It’s not exactly news when DJs post photos of themselves to Instagram, but when Mau P did so on Jan. 5, the carousel didn’t just include shots of the Dutch dance producer’s glam lifestyle and naturally looksmaxxed face.

“In 2026 I will give the world an album, a label, a clothing line,” declared a note rather unceremoniously tucked between a photo of the artist staring into the camera, his recently bleached blonde hair glistening, and another of him walking onstage, party cup in hand. The proclamation — which one dance music blog would soon say “sent shock waves through the dance music community” — was ambitious, to say the least. And no one on his team knew he was posting it.

“I just wanted to put it online so people would hold me accountable for it,” Mau says over sushi rolls at a dimly lit Downtown Los Angeles restaurant in mid-January, the week after sharing his plans with the world. “Now, I have to do it.”

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Mau’s nonchalant approach to major announcements could scan as amateurish in an industry where marketing strategies are more typically timed to the minute and treated like state secrets. But for the 29-year-old producer — an omnipresent figure in the global dance scene since his viral 2022 debut single, “Drugs From Amsterdam” — following his instincts and trusting his inner circle have yielded spectacular success. This includes but is not limited to hundreds of millions of streams, massive headlining shows and the brown suede Prada tote bag he carries with him today that retails for more than my rent.

“My whole career has been like that,” he says. “People might think there’s a big organization behind it, but it’s just friends and people I work really well with, and we’re all just figuring it out.”

In 2025, “just figuring it out” involved saying yes to as many shows as he could physically play. The run included key dance festivals like EDC, Ultra, Portola, Elements, the Netherlands’ Awakenings and splashy all-genre events like Lollapalooza and Coachella, where he played a pair of packed shows that he calls “the biggest thing that happened last year,” given that so many people around the world saw him perform on the festival’s livestream. Happening during the hallowed Saturday-night time slot, the show turned the Sahara tent into a loose, sweaty, properly ravey party for the roughly 50,000 people congregated inside.

“That was honestly also just put together by me and my friends,” he says of the Coachella shows. “The guy who made the stage production is so young, and we’d just started working with him. It was him, me and one of my best friends sitting in an office, acting like we had it all figured out.”

Graeme Studio Archive shirt and jacket, AGOLDE jeans, Taiga Takahashi belt, Universal Optical eyewear from RetroSpecs LA. Joelle Grace Taylor

Meanwhile, every Wednesday from August to October, he was in Ibiza for his debut island residency at the clubbing institution Pacha, which had enough faith in Mau P’s appeal to put posters of his face on the sides of local buses. He equates the residency to intensive training, saying that by season’s end “I was like, ‘I’ve got it now. I really know how to control the room.’ ” (He’ll return to Pacha for round two this summer.) In October, 37,900 people saw him play a pair of headlining shows at Los Angeles State Historic Park that together grossed $3.1 million, according to Billboard Boxscore.

So it’s understandable that he hasn’t quite had time to refine his three big projects for 2026. The label? A work in progress. The fashion line? “I haven’t started on that yet.” The album? “It’s still very rough, but I sort of know what to do.

“These are all things I’ve been thinking about for at least two or three years,” he adds. “So I’ve been waiting to actually start doing them.”

Given how seamless he’s made his accomplishments thus far look, it seems likely he’ll pull off this hat trick of projects on his specified timeline — and as big as he already is, they might make him even bigger.

Before he was Mau P, he was Maurits Westveen, born into a musical family in Amsterdam. His mother is a singer, and his father was a music teacher, conductor and session musician who could play two saxophones at the same time; the pair of saxes tattooed on Mau’s left forearm are a tribute to his dad, Gerbrand Westveen, who died in 2018. When he’s not working on the road, Mau makes music at the Amsterdam studio where Gerbrand used to work, a place he calls “one of those hippie, old-leather-couch-and-rug kind of spots.”

He released “Formula,” his first single as Maurice West — a play on his birth name, and the moniker he made dance music under for eight years before adopting his current name — in 2014. Over the next half decade, he officially remixed titans like Tiësto and KSHMR and collaborated with Hardwell, finding traction with big room EDM. After his 4 p.m. slot at Ultra Music Festival 2018, a Reddit user called him “easily the most underrated artist in the scene.” The observation was prescient. Seven years later, in March 2025, he closed one of the Miami dance megafest’s biggest stages during a b2b2b2b set alongside dance heroes Solomun, Four Tet and Chloé Caillet, but with both a distinctly different style of dance music and a new name.

“I always thought I had to do stuff in the traditional way the other big guys did it in order to become big,” he says. “For press pictures, I thought I needed a really good creative director to make this whole concept for me, or that I needed a lot of money to invest, or that I needed the best team. But I noticed that after so many years of not succeeding, you just sort of have to do it yourself. And it works because it makes things more real to people, because they understand it comes from me.”

