STVW

A big-room producer who kept going back to his teenage records

STVW — pronounced "Steve W" — is Steve Witzlsperger, a producer and DJ based in Munich. He began putting big-room tracks on SoundCloud in 2015, and the bootlegs he made in that period were what got the attention of established dance acts. The two halves of his listening were already there and unreconciled: blink-182, Sum 41, Green Day, Simple Plan and My Chemical Romance as a teenager, then W&W, Hardwell and Blasterjaxx once he started making tracks himself.

His first official release, "Lean Back", came out on Hardwell's Revealed Recordings in 2018. The relationship that mattered more was with Rave Culture, W&W's label, which he has described as the first to see what he was aiming at: "Heartbreak" and "Time Capsule" with AXMO both landed there in 2021. Spinnin' Records and Virgin EMI followed, so by the early 2020s he had the standard credentials of a working festival producer.

His own account of the pivot is undramatic. As a teenager he fell for emo and pop-punk, later got into EDM, and at some point simply began blending the two. What is unusual is that he kept going until the blend needed a name of its own.

Soulmate, and the record that decided it

The commercial proof arrived in 2022 with "Soulmate", made with Ben Nicky, which sat at number one on Beatport's hard dance chart for several weeks. That is also the record German reference sources mark as the point where the rock element stopped being a garnish and became the brief. From 2023 onward the releases were increasingly reworks of rock songs he grew up with — Sum 41, Green Day, blink-182 — alongside collaborations with Timmy Trumpet and Breathe Carolina.

He has also worked as a producer for other people's hits rather than only his own: he produced "Kamikaze" for Tream and Finch, which reached number 29 in the German singles chart in 2024.

The reworks travelled fastest on short video. His version of Sum 41's "Still Waiting" passed two million views on Reels and TikTok within days of being posted, which is the mechanism that turned a production habit into an identifiable project. The technical problem he talks about is a specific one — distorted guitars and modern dance low-end occupy overlapping space, so the guitars have to be kept out of the bottom of the mix for the drop to still hit like a dance record.

Permission from the bands

The thing that separates Punk Rave from the mashup economy around it is paperwork. Rather than leaving the reworks as unreleasable bootlegs, STVW has gone and got official clearance to release cover versions, with blink-182, Simple Plan, Boys Like Girls and All Time Low among the acts who signed off; Sum 41 and Good Charlotte have shared his versions.

The clearest example is "All The Small Things", an official blink-182 cover made with Timmy Trumpet and released in January 2025. In the same year he remixed "Elevator Operator" for Electric Bassboy — the alter ego of Electric Callboy, the German band who have made the same pop-punk-to-dance crossing from the other direction — and that remix was premiered live at Rock am Ring and Rock im Park.

The most recent addition is a Punk Rave version of All Time Low's "Dear Maria, Count Me In", now sitting at the front of the music section on his own site and listed as a 2026 release. He has named further collaborations in progress with Kellin Quinn of Sleeping With Sirens, 408 and Boys Like Girls, which points at the next step: original songs with singers on them rather than covers of songs that already had one.

Autumn 2026: the largest run so far

The Punk Rave Europe Tour is the reason to pay attention this month. It opens in Munich on 2 October 2026 and runs Im Wizemann in Stuttgart on 3 October, Das Bett in Frankfurt on 7 October, Die Kantine in Cologne on 8 October, the Markthalle in Hamburg on 9 October, Hole 44 in Berlin on 10 October and the Felsenkeller in Leipzig on 11 October. It then widens: John Dee in Oslo on 15 October, Razzmatazz 3 in Barcelona on 16 October, the Dynamo in Zürich on 22 October and La Machine du Moulin Rouge in Paris on 23 October.

The British leg lands at the end of the month — SWG3's Warehouse in Glasgow on 28 October, Rebellion in Manchester on 29 October, O2 Institute2 in Birmingham on 30 October and The Dome in London on Halloween, promoted by Live Nation. After that come Vienna on 11 November and Fuchs2 in Prague on 14 November, with a North American date at Fortune Sound Club in Vancouver on 3 December. Eighteen shows are currently listed across seven countries, and German press covering the announcement described the eight-date German, Austrian and Swiss stretch as his biggest European tour to date.

Alongside the headline run he remains a festival booking in the German dance circuit, with Parookaville and World Club Dome among his regular appearances and Bootshaus in Cologne among the clubs. Asia and Australia have both featured in his touring, and Australian dates were flagged as part of the plan when the tour was first discussed in October 2025.

A rave with a punk-rock band

The live format is the argument. Rather than playing the reworks from a DJ booth, STVW performs with an electric guitar and a second musician, drummer Martin, behind a kit. His own description is the useful one: a rave with a punk-rock band, or a band without a singer, since the vocals in the tracks carry the top line while the guitar and drums put the performance back into music that was assembled in a studio.

He reports that the response from promoters and the pop-punk community has been the thing that made the tour viable, and the routing supports that — these are club-scale rooms in fifteen-odd cities rather than a handful of big halls, which is what a format still proving itself gets booked into. The billing on the London listing states that the 2025 run sold out across several countries, though that is promoter copy rather than an independent count.