 10 October, and Futur Festival in Monterrey on 13 and 14 November. Reporting on her Coachella appearance with ROSSI. in 2026 focused on how heavy the basslines ran — a reminder that the daytime festival version of her sets is brighter than the club one, not softer.
Researched from djmag.com · thelineofbestfit.com · chloecaillet.bandcamp.com · completemusicupdate.com · songkick.com · setlist.fm · djmag.com