Sickmode

A name chosen for the state he was in

The act now billed as Sickmode began as half of Malice, a raw hardstyle duo responsible for 'Aggressive Acts' and 'Watch Your Back'. The split was made public through Gearbox's 10 Years documentary, and the solo project launched in 2019. Insomniac's artist profile notes he is Italian, self-taught, and came up without a studio pedigree behind him.

The new name was not a branding exercise. Speaking to Hardnews around the launch, he traced it to the move from Italy to the Netherlands and what followed: the isolation, the language, the grind of trying to establish himself in a scene whose centre of gravity sits in the Dutch south. His words were that all of it together resulted in him becoming very mentally sick. Production became the mechanism for getting through it, sometimes several tracks in a day.

That output rate is the single most consistent fact about him. To have enough material for his first Gearbox X performance as a solo artist, he produced 26 tracks in three weeks, and described the process afterwards as extremely exhausting. Nothing in the years since suggests the pace has slackened; it has simply been pointed at a release schedule rather than a deadline.

The anthem, and the records that stuck

His first commissioned anthem arrived quickly. 'Unleash Your Aggression' was written for Suppression XTRA RAW and released on 7 December 2019. His brief to himself was narrow and practical — stay inside the event's theme for that year, and build something a crowd could sing back in unison rather than simply absorb. The same interview carried his line about continuing to try to make something new, which has since read as a statement of method.

The records that travelled furthest afterwards were blunter. 'Klaplongen' and 'TOO HOT' are the two most often named in artist listings, and the annual 'Hey X' mini-album series became the vehicle for whatever he had been experimenting with that year rather than a conventional album cycle. He also announced an album at the time of the Suppression anthem, led by a track called 'No Limits', with the stated aim of complete freedom across genres while keeping his own sound recognisable.

The collaborative catalogue is wider than the solo one. 'WELCOME TO THE GANG' volumes one and two and 'CLUB BANGER' were made with Rooler, and that partnership became the hinge for everything that followed on the business side.

Aggressive Records and the AR Gang

By 2023 he was being described in the Dutch hardstyle press as the owner of Aggressive Records, with a surrounding collective referred to as the AR Gang. The label is the thing that separates him from contemporaries of similar streaming size: it gives him a release pipeline he controls and an event brand to hang shows on.

Welcome To The Gang moved from a club night into a full-scale day event. Hardnews reported on 21 November 2023 that Rooler and Sickmode would take it to Breepark in Breda on 16 March 2024 for 13,000 visitors, with the line-up deliberately withheld — the organisers' answer on when it would be published was never, maybe, some day. The pitch was back-to-back sets, surprises, and the pair's own catalogue, 'Hammertime', 'TOO HOT' and 'CLUB BANGER' among the tracks named in advance.

The other experiment was geographic. In December 2023 he ran eleven club dates across Germany under one concept, with new music, edits made specifically for German floors and dedicated visuals: Munich on 1 December, Mannheim on the 2nd, Celle on the 8th, Wildeshausen on the 15th, Trittau on the 16th, Göttingen on the 22nd, Zwickau on the 23rd, Ihlpohl on Boxing Day and Schüttorf on the 29th. His framing was that he had been working on it for months and wanted the full AR Gang package in rooms small enough to feel it.

Mish, Rave Love, and the second anthem

The partnership with Mish started as a release rather than a live act: the RAVE LOVE EP in August 2022, with the pair forming a joint live show around eighteen months later. Songkick's data puts Mish as by far his most frequent stage partner, at 50 shared appearances, ahead of Aversion and Riot Shift.

That duo took the REBiRTH Festival 2024 anthem, 'Discover The Mayhem', released on 28 March 2024 and debuted on 16 March at Welcome To The Gang in front of a reported 10,000 people. Their reading of the festival's Mayhem theme was something unusual, over the top and aggressive, and the structure was built around the crowd shouting the title before each of the first two drops, which escalate into a final climax. They played the anthem show on the Saturday of the festival in Haaren, in a half-hour slot from 20:45, and said in advance that it would lean on energy and new edits rather than anything delicate. Both artists admitted they were surprised to be asked at all, given how hard their material sits relative to the festival's usual anthem commissions.

2026: one single roughly every five weeks

The current period has been defined by release volume rather than a flagship album. Release listings for his Spotify catalogue show 'WHAT THA HELLY (SOMEONE CALL THE AMBULANCE)' with Krowdexx on 16 October 2025 and 'DIRTY BEAT' on 13 November 2025, then an almost unbroken 2026 run: 'YEAH' with Krowdexx on 26 February, 'PILLS, DRUGS AND MF KICKROLLS' featuring Mutilator on 19 March, 'SORRY MAMA' on 4 June, 'KISS KISS' with GPF and Dr Donk on 18 June, 'OUR LIFE' with Krowdexx and Teal on 16 July, 'BACK TO DUTY' on 30 July, 'OGSHIII' on 13 August and 'MAKE ME FEEL' featuring Odium on 27 August.

The titles tell their own story about where his sound has gone. 'OGSHIII' carries the parenthetical '20 min with 2019 folder eeeeeasyyyy' — a producer making a joke out of rifling through seven-year-old project files and finishing something in twenty minutes. The collaborator list, meanwhile, has widened from the raw hardstyle core into uptempo and donk, which matches how his sets are now catalogued: hardstyle, rawstyle and uptempo hardcore in the same booking.

Nothing in the 2026 output has been framed as the long-promised freeform album. The mini-album habit and the single-a-month cadence appear to have absorbed that ambition instead.

Standing and the road into 2027

Songkick counts 13 shows booked across 2026 and 32,442 people tracking him for alerts, with his heaviest historical concentration in the Dutch club circuit — Tilburg eight times, Eindhoven seven, Amsterdam six. That is the base; the growth is elsewhere.

The autumn run went to Australia. He played The Arena at Knockout Outdoor at Sydney Showground on 3 October 2026, then Hindley St Music Hall in Adelaide on 24 October and 170 Russell in Melbourne on 25 October. After that come Hallowfest in Madrid over 31 October and 1 November, Electric Daisy Carnival in Phuket across 18 to 20 December, and Box Park in Liverpool on 30 January 2027. For an artist whose early career was a move of a few hundred miles from Italy to the Netherlands, the booking map is now effectively global, and the Australian hard dance circuit has become a reliable second home.