A Month Anchored to ASOT 25
February 2026 was structurally different from any other month in the year because of A State of Trance 25 — the two-night festival edition at Ahoy Rotterdam on February 27 and 28 marking 25 years since the radio show launched in 2001. Every major Armada release of the month was timed to land into ASOT episodes leading into the festival; every label aligned with the show pushed material into rotation; and the entire trance editorial calendar bent around the event in a way that the genre has not seen since the original ASOT 1000 celebrations.
The Headliner: "Always You" — ASOT 2026 ELEVATION Anthem
Armin van Buuren's "Always You" with Richard Durand and Dicosis (Armada / A State of Trance, vocal trance) was the official ASOT 2026 ELEVATION Anthem and timed for the festival weekend. The collaboration is unusually meaningful: van Buuren and Durand have been parallel ASOT figures for over a decade, and "Always You" is their first headline collaboration at this scale, joined by Danish duo Dicosis. The track is built around a piano-led breakdown and an uplifting vocal — direct, harmonically open, and built around the kind of long-form structure that the festival's 25-year arc demanded. The anthem premiered during van Buuren's ASOT-stage set at Ultra Music Festival Miami and has continued to play across his 2026 sets.
The Aly & Fila / Jwaydan Reactivation
"We Control The Sunlight" (Aly & Fila feat. Jwaydan) is one of the genre's most loved early-2010s vocal collaborations — the 2011 ASOT Tune of the Year. FSOE's remix package, Part 1, released on Jan 30 with Darren Porter and Fuenka remixes, pushed the track in different directions across February rotation: Porter into the harder Pure Trance / 138 register, Fuenka into the slower melodic-progressive crossover space. Together the two versions allowed FSOE to deploy the track across multiple set contexts, and it spent February in rotation across ASOT, Group Therapy, and FSOE radio.
Crossover and Mainstage Picks
Two February cross-label cuts that fed into the ASOT 25 weekend stand out. Joris Voorn x Ferry Corsten x Moonman's "Don't Be Afraid" (Spectrum, Feb 19) — the Voorn rework of Moonman's 1996 Sci-Fi Records classic — was the most surprising February release in the progressive-techno crossover space and later anchored the Pulse mix of the ASOT 2026 compilation. XiJaro & Pitch's "I Have Friends Everywhere" (FSOE, Feb 27) extended the duo's mid-tempo vocal-uplifting lineage and continued their partnership with the FSOE main roster, landing on the eve of the festival weekend.
The 25-Year Echo
February 2026 will be remembered as the month in which the genre's editorial centre — A State of Trance — celebrated its longest-running anniversary. The releases above are the editorial picks; the broader story is that ASOT 25 demonstrated the durability of the institution that the ASOT-25-years essay in this catalogue treats in detail. The month's music is best heard in that frame: not just as a chart of releases but as the soundtrack to the genre's most consequential anniversary moment to date.
A Listener's Note — Watching ASOT 25 Through the Stream
February 2026 was an unusual month for any listener following the genre from outside the Netherlands. The article above can describe the editorial moment of ASOT 25 with confidence, but the embodied experience of being inside the 25-year anniversary room at Ahoy is not mine to claim. The livestream is a parallel artifact, not the event itself. From the stream side, what reached was a marathon broadcast: the long set arcs, the crowd response captured on camera, the new releases premiered into the room. Plenty to follow, but a different thing.
What can be said from the listener side is that the Aly & Fila / Jwaydan reactivation hit harder than the new ELEVATION anthem. "We Control The Sunlight" is a 2011 record, which makes it pre-history for newer listeners — learned backwards through Tune of the Year retrospectives rather than as a present-tense event. Hearing the Darren Porter and Fuenka remixes arrive in 2026 was the strange experience of meeting a record already known as canon, but as a current release rather than as an archive document. That kind of layered temporal encounter is, I think, increasingly what trance listening feels like as the genre's catalogue deepens.