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, February 26, 138 BPM, 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 without recording together at this scale, and Dicosis' vocal performance is among the year's most distinctive — direct, harmonically open, and built around the kind of long-form breakdown that the festival's 25-year arc demanded. The track will continue to play across Armin's 2026 sets and most likely close many of them.
The Aly & Fila / Jwaydan Reunion
"We Control The Sunlight" (Aly & Fila feat. Jwaydan, FSOE, February 2026) reactivated one of the genre's most loved early-2010s vocal collaborations. The original release was accompanied by Darren Porter and Fuenka remixes that pushed the track in different directions: Porter into the harder Pure Trance / 138 register, Fuenka into the slower melodic-progressive crossover space. Together the three versions allowed FSOE to deploy the track across multiple set contexts, and it spent the back half of February in rotation across ASOT, Group Therapy, and FSOE radio.
Mainstage Picks From the ASOT 2026 Compilation
Several tracks visible across the ASOT 2026 compilation tracklist sat in heavy February rotation. Mark Sixma's "Bring The Fire" landed in the compilation's Energy mix and operates as the kind of peak-time festival anthem that rewards stadium-scale production. Ronski Speed's "Without You" with the Allen Watts remix bridged the German vocal-trance lineage with the modern Pure Trance / 138 sound — a pairing that the women-in-trance-producers essay would treat as canonical. And David Forbes and Sue McLaren's "Satellite" continued the Black Hole / FSOE vocal-trance tradition that the genre's 2010s gold-rush established.
Progressive and R/D/H Picks
Beyond the headline mainstage activity, two progressive-leaning February cuts deserve mention. ReOrder pres. Crowd+Ctrl's "Move To The Rhythm" (Armada / ASOT) sat at the harder end of the progressive-tech crossover and got placement on multiple ASOT 2026 episodes. Farius' "Elements" (Armada / Anjunabeats) pushed deeper into the Andrew Bayer-adjacent melodic-techno register that the late-2020s Anjuna ecosystem has been refining. Both rewarded full-track attention rather than the peak-time-only listening that the rest of the month's mainstage material defaulted to.
The 25-Year Echo
February 2026 will be remembered as a 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.