Psytrance in 2026: Vini Vici Leads a Scene 1,014 DJs Deep

Psytrance has never needed the mainstream's permission. It has its own festivals, its own labels, its own hour of the night, and a fan base that votes like it means it. On DJ Radar right now the genre family counts 1,014 DJs on the board, and the top of that list is remarkably stable in its identity: hard-hitting, melodic, and built for sunrise.

Vini Vici sits at number one with a credit score of 914 and 11,085 votes, the only act in this top eight to clear the 900 mark. The streaming footprint matches the rank: 3,097,952 Spotify monthly listeners, 627,534 Spotify followers and 732,966 Instagram followers. Whatever else is happening in the scene, Vini Vici is its commercial centre of gravity today.

Astrix holds second on 879 with 7,935 votes. The profile is strong across the board, including 562,816 Spotify followers, 481,389 SoundCloud followers and 1,380,000 YouTube subscribers. Few psytrance names carry this much weight on so many platforms at once.

Third and fourth are effectively a dead heat. Infected Mushroom scores 871 on 7,199 votes, and Neelix scores 870 on 7,210 votes, a single point apart. Infected Mushroom's reach is unusually deep in the long tail of listening: 834,390 Spotify followers and 1,042,022 Last.fm listeners. Neelix, the highest-ranked German act here, counters with 792,636 Spotify monthly listeners and 366,484 SoundCloud followers.

Mandragora completes the top five on 862 with 7,558 votes, the Mexican producer's 812,233 Spotify monthly listeners and 801,000 YouTube subscribers confirming a genuinely global audience rather than a regional one. Bliss, from Israel, follows on 859 with 6,541 votes and 380,703 Last.fm listeners.

The board closes with a tie. Liquid Soul of Switzerland and Protoculture of South Africa both score 847. Liquid Soul takes seventh with 7,556 votes against Protoculture's 6,892, backed by 466,375 Spotify monthly listeners. Protoculture's numbers are smaller, with 178,364 monthly listeners, but a seat in the top eight of a 1,014-strong board is not an accident.

Four of the eight leaders are from Israel: Vini Vici, Astrix, Infected Mushroom and Bliss. No other country places more than one act. Psytrance has long been treated as a global tribe, and the voting here agrees, with Germany, Mexico, Switzerland and South Africa all represented. But the gravitational pull of the Israeli scene on the top of the chart is impossible to ignore.

Psytrance is trance stripped of its radio instincts and rebuilt for the dancefloor at full stretch. The engine is a relentless rolling bassline locked to a four-to-the-floor kick, usually faster than mainstream trance and far more insistent. On top sits the genre's signature palette: acidic, squelching lead lines, metallic percussion, swirling effects and long, patient builds that reward dancers who stay for the whole arc.

The modern leaders split that template in two directions. The full-on and progressive strands prize big melodic breakdowns and festival-scale drops, which is where much of the top of this board lives. The darker and more psychedelic end leans on texture, tension and sound design over hooks. Both share the same DNA: the groove never stops, the bass does the talking, and the peak is earned rather than announced.

The spread from first to eighth is 67 points, so this is not a scene in flux so much as one with a clear leader and a dense, competitive pack beneath. Vini Vici is out in front, Astrix is the obvious chaser, and the one-point gap between Infected Mushroom and Neelix is the race worth watching when the next votes land.