Tokyo's DJ MARIA. Made DJ Mag's 2026 Watchlist. Her Best New Track Came From Bangkok.

Three years ago, DJ MARIA. had never played a show outside Japan. In 2023 she got on a plane for her first European tour and came back having ticked off Bassiani and Berghain, techno's two most gatekept rooms, in the same run, then followed them with Madrid, Amsterdam and Paris. This month, DJ Mag named her one of its artists to watch for 2026. The track everyone should actually be listening to right now isn't even hers alone. It's a co-write with a producer this site already knows well: Bangkok's Sunju Hargun.

A Decade in Tokyo's Clubs, Then the Rest of the World

MARIA. is Osaka-born and Tokyo-based, and DJ Mag's own profile puts it plainly: she has spent the better part of a decade becoming an essential presence behind the decks locally before any of this international attention showed up. Her regular spots are WOMB and VENT, the two Tokyo rooms that keep producing Japan's biggest techno exports (Wata Igarashi came out of the same scene). Her sound sits somewhere between propulsive techno and old-school trance, heavy on tension and atmosphere, light on ego. "Rather than forcing my own colour onto the floor, I try to choose expressions that naturally harmonise with the space," she told DJ Mag, "and before I knew it, that approach became my own style."

That patience shows in the pacing of her career. She dropped the Acid Sunrise EP in 2022, kept a low international profile through 2023's breakout tour, and is only now, per DJ Mag, "preparing for new releases while continuing to refine her production skills." The DJ Mag write-up isn't a launch pad so much as a receipt for work already done.

The Bangkok Track

The most interesting of those new releases isn't a solo cut. In January, MARIA. remixed Sunju Hargun's 'Silverhaze' for Extans Mantra: The Final Trip, the closing chapter of Hargun's long-running series. The original was ambient and vocal-led; MARIA. rebuilt it into what Mixmag Asia called "a no-frills, hypnotic cut built for fog-filled rooms and heads-down dancers," keeping the vocal but burying it under rolling low end. Hargun, announcing the record's end, put it simply: "At a certain point I felt I had reached the creative limit of what the project needed to be."

That remix turned into an actual collaboration. On August 7, the label The Third Room released Curation 02: D.Dan, the second entry in a curator-led series where one artist picks the lineup instead of the label. D.Dan, curating this one, packed four tracks into a tight, deliberately narrow brief: himself, Rene Wise, Connor Wall, and, closing the record, an original co-write credited to Sunju Hargun & DJ MARIA. called 'Gensou'. A Bangkok producer and a Tokyo DJ whose first tour outside Japan only happened in 2023 now share a production credit on a European techno label's flagship compilation. That is not a small thing for either scene.

The Forest Parties Back Home

MARIA. isn't only touring other people's festivals. She also helps run Transcendence and Moment, the small DIY outdoor parties DJ Mag describes as part of what keeps Japan's "storied deep techno tradition" alive outside the club circuit. Transcendence's 2026 edition ran its fifth year in May at Choja no Mori in Nagano, with early bird tickets selling out before the full lineup, DJ Nobu and Paquita Gordon included, was even confirmed. It is the kind of event that never needs a headliner announcement to sell out, which tells you more about the scene MARIA. came up in than any remix credit does.

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None of this reads like a debut. It reads like someone who spent ten years building a following one WOMB night at a time, then let the rest of the world catch up on its own schedule. DJ Mag calling her an artist to watch in 2026 is true, and also a little late. The Bangkok record is the part worth actually paying attention to: it's the first sign that MARIA.'s next chapter runs through Southeast Asia as much as through Berlin or Tbilisi.

Cover photo: DJ MARIA., via Sónar Barcelona.