Helsloot

A decade in the background

Helsloot is Thomas Helsloot, a Dutch producer and DJ based in Amsterdam who works under his surname alone. The music sits between melodic house and techno, with disco and hip-hop rhythm thinking underneath it — a combination he arrived at slowly, because for years he was making records that carried other people's names.

He has said that the behind-the-scenes years taught him discipline more than anything else: instead of chasing whatever the clubs were rewarding that season, he narrowed the question down to what he actually liked. That reorientation is the whole story of the project. The catalogue since has moved across Get Physical, Anjunadeep, This Never Happened and Domino, which is an unusually wide spread of houses for a producer whose public profile was built on a single co-write.

The record that arrived twice

That co-write is 'Because You Move Me', made with the Dutch duo Tinlicker and credited to Tinlicker & Thomas Helsloot. It came out on 31 July 2017 through Armada, runs three minutes and sixteen seconds, and was written by Helsloot with Jordi van Achthoven of Tinlicker and Yael Watchman. It did not behave like a normal 2017 dance single. A video shot in Alberta, built around a skater on a frozen lake, appeared in February 2021 and pushed the track back into circulation years after release.

The second life was the bigger one. The single peaked at 14 in Germany, 19 in Switzerland and 22 in Austria, and was still high enough in ongoing play to finish 76th on the German year-end chart for 2022. It has been certified diamond in France, platinum in Germany and New Zealand, gold in Canada, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain, and silver in the United Kingdom. Publicity for his 2026 touring put it past 600 million Spotify streams alone.

Helsloot's relationship with it is not straightforwardly proud. Speaking in June 2026 he said he still loves the record but hesitates to play it, because 'the reaction is usually great, but it feels too easy sometimes, like a cheat code'. That is a revealing thing for an artist to say about the song that pays for the tour bus, and it explains a lot about how he builds a set.

Records with his own name on them

The answer to the cheat code was an album. 'Never Tried', his debut, landed in 2024 and was framed by Helsloot as an exercise in self-exposure rather than dancefloor utility. His own summary of it was blunt: the album is mainly about him, which he described as the hardest possible assignment for a people pleaser, and he set out to dig as deep as he could while ignoring every trend. Tinlicker appear on it, as do a set of vocal collaborators who have kept turning up in his singles since.

Around the album the release schedule has stayed dense and club-facing: solo cuts such as 'Be Strong', 'We Get High' with Richard Judge, 'Guard Your Joy' with mOat and Pete Josef, and a remix of M.A.N.D.Y. vs Booka Shade's 'Body Language' — a record he also plays, and one of his most frequently logged selections on stage. 'I Was There', made with Beacon, was given a Booka Shade remix in April 2026.

Two 2026 singles matter for anyone going to a show. 'FF' arrived on CORE Records on 10 July 2026, a club track Helsloot wrote with a fast car in mind; the first draft was called 'Linkerbaan', Dutch for left lane, and he describes the drop as the feeling of shifting up a gear. Later in July came 'Edge of Forever' with Tinlicker, released through Remember The Future and [PIAS], written while the three of them were on a tour bus crossing Europe — deep melodic house with vocals layered over a broken, gently propulsive rhythm that tightens into something harder.

2026, in order

The year began with Helsloot opening for Tinlicker across Europe. The Glasgow date, at the Galvanizers room in SWG3 on 18 March 2026, ran from 19:15 to 20:20 — a sixty-five-minute warm-up of thirteen records including 'It's Alright', 'Paradise', 'Hideaway', 'Killing Time' and 'Whatever Realm'.

In May and June he headlined North America for the first time, eleven shows in eleven cities across the United States and Canada: Chicago on 15 May, Vancouver on the 16th, Montreal on the 17th, Miami on the 22nd, Washington DC on the 23rd, Austin on the 29th, a day-and-night double of Denver and Los Angeles on the 30th, then Seattle on 5 June and a second double of San Francisco and San Diego on the 6th. Rooms were mid-sized and often unconventional — Kingdom in Austin, Q Nightclub in Seattle, Quartyard in San Diego, Halcyon in San Francisco. His line on the run was that he had always felt the interest from across the ocean and was finally getting to play all his own songs there. Several dates carried early previews of unreleased material, 'FF' among them.

Summer closed the loop. He made his debut at Awakenings and at DGTL, played Australia for the first time, and on Sunday 19 July 2026 played his first Tomorrowland, at De Schorre in Boom during the festival's opening weekend. For a producer whose name most people first encountered in small print under someone else's, three first-time bookings of that size inside one season is the clearest measure of where he currently stands.

How he reads a room

Helsloot uses live sets as a testing bench, and he has a specific metric for whether an unreleased track is working: 'If I see somebody opening up Shazam, I know I'm in the right pocket.' It is a practical way of separating polite dancing from genuine curiosity, and it tends to mean recent sets carry a meaningful proportion of music nobody can look up yet.

He has also been explicit about why he thinks that matters now. Asked in mid-2026 what audiences are short of, he pointed at authenticity — that in a period of AI-made music people are looking for the human touch, and that visible enjoyment from the person behind the decks, mistakes included, is what makes a night stick. It is consistent with his reluctance to lean on the platinum record: the set is built to be watched being made, not recited.