‘This S–t Is Not Normal’: Backstage With Mau P at Coachella

It’s a hot Saturday afternoon during the first weekend at Coachella 2025, and backstage Mau P arrives 30 minutes behind schedule after getting stuck in festival traffic. He’s got the de facto DJ entourage — agent, manager, content team — in tow, and after they locate his trailer in the artist compound, the Dutch producer sits on a couch outside it and smokes a cigarette, an ostensible moment of repose amid the chaos.

This is Mau’s second time playing Coachella. Last year, he was added to the bill a month before the festival as part of the lineup for the new Quasar stage, where he played b2b with Diplo. You can read the tea leaves and see that his star has only since risen, as Mau is back this year with his name in the most hallowed of set times: the Saturday 10-11 p.m. peak time party slot on the Sahara stage.

The meaning isn’t lost on the 28-year-producer, who is tall, has blessed bone structure and is wearing a t-shirt printed with an image of his dad, the late Dutch saxophone player Gerbrand Westveen, who is shown in his own moment of musical brilliance while playing two saxophones simultaneously. This image will reappear later tonight when Mau ends his set by flashing it on Sahara’s giant video screens above the words “In Honour of Gerbrand Westveen.”

One has to believe the elder Westveen would be proud of his son, and certainly Mau is approaching it all with gravitas. “I feel like I have this responsibility,” he says while sitting at the table in his dimly lit trailer, a space crowded with stacks of Coachella branded water bottles, “because I love everyone that listens to my music so much, and they put me up front, so I better live up to it.”

Still, if you’ve not yet heard of Mau P, you are forgiven. While he hasn’t quite reached the mainstream ubiquity of peers like John Summit or Dom Dolla, the producer has been making chess moves through the dance scene over the past three years, and it’s hard to overstate how impressive the producer’s growing portfolio is and how influential he’s become amongst fellow underground artists and fans. Since playing b2b2b2b with Solomun, Four Tet and Chloé Caillet at Ultra 2025, he’s even been dubbed by dance fans as one of “The Avengers.”

But if he’s sweating the pressure, he hides it well, answering questions and making casual conversation (“Do you have an accent?” he asks me. “How old are you?”) like he has all the time in the world. Meanwhile, five hours from now, he’ll play for a sea of people in an area just slightly smaller than a football field. There’s no exact count of how many people fit inside Sahara, but to the naked eye, there appears to be roughly 20,000 people here to see him, with the crowd spilling out of the tent and extending up the adjacent hillside viewing area.

Onstage, Mau’s hour-long set includes his string of hits, which along with increasingly higher profile shows like this one, cement his status as one of the moment’s essential next-gen dance producers. The crowd bumps and shimmies, altogether bucking the stereotype of stiff Coachella crowds. Mau also bumps and twirls (the cameras hone in on him while the screens flash with the words “Mau P is dancing”) as he builds a set from his own music along with his remixes of Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack” and his show-closing edit of Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place.”

Predictably, everyone goes especially hard for his 2022 breakout hit “Drugs From Amsterdam,” with the screens in tandem flashing a message at once gracious and true: “THIS IS THE SONG THAT CHANGED MY LIFE FOREVER. THANK YOU FROM THE BOTTOM OF MY HEART.”

“Drugs” indeed marked a turning point for the artist born Maurits Jan Westveen. He’d been making big room house as Maurice West since he was a teenager and in that era was just “really wanting to do what other people were already doing, which is sort of the safe option, but it worked for me for like, six years.”

Then he made the darker, woozier, tech house track, and it became a global club hit that’s aggregated 259.2 million official on-demand global streams and 39.8 million official on-demand U.S. streams, according to Luminate. He changed his artist name to Mau P (a play off his “Maupie” nickname) and everything he’s subsequently done has been “an experiment of, ‘Okay, now I have the audience because of ‘Drugs From Amsterdam, and I have the freedom to do whatever I want to do, so might as well do some crazy s–t.’”

