Through the two hours we spent talking, Marlon is refreshingly outspoken. Comments that might read on paper as provocatively frank come across, in person, as being humble and just plain principled. In a landscape where too many big names remain silent, happy to take payola over moral considerations, he confesses: “I have quite a big list of promoters I don’t work with anymore.”
“I get so many bookings where there’s not one single woman on the line-up,” he says, as a principle he actively refuses and even pulls out of male-only lineups. “I am not playing a stage where you don’t book a woman, at least one woman, I’m not even asking for 50/50. And then promoters always try to trick you, like, ‘yeah we have a woman on the line-up on floor number 3.’ I don’t want a warm-up slot, I want a proper headliner slot because there are so many female headliners.” Yet while saying this, there is a touch of self-awareness to his words, that in talking about it there’s the possibility of taking credit for what should be the selfless role of allyship: “I don’t want to say ‘I’m the saviour’ or some bullshit like this because it’s not even close to what should be done. I don’t need applause for me doing it.”
If 2025 was outwardly massive yet a period where, for him, the growth slowed, 2026 could be a year where the boundaries between DJ and popstar diminish further. His popularity seems to encapsulate a point where the dividing lines between what is ‘underground’ and what is mainstream feel more blurry than they once, at least on the surface, did. Marlon can go from a 70,000 capacity stage at Electric Daisy Carnival to somewhere tiny like Glasgow’s Sub Club or London’s “100% DIY” venue The Cause with Club Heart Broken and it doesn’t raise much of an eyebrow. This summer, Skrillex will play Dekmantel and Ben UFO will play Tomorrowland. Examples of lines being straddled that felt uncrossable a decade ago can be seen across electronic music.
“I’m entering a very commercial world,” Marlon says, “but I’m still very much interested in not losing this ethos that I learned here in Berlin.” He’s symbolic of this moment, where those are no longer incongruous concepts. What’s rarer is his honesty about it. “I think many DJs that consider themselves or frame themselves as underground artists are not underground, because if you’re touring internationally, playing clubs with high entrances and sharing stages on big festivals, it’s not underground,” he says, reflecting on the at-times aesthetic nature of the categorisation. I think of a beat from a piece by the legendary music writer Simon Reynolds from 2011 (recently repackaged in his Futuromania anthology) where he pontificates that in electronic music, the underground has become replaced by the boutique. Small and fashionable, but not necessarily anything more than a set of tropes. There are genre touch points that, when they’re hit, give off an aura of underground authenticity, just like minimalist Scandinavian furniture gives off a certain aura of authenticity in a third wave coffee shop.
To Marlon, the true definition lies outside of sonics: “I think it’s more about the work you contribute to the local scene, to an underground scene, to the decisions you make and the spaces you create.” Therein lies the ethos he hopes to retain, incorporating wider scope of values nurtured through small parties, DIY culture, queer and marginalised communities. Fortunately for Marlon, the sounds he’s drawn to have become more accepted in those spaces too, with the rise of BPMs, fluoro-happy melodies and tracks that reject long, building groove for short sugar-rush Top 40 momentum.
“Life in general for everyone started to be a lot tougher around COVID-19 than it was before,” he says, pinpointing when this change started to take place. “And I feel that music that is harder, faster, louder, more energetic can be a tool to express or release feelings.” Marlon’s ascendence (more or less) corresponded with the re-opening of nightlife, and with that, the emergence of a new generation of ravers unschooled in the social blueprints laid down by their slightly older nightlife peers. TikTok and Reels helped normalise subcultural styles as trends. This is not in any way to suggest Marlon’s bright hair colours and even brighter sound is in anything less than a genuinely authentic expression of an artist who arrived at a point, said ‘fuck it’, and found a way to express himself sincerely, just that the timing of this re-emergence hit this particular epoch bang on.