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The profile · researched 8 October 2026
From a Boiler Room clip to a Tuesday on Rinse: how DREA built a career out of Madrid
DREA is Andrea Bautista Beneitez, a Madrid DJ whose weekly Rinse FM hour has become her main body of recorded work, and whose sets run from 90s R&B to vocal house in a single sitting. Her radio archive now stretches from November 2023 into September 2026, and her live calendar is deliberately thin.
Madrid, Black music, and a set that will not sit at one tempo
DREA works out of Madrid under a name short enough to fit on a flyer; the fuller version, used on her broadcaster's listings, is Andrea Bautista Beneitez. Her account of what she plays starts at home rather than in a club. She is of African descent and grew up inside Black music, and that inheritance functions as the organising principle of a set rather than as one colour within it.
The shape of a DREA set, as her station describes it, is unusually specific for a DJ whose material is this wide. She tends to open on 90s R&B, move through Afrobeat edits, and finish on hard-hitting remixes of dance funk or vocal house. That is a tempo journey rather than a genre lane, and it means the first fifteen minutes of a DREA set sound almost nothing like the last fifteen.
The raw material is drawn from a long list: R&B, disco, hip-hop and house from her childhood, and baile funk, Jersey club and kuduro from her present listening. Grime, UK garage, amapiano, gqom, chaabi, hip-house and footwork all turn up in her recorded mixes. The connective tissue is not a shared BPM — several of those forms sit twenty or thirty beats apart — but a shared lineage, which is the point she makes about her own programming.
The Boiler Room night that did the travelling
The booking that moved her out of local billings was Boiler Room x Ballantine's True Music Studios in Madrid. The session she appeared on is dated 20 January 2022, an evening running from early until around midnight, and she was listed among the Madrid locals on a bill that also carried Ms Nina, Soto Asa, Delarue, Brava, KARNE KULTURE and Toccororo. The series framed itself around the influence of Latin American culture on the Spanish scene, with Madrid's own artists doing the work.
The footage is what mattered afterwards. Her set from that night went past half a million views, which for a DJ with no album, no label home and no press cycle behind her is the functional equivalent of a hit single. Bookers outside Spain saw the clip before they saw her name on any lineup, and the European dates that followed — Berlin, London, Paris, Amsterdam — came largely in its wake.
It is worth being precise about what that moment was and was not. It was not a breakout into festival headline billing, and four years on she is still mostly a co-billed name rather than a top line. What it did was establish a document of her mixing that exists independently of whether anyone was in the room.
Rinse FM, every Tuesday, as the actual catalogue
The residency is the centre of the work. DREA holds a weekly show on Rinse FM, the London station, scheduled on Tuesdays and billed as an interlude in the middle of the week. The genre tags attached to it rotate between house, R&B, garage and plain multigenre, which is an accurate description of a show that refuses to specialise.
The archive runs back to November 2023, which makes this close to three years of regular broadcasts rather than a short promotional run. Episodes are sometimes handed over to guests or built around a theme, and the descriptions are short and functional: the instalment broadcast on 4 April 2026 at 17:00 was summarised as a soulful ride with a groove-heavy selection, deep and raw house energy. A further show went out on 10 July 2026, and the episode list carries entries into September 2026.
This is also where the honest limit of the story sits. There is no verifiable discography of original productions under the name — no album, no EP, no label signing on record. The recorded output is mixes and broadcasts, and the radio archive is the catalogue. For a DJ whose craft is selection and sequencing rather than studio production, that is a coherent body of work rather than a gap, but it does mean there is no release schedule to hang a tour on.
SonarMix 040 and the argument inside the mix
The best single piece of evidence for how she thinks is the mix she made for Sónar's series, SonarMix 040, published on 25 April 2024 and built as a pass through the past and present of Black dance music. It holds forty tracks in one sitting, moving across amapiano, grime, UK garage, hip-house, Brazilian funk, gqom, chaabi and footwork, with remixes and edits placed next to older records. Her stated through-line for the whole thing was energy, not key or tempo.
The sequencing is argued rather than assembled. As she put it, she always tries to consider the cultural background of the sounds when putting a set together — a position that explains why a forty-track mix spanning three continents does not read as a crate dump. Each form arrives with its own history attached, and the ordering is the commentary.
Ahead of a Sónar by Night booking she was deliberately unhelpful about what she would play. Her line was that she prepares every set with love but does not like to set expectations, together with a warning that anyone turning up for a conventional, well-behaved warm-up had misread the slot. That is consistent with how her club sets are described: the escalation is not held back for someone else's headline hour.
Where she stands in October 2026
As of October 2026 the radio is the constant and the live diary is sparse. The Rinse show has continued through the year — broadcasts on 4 April and 10 July 2026, with listings carrying on into September — while the publicly bookable calendar is down to a single date on sale. No album, label deal or announced tour sits behind it.
That combination is normal for a DJ at her level and in her lane. The work arrives as club bookings and festival slots negotiated a few weeks out rather than as a routed tour announced six months ahead, so the public calendar understates the activity and then fills abruptly. The European cities already on her record — Berlin, London, Paris, Amsterdam — plus regular appearances at Spanish venues are the established footprint, not a one-off run.
What would change her standing is straightforward and has not happened yet: original productions, or a festival booking promoted on her name rather than listed inside a lineup. Until then, the Tuesday hour on Rinse remains both the most reliable place to hear her and the most accurate preview of what a room will get.
The show, now
A DREA booking is a club or festival DJ set rather than a staged show with a fixed running time, and there is no setlist to publish — the set is assembled live. The documented arc opens on 90s R&B, works through Afrobeat edits, and closes on hard-hitting remixes of dance funk or vocal house, which means the tempo climbs steeply across the slot and the opening twenty minutes bear little resemblance to the end. Her recorded mixes suggest how far the material can travel in one sitting: SonarMix 040, released on 25 April 2024, moved through amapiano, grime, UK garage, hip-house, Brazilian funk, gqom, chaabi and footwork across forty tracks, with energy rather than tempo as the through-line. She declines to brief audiences in advance, saying she prepares every set with love but does not like to set expectations, and before a Sónar by Night slot she specifically warned against expecting a conventional warm-up. Billings are usually shared with co-headliners and local DJs rather than built around a named support act, and the most visible audience verdict remains her Boiler Room Madrid set from 20 January 2022, which has passed half a million views. Her weekly Tuesday Rinse FM hour, running on 4 April and 10 July 2026 among others, is the closest thing to a preview.
Researched from rinse.fm · rinse.fm · sonar.es · boilerroom.tv · soundcloud.com