Vintage t-shirt, JW Anderson pants. Joelle Grace Taylor

The final Maurice West single, the catchy but largely bland big room track “Gasoline,” came out in July 2022. Less than a month later, a freshly launched @maup Instagram account posted a teaser of a dark, bouncy tech house track, with vocals declaring, “Off my face don’t know where I am, ’cause I got my drugs from Amsterdam.”

“I should probably release this one,” read the caption.

“Drugs From Amsterdam” came out three weeks later on Repopulate Mars, the label founded by producer Lee Foss. (The imprint had also recently released a few of the first tracks by another dance world upstart-turned-superstar, John Summit, whose Experts Only label later released tracks by Mau P.)

With his rebrand, Mau ditched the big room style that by 2022 felt like a relic of a bygone era. “Drugs From Amsterdam,” which has reached nearly 300 million global streams, according to Luminate, helped the tech house genre skyrocket past EDM in popularity in the United States, further solidifying not just a new sound but a new generation of star producers. “When I changed my artist name and released that song,” Mau says, “everything started to click.”

The track also captured Mau’s preferred way of working: with day ones he knows and trusts, even if they’re not the flashiest collaborators. His team now includes co-managers Julius Leuftink, who Mau has been friends with since they were both 15, and Halil Cakar of The Replay Group; CAA’s Roger Semaan; producer Jack Fayad; videographer Tommy Reeink; and stylist Blake Hardy. “We all know each other really well, so we know how to work without any static,” he says.

Among them is longtime collaborator Robert Pronk, who Mau met during a 2020 writing session arranged by his publisher. “Drugs From Amsterdam” was the first time they struck gold. A sort of secret weapon, Pronk “doesn’t know anything about dance music,” Mau says. “He’s in his late 30s. He has three kids and teaches at a technical school. He absolutely does not know how to do social; he’ll take a screenshot of my post or screen record my stories in s–tty quality, and that’s his promo for this song.

“The nice thing,” he continues, “is that people might not want the spotlight, but I’ll still give it to them. When people are great at what they do, they deserve the credit.”

Joelle Grace Taylor

Mau credits Pronk — who’s listed as a ­composer and producer on most of Mau’s hits, including “Tesla,” “Like I Like It,” “Merther” and “Gimme That Bounce” — with helping instill his dance productions with more traditional songwriting and says he’s “very involved” with the album. As a whole, Mau’s music jettisons anthemic tendencies, instead staying in a sexy, groovy, tongue-in-cheek wheelhouse that leans hard into party culture. (“Yo, I just popped a Tesla, ain’t no need to charge” states 2025’s “Tesla,” which references the famous ecstasy pills stamped with Tesla logos and pulses with the kind of bump-and-grind sexuality one might feel after taking one.) While a lot of dance music takes itself so seriously that it feels claustrophobic, Mau’s work has a swaggering self-awareness and sense of humor.

The trick, he says, is giving each song what he calls a “middle finger” moment. It’s “a certain boundary-pushing element that could throw people off a bit,” he says. For example, his 2023 track “Dress Code” flips the finger when the wailing gospel vocal that rises during its chorus is cut off by the song’s vocalist going “shhh, shut up” before the track proceeds. And Pronk, he says, “really understands the middle finger. We’re always both looking for the ‘f–k you’ in a song.”

This signature has helped Mau generate 683.6 million official global on-demand streams, according to Luminate, a number that’s even more impressive when considering that his entire catalog contains just 14 original tracks, along with official edits of songs by Armand van Helden, Calvin Harris and Swedish House Mafia.

While he can make music quickly and says he could increase his output if he wanted, “I put a lot of pressure on myself and I want to have big moments. Not for the fame, but for the sake of having something very valuable. That’s why I don’t make a lot of songs.”

Translating a style he himself calls “sexy and intimate” into an album will take time, but a slower speed may ultimately benefit the final product as he tries to “find a way modern-day dance music more timeless. Especially in tech house, there’s so many songs that get made, get played for a little while and then we forgot about them.”

He foresees the album having 10 or 12 songs and is already playing out three tracks likely to land on the project. (None of his previously released music will be on the album.) His team has helped him carve out weeks off the road (time he feels he earned by playing so many shows last year) to make music back in Amsterdam.

While he’s currently working on a track with Offset and hip-hop producer Murda Beatz that’s likely to come out in the next few months, the only person he really invites over to his studio is Pronk. Here, he imagines creating a checklist for each track and “systematically going at it,” hoping to eventually emerge with an album “you can listen to from front to back. I want it to be like Radiohead, but for dance music.

“I’m still figuring it out,” he says, “but that’s why I want to do it, because I’ve never done it before.”

Vintage t-shirt, Cartier watch, Chanella van Bemmel for TROPHY BY GASSAN bracelet and earrings. Joelle Grace Taylor

He speculates that this time at home will also give him space to think about his clothing line, which has nothing to do with standard issue merchandise. “There are so many people already making stuff with my logo and just selling it on Etsy or whatever and making money. I’m like, ‘Awesome.’ ” (He’s not being sarcastic — he’s grateful for the free marketing. Among other items, unlicensed baby doll tanks stating “I