ZHU

The electronic music artist ZHU (Steven Zhu) is one of a handful of performers and songwriters
in the genre who continue to push boundaries in many forms of art beyond club and music
festival culture. Creating concepts and atmospheric experiences for fans, both sonically and in
real life, ZHU continues to demonstrate a fearless pursuit to evolve today’s music through his
artistic vision.
Beyond being a DJ and producer, many fans associate ZHU with being a live performer, singer
and instrumentalist. He delivers indelible live shows and sets using his keen production ability,
voice, sleek synth melodies, billowing basslines, and undeniable hooks to create a hypnotic
experience that is all-at-once sultry and sinister. On his latest project BLACK MIDAS, he returns
to his roots, creating an album of compelling dancefloor tracks set for release April 24, 2026.
For songs, ZHU channeled a 2025 cross country journey in a Mercedes Sprinter Van after he was
displaced by the Southern California Palisades wildfire. In the fire, his land burned and
neighborhood was decimated yet his house and studio structures were spared, although
uninhabitable from smoke damage. He spent the entire next year rebuilding everything he had
known, including his music. With no home base or studio, he produced music on the road
accessing different parts of the country and artists he approached online to create his most
recent album and accompanying nightlife warehouse concept, BLACKLIZT. It was a true return to
his original dance club roots that started, like so many DJs and producers, in his teenage
bedroom.
“In the beginning my music was intended for the dancefloor, and was the clubby part of my
sound. For me, BLACK MIDAS is a return to why I first made music,” he explains. “Obviously, I've
experimented and gone into different genres throughout my career, but I thought it was
important for my new fans, my contemporaries, and also the new dance community, to
understand that I came from that world from the beginning and am still a part of it. That’s why I
made this record. What I'm doing now speaks to my core fans, but also to the core dance fans of
today.”
ZHU first made his presence known to mainstream music fans when his 2014 single,“Faded” was
nominated for Best Dance Recording at the 2015 GRAMMY® Awards. His 2016 genre-blurring
debut album GENERATIONWHY followed, with the hit single “In The Morning.” The artist’s rise
to prominence happened swiftly and steadily. ZHU continued to evolve with subsequent
projects, tours and collaborations including his releases RINGOS DESERT (2018), DREAMLAND
2021 (2021), Musical Chairs Mixtape (Vol. 1) (2022), and THE DAYS BEFORE GRACE EP (2023).
For his last 2024 album and tour GRACE he also produced the “making of...” documentary, 24
Hours of Grace, recorded in San Francisco’s grand Grace Cathedral. The film demonstrated his
ability to express a narrative across mediums.

For BLACK MIDAS, ZHU transports listeners into a different world by creating tracks around late
night narratives through sounds, emotions, words and energy he encountered on his van
journey. The productions range from deep house to melodic techno and feature collaborations
with an array of underground and emerging artists.
“Rebuilding is actually a theme on this particular record,” ZHU adds. “The way that I rebuilt was
to keep moving, and to keep the pace and not really dive too much into the cerebral parts of the
process. Instead, allowing the physical parts, which is the movement and dancing to lead and
keep my mind moving forward. Obviously, one aspect was in the club (with the BLACKLIZT
parties) and the other was on the road. I was making songs very fast, and if it didn't feel good in
the first or second demo, I just kept moving on.”
Because ZHU only had his laptop and gear in the van, everything else became an inspiration. “I
wrote what I felt really quickly. Everywhere we stopped, we had a camera, some minimal gear,
laptops, and speakers. I've never really driven across these places or played the music I've made
in real time. I simply made the music in the locations we went through. It was an interesting and
inspiring way to create it. Usually you're in the studio trying to envision what something might
feel like, but this was actually real life.”
There were parallels in the way he was rebuilding his house, and also rebuilding this part of his
musical evolution by simplifying everything. “I went back into a very electronic dancefloor...
including sounds, the live experience, and all these different places we took the BLACKLIZT
parties. It really stripped down to being very minimal and was about movement, energy and
people.”
ZHU doesn’t see the BLACKLIZT parties as a tour. “We just picked a few places where people
came and were asked to wear black to keep everything very unified. When you look around,
and everybody is wearing the same thing, there's a sense of unity to it. I think it allowed people
to really let go over the set’s three hours and focus on the music.”
Parties were held from Brooklyn Storehouse in New York to the Volkswagen Arena in Istanbul,
Turkey. “There are a lot of fans in Turkey who have been listening for a long time but we never
really went until recently. And all of a sudden, it exploded! It was the same thing in Berlin and
London where early on I wasn't able to go, especially with the band. With those fans, the decks
are their language, as opposed to in the US where we grew up with bands, singers and live
performers. The culture is just different. So this album is also about bringing different cultures
together. Growing up in America, you listen to music, lyrics and melodies so you like songs. You
discover the artist, then maybe the scene or the culture. Over there, you discover the scene,
then the artist, and maybe there's a song you love. So the BLACKLIZT parties became about the
music, not about what somebody was wearing or the bottle service or whatever else.”
If you know ZHU, the color black is a recurring theme in his sets, in his music and his fashion line
NightDay Collection. Today, it figures prominently in the BLACK MIDAS story, one he hopes will
become a trilogy. “I want to give black an attitude that hasn’t been achieved in the last decade.

Like a sexy black, a fun black, but also, a celebratory black. I think everybody associates black
with emo, punk, and rock. In my music, I want it to be transformed into this more elegant, sleek,
couture sense. It's tactical, it's seductive, it's elusive. And it's primal. I think those are the things
that I'm bringing to the color that no one else is really bringing through music.”
Because 2025 was a year of extremes for the artist, in order to move forward, he had to simply
roll with it and embrace things out of his control. “I actually have enjoyed living in the
extremes,” he admits. “I've been very mindful of that. So the analogy is when somebody asks
what my favorite food is, I say it’s the food that takes the least steps to go from the ingredients
to my mouth. If I'm going to gorge on something that's all butter and sugar, I'd rather be in New
Orleans to get the most soul-drenched food possible. But if I'm eating something healthy, I don't
want any additives or anything. So for music, I'm going to make music for dancing and
everybody better be dancing. If I'm making music for listening, I'd better make sure everybody's
ears are up. I don't really want to do two things at the same time. I’d rather do them in
sequence where people can really have one thing to focus on at a time. It’s my current
philosophy that’s reflected in this album. Where ZHU is now, is anywhere but in the middle.”

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