Krowdexx

Alba, a motorbike and a Behringer controller

Krowdexx are Simone Calvino and Giulio Destefanis, from Alba in Piedmont, and the partnership predates the music by years: the two met at eleven, at secondary school. What turned them into producers was an accident. Calvino came off a motorbike at fourteen, and the pair spent the recovery indoors making tracks rather than going out, a sequence they set out plainly in an interview published on 5 August 2016. The first serious purchase came at fifteen, a Behringer BCG3000 controller, and the record they credit with fixing the direction was Headhunterz vs Abject's Scantraxx Rootz.

They worked first under the name Noisedominators and dropped it after about a year. The replacement was assembled out of their own earlier aliases, Kal and D-ex, and in 2020 they explained the logic as wanting something that could not be compared to anything already on a line-up. The masks arrived for the same reason: a painter friend made them, they were never put on sale, and the stated aim was a brand identity that had nothing to do with the two faces behind it.

The Gearbox years

The early catalogue was dancefloor rawstyle with the melodic streak left in. By mid-2016 they were pushing Deathmatch, a straight floor track, next to Castaway, which carried a vocal from Nikkita. On 16 February 2017 they confirmed they had joined Gearbox Digital, citing the label's internal camaraderie and the work of Pure Bookings behind it, and that Get Paid, made with Enemy Contact, had gone onto the Hard Bass 2017 compilation CD — a real marker for an Italian act at that point, because the Dutch events were where the audience was.

The influences they named were not hard dance ones. Hans Zimmer and Two Steps from Hell came up instead, which tracks with how the records are built: orchestral breakdowns carrying the weight before the kick returns. "We really like to include atmospheric breakdowns and melodies," they said in the same interview. The method has stayed deliberately low-overhead — two separate home studios in different Italian cities, Logic Pro X since 2014, KRK RP5 monitors over an RP10s sub, a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2, an M-Audio Oxygen 49 and an Access Virus TI Snow. Nothing about that setup requires a label's room.

By early 2020 the output had hardened and widened at once. PU$H landed as a single, the mini-album Dungeon followed at the start of that year, and the remix work ran from Cascada's Miracle to Andy The Core's Drop Zone — one a trance-pop standard, the other uptempo. Asked to place themselves, they declined the subgenre question outright: "We always make what we personally enjoy, from Hardstyle to Hardcore to Frenchcore." Artwork and the videos came from a single collaborator, Lorenzo Bianco, which is why the visual run from that period holds together.

Why they left Italy to work

Their own assessment of the home market in 2017 was blunt. Asked about the Italian scene, the answer was "Not very nice, you can find Rawstyle and generally hard dance music in a few clubs." In the same breath they mentioned having bookings confirmed in the Netherlands. That split — Italian studio, Dutch and German stages — has defined the career since, and it explains why a duo from a town of thirty thousand ended up as a recognisable name at the large Benelux festivals rather than at home.

In 2016 they named Defqon.1 as the venue they wanted. They have since played it, which is the kind of closed loop that rarely gets closed.

Where they stand in 2026

The current releases come through Aggressive Records, whose own channel hosts their live recordings, and are sold direct through the label's AR GANG store — WE THE LOUDEST is listed there as an extended-mix download. That title has become the banner the duo tour festival sets under, and it recurs across the archived recordings of their 2026 appearances.

The clearest picture of the present set comes from the archived Intents Festival 2026 performance in Oisterwijk. It runs to eighteen tracks and is built almost entirely from their own material: originals, plus collaborations with Sickmode, TOZA and Lekkerfaces, cut with their own edits of records from outside the genre entirely — Tiësto, Afrojack, Avicii and David Guetta all appear in reworked form. That is a specific choice. It means the hour reads as a Krowdexx set rather than a selection, and the non-hardstyle edits give the room recognition points without softening the tempo.

The second strand is Noisemakers, the joint billing with the Italian producer Sickmode. It is not a one-off: the pairing is what headlines the Australian dates this month, where the poster reads "The Noisemakers, Sickmode & Krowdexx" rather than listing them as separate acts.

The dates that are on sale

Six shows are currently listed across three countries. The run opens in Australia on Saturday 24 October 2026 at Hindley Street Music Hall in Adelaide, promoted by Project Hardstyle as a Halloween event, doors at 10pm and 18-plus, followed by 170 Russell in Melbourne on Sunday 25 October.

Europe picks it up a fortnight later: Livehouse in Dundee on Friday 6 November, then two French club dates back to back — Hangar DS in Bordeaux on Friday 13 November and Studio Saglio in Strasbourg on Saturday 14 November. The run finishes on Saturday 19 December at the Parc des Expositions Paris Nord in Villepinte, an exhibition-hall booking of a completely different order to the rooms that precede it.

The shape of that list says something about where the act sits. Five of the six are club-scale rooms holding a few hundred to a couple of thousand, which is where a masked duo with eighteen tracks of their own material can carry a full headline slot; the Villepinte date is the festival-scale exception.