Such crazy s–t has included “Merther,” which samples Jamaican legend Ini Kamoze and came out last year on revered U.K. house label Defected. The track demonstrates his ability to Frankenstein together styles that might not intuitively work, with the song made, he says, of “’90s rave breakbeats, combined with tech house, combined with bass that could be like, Metro Boomin, or rap,” he explains. “Then, in the structure, it just goes into banging breakbeats instead of just the house beat that was going on.” He’s also worked with hip-hop royalty including Gunna (on 2024’s “Receipts” with Diplo) and Mike Dean, who worked on 2024’s “On Again,” which was also the first song Mau put his own vocals on.

Meanwhile his official remix of Tame Impala‘s 2015 song “The Less I Know the Better” came out on Nervous Records in February, and is currently in the top spot on Dance Mix Show Airplay, giving Mau his first Billboard No. 1. Last week he released two driving singles on the Diynamic Imprint from Solomun, who Mau says “is like a dad to me. We talk for hours about life and our careers and how everything went for him, and I think he sees himself in me and that’s why he’s so protective and has always taken me in.”

Solomun’s advice for the young dance Jedi? Never change your style for anyone. In following this wisdom, Mau says his work is “combining multiple sounds and genres that people don’t necessarily think of would work. I listen to a lot of older music. My parents brought me up listening to jazz, and soul and Chaka Khan and Sade. My dad played the saxophone, so all of my knowledge of older music combines with how I see modern music and dance music.”

Releasing music across roughly ten labels has also been strategic. “I definitely chose [each label] because they all have their own community,” Mau says. “I’ve been around house and techno for so long, but I never really had a connection with [some of the] communities, so I was just trying to get everyone in and show them like, ‘Hey, I’m here.’” He’s also preparing to announce the launch of his own label.

Altogether, his approach has earned his catalog 463.6 million official on-demand global streams (through May 22), along with increasingly bigger shows that include upcoming festival bookings like Lollapalooza, Miami’s III Points, San Francisco’s Portola, his Pacha Ibiza residency and a host of European events. In November, he’ll play Colorado’s Red Rocks — a rite of passage for rising dance artists — and yesterday (May 27) he announced a headlining show at the Los Angeles State Historic Park, a venue reserved for only the biggest name DJs. It’s all a quantum leap from 2023, when Mau was first touring the U.S., playing 300-capacity clubs.

The reason for his success? His agent, CAA’s Roger Semaan, attributes the rise to Mau arriving at a moment when house was reaching new levels of popularity in the U.S., and him making music that “wasn’t copying anyone… The way he presents himself on stage and the way he controls the room is truly like no other. He is someone that loves the art of deejaying and knows his library so well that it allows him to stand out.”

Mau agrees he’s “exploded faster and bigger” in the U.S. than in Europe, saying that in his homeland, “you have to kind of win them over a bit more, and it takes a while.” As such, the States “sort of feel like another planet that I go to, and a lot of people recognize me in the streets. Then when I go back to Amsterdam, I can go grocery shopping and it’s not a problem.”

Still, DJ stardom ain’t easy. He says the hardest part is “navigating mentally, because this s–t is not normal.” He’s humble enough to say the fame he’s experienced is “a little breadcrumb of what Justin Bieber has done in his life,” and says he feels for Martin Garrix — who had a breakout hit when he was 17 and has subsequently grown up in the industry. While he’s grateful his career blew up after “my brain was fully developed,” navigating the demands “is incredibly hard… I try to be nice to everyone.”

Certainly he’s very nice — warm, funny, conversational and generous with his time. He’s also found comfort in keeping his inner circle small. “I never liked that saying, because it sounds so negative… I work with the people I know well.” To wit, he’s known his manager since they were both 16 and has also known his photographer since the days “we used to just tour with the two of us and sleep in the same bed to save money.” The rest of his team has been with him since the start of the Mau P project.

He’ll be surrounded by these trusted allies as he crosses progressively large shows off the list through the end of the year. Beyond that, he’d love to make an album — although he says the idea “is scary,” given that he’s never released anything longer than two songs.

And right now, he just doesn’t seem to have time. He’s got to get to the stage.