ZHU, Mahmut Orhan, and San Pacho close out the BLACK MIDAS listening event with a B3B set under washes of red light.
A coffee reading in Istanbul, a Sprinter Van studio, and a Burbank hangar full of black-clad fans — inside the listening event for the GRAMMY-nominated producer’s fifth studio album.
Written by, Eric B. Thornton
When the invitation hit my inbox for an intimate listening party with one of dance music’s most enigmatic artists, the answer wrote itself. ZHU doesn’t do this often, and when he does, it usually arrives with a concept attached.
For the uninitiated (though I suspect there are few left), ZHU is the GRAMMY-nominated producer, DJ, singer, and filmmaker behind “Faded”, the 2014 single that still detonates dance floors more than a decade after its release. He’s also the architect of a signature aesthetic — sleek, mysterious, lacquered with a smoky late-night gloss that runs through “Cocaine Model”, “Automatic” with AlunaGeorge, and “Working for It”, his collab with Skrillex and the R&B duo THEY. Whether you’ve caught his cinematic recorded set in Istanbul where the production and lights are second to none or his pandemic-era DIY broadcast for Virtual Lollapalooza 2020 (a couple of buddies, a few instruments, joints in regular rotation), every ZHU project arrives wrapped in a narrative.
For his first two albums, fans famously had no idea what he looked like. He’d manipulate stage lighting to keep himself in silhouette, a workaround for an artist who, after struggling to find a vocalist, decided to sing his own tracks through a thicket of effects. That modulated voice became his fingerprint.
His fifth studio album, BLACK MIDAS — out now on Broke / BLACKLIZT Sound Syndicate — hasn’t lost any of those vibes. If anything, it’s tunneled deeper underground.
A Warehouse, a Dress Code, and a Stream
The venue was perfect on paper and even better in person: a warehouse complex on Sherman Way in Burbank, steps from the airport, with the dress code strictly black and the industry types and die-hards all complying. The whole thing was livestreamed on Twitch and YouTube, a nod to the BLACKLIZT warehouse concept ZHU has been quietly building all year. Inside, the room felt like the kind of small, knowing crowd that gets first dibs on everything.
All-black-clad guests gather outside the venue on Sherman Way before doors open on April 23, the night before BLACK MIDAS dropped.
At the entrance, a small sign greeted everyone: “BABY I’M FADED — NEW ZHU ALBUM BLACK MIDAS — TAP HERE,” with a Spotify NFC tag underneath. A wink to the song that started it all, and a soft launch for the one that’s now closing the loop.
The night opened with a screening of 24 Hours of Grace, the documentary feature ZHU directed, produced, and wrote, which premiered at SXSW last year. Then he stepped onto the decks.
“Baby I’m Faded” — the entrance signage to the BLACK MIDAS listening event.
“What Color Do You See in My Future?”
The album doesn’t open with a beat. It opens with a question, asked in a dimly lit room: “What color do you see in my future?” The answer comes back in Turkish, from a fortune teller ZHU recorded during a kahve falı — a coffee reading — in Istanbul last December: “All black.” That exchange sets the temperature for everything that follows.
Then the title track, BLACK MIDAS, drops, and the bass swallows the room.
In the front room, the mannequin installation from ZHU’s recent Ultra Music Festival production where he performned in a round stage, surrounded by mannequins, with the stage literally on fire. Walking past them on the way to the dance floor felt like walking through the album’s cover art.
The 14 tracks that follow are the deepest ZHU has gone in years. There’s BURN with Joyia; LEVELZZZ with South Africa’s GCBestBelieve and HNTR — which Billboard recently described as sexy and darkly chugging, and which would sound enormous in a desert at 2 a.m. — plus 5STARRR, his rework of THEY.’s 5 Star.
The mannequin installation from ZHU’s 2026 Ultra Music Festival production was reassembled inside the Sherman Way space, washed in red light.
By the end of the night, besides LEVELZZZ, my favorites are: NEW SHOES, with its smoky, low-lit pulse, and IN THE WILD — a techno-leaning collaboration with Turkish producer Mahmut Orhan that built and built until the room was fully gone.
Survival Mode
There’s a backstory worth knowing. The album was largely produced from a Mercedes Sprinter Van, on the road across the country, after ZHU was displaced by the Palisades wildfire in early 2025. His land burned. His neighborhood was decimated. His house and studio were spared structurally but rendered uninhabitable from smoke damage. He spent the year rebuilding everything he had known — including his music — with no home base, no permanent studio, and a roster of collaborators he met online and pulled into the project from wherever the van happened to be parked.
You can hear it. BLACK MIDAS is a record made by an artist reconnecting with the dance floor on purpose — the same artist who recently shared Coachella’s Quasar stage with deadmau5, threw a surprise pop-up after Bonnaroo’s weather shutdown in Nashville, headlined Istanbul’s VW Arena, played London’s legendary Drumsheds, and returned to Ultra Music Festival this spring for the first time since 2017.
ZHU on the decks playing BLACK MIDAS for the first time.
