Why January 2026 Mattered
The first month of 2026 set the tone for a release-dense year. Paul van Dyk and Ciaran McAuley delivered "When I Found You" on Black Hole at month's end, the kind of tech-trance reunion that Pure Trance and Subculture audiences immediately played out. The January 23 Beatport release wave brought multiple headline cuts at once across Armada, Vicious Circle, and Saint Vaast. And Beatport's Best New Trance (R/D/H) chart continued to surface the slower, raw-trance material that has driven much of the genre's 2025-2026 audience expansion.
Tech-Trance Headliner: Paul van Dyk & Ciaran McAuley
"When I Found You" (Black Hole Recordings, January 23 2026) is the kind of tech-trance reunion that Paul van Dyk's late-career catalogue has been quietly stacking up. The collaboration reunites the pair after their first joint outing, "Someone Like You", from van Dyk's This World Is Ours album. Ciaran McAuley's emotive touch fuses with van Dyk's floor-focused architecture; the track has slotted cleanly into Subculture and ASOT mainstage rotation since release, and also appears on McAuley's February 6 album Finding Me on Black Hole.
Mainstage Picks Worth Catching
Three more January mainstage releases that earned heavy play, all landing in the January 23 Beatport wave. Paul Glazby's "Kick It 2025" (Vicious Circle Recordings, 2026-01-23, 150 BPM) sits squarely in the modern hard-trance revival lane that the Sneijder profile in the Artists section treats in detail — fast, loud, and deliberately unfashionable in the most rewarding way. Olav Basoski, Sil and Entasia's "Windows" (Armada Music, 140 BPM) crosses Olav Basoski's house DNA into the trance R/D/H register without losing the propulsion. And Vhyce's "AcidSeq2" (Saint Vaast Recordings, 130 BPM) brought the Berlin acid-trance scene into the month's most-played short list.
R/D/H and Lower-Tempo Picks
The Raw / Deep / Hypnotic side of the genre delivered two January cuts worth attention. Hoopoe's "Aryaduta (Bam Jerapah Remix)" (Hedjog Records) updates the original with the kind of melodic-techno crossover that Mind Against and the Afterlife scene have made central to 2026 trance audiences. Keistep's "Last Mantra" (Celestial Records) is the more contemplative of the picks, with extended pad work that rewards full-track listening rather than excerpting. Both sit at the lower-BPM end of what counts as trance in 2026 — an expansion of the genre boundary that the spirituality-of-trance essay in this catalogue treats at length.
What We're Watching for February
The big February release on the calendar at month-end was already announced: Armin van Buuren's "Always You" with Richard Durand and Dicosis, the official A State of Trance 2026 ELEVATION Anthem timed for the 25-year ASOT festival editions in Rotterdam (February 27-28 at Ahoy). Beyond that, the FSOE remix-pack release of Aly & Fila feat. Jwaydan's "We Control The Sunlight" (Darren Porter and Fuenka remixes, Jan 30) was already pushing into February rotation. The first month of 2026 looks like the start of a more release-dense year than 2024 or 2025 produced — which, for committed trance listeners, is exactly the year-opening signal worth wanting.
A Listener's Note — January Listening Notes
January is a quiet listening month. The post-holiday slump is real, the week settles back into rhythm slowly, and the year-opening Beatport release waves arrive into a calendar that is still half on winter pace. The Paul van Dyk & Ciaran McAuley release at month-end was the cut I noticed first inside the weekly listening — it landed into a Friday A State of Trance episode and stayed in rotation through the weekend, before it had earned the broader positions described above.
The other thing to flag honestly: I am still learning to hear the Raw / Deep / Hypnotic side of the genre. Hoopoe and Keistep are the kind of lower-BPM material the article above treats as established. From the listener side it is newer than that — still working out where the boundary sits, and which of these releases reward attention versus which are simply slower. January 2026 was a month for giving the R/D/H wing more attention than usual, and the article above benefits from that experiment more than from any settled view.