“Both gig and music-wise, it’s been our busiest year to date”, state the Ws, down the line from their freshly minted new studio. “We’ve been producing a lot of new W&W music, but at this time, much of it is still to be released.”
That said, the lads haven’t done badly in the already-out-there stakes this year. ‘Put Em Up’, ‘Whatcha Need’ and their Vini Vici co-production ‘Chakra’ have all been keeping their Mainstage Music imprint fuelled. Five years in and the label is honing in on its 100th release, helped on its way in 2017 by releases from Bart Claessen, TWIIG and Willem & Wardt’s own mentee, Maurice West.
There’s a small matter of the launch of NWYR (or New Year), which set W&W’s cat back amongst the trance pigeons in the spring. “We got really inspired by the ASOT stage at Ultra in 2016,” they tell DJ Mag. “We hadn’t been there or played it for four years and when we dropped by we were just blown away. We came up with the NWYR alias almost entirely so we could have a shot at playing that stage again. And that’s exactly what happened! We premiered 15 previously unheard tunes during the set, so there’s a whole lot of new material upcoming from that area too.”
