Steve Aoki

I have his poster on my wall. That’s the whole story right there. Steve Aoki’s this American club DJ, born in Miami, raised in California, and yeah, his sister’s worth worshipping, but what destroyed me was Pillowface and His Airplane Chronicles—finally downloaded it last year and couldn’t stop spinning it. He took the songs I actually cared about, the ones living in my head—Justice’s Happen, Uffie, Peaches, Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand—and remixed them into these devastating, gorgeous, absolutely filthy bangers. It’s like he’d somehow read my mind and figured out exactly what I needed: something to pull my heart out of indie-depression hell and make it actually feel something. Dense, gleaming club tracks that just hit right. Thinking about it gets me sweating—that deep club-floor sweat, the kind you get at 4 AM with a hundred bodies around you—and I need to sit with ice water.