Headhunterz Announces His Official Return to The Hardstyle Scene
A few years back, Headhunterz announced his move to more mainstream music and will be departing from hard dance music completely. In that time, Headhunterz produced records with KSHMR, R3HAB, Krewella, and Crystal Lake.
In a recent post, Headhunterz explained that its almost impossible to explain why he left the hardstyle scene to explore the world out there. “I didn’t even really know myself what I was looking for yet,” said Headhunterz. “Hardstyle was the music I grew up with, making it was the most natural thing to do when I started making music. But my mind has always been curious and adventurous. Thus, at some point, I couldn’t resist the question: “What else is there?”
He continued on to say:
But now I have been given the answers I was looking for. I did not fall in love with hardstyle just because I grew up with it. It was love at first sight with hardstyle and myself! I fell in love because it was the only music in the world that connected with every part of me that made me human. Raw emotion and energy, uncontaminated and right underneath the surface of our rapidly moving society that consumes everything in its path. It has united people like nothing I have ever seen in my life and it has made even the toughest men shed tears at times, like it did at that moment in time.
That day changed me as a person. I no longer felt the need to prove to myself and the world that I could do it all. The illusion that something else better than this is out there evaporated. I made it to the elephant graveyard and back. Thank you for showing me the way home. Thank you for always leaving the door open. I hereby return as a humble member of the community, offering my works, committed to spreading the word.
“One day, sooner or later, we see this music is our destiny”
A Detour That Made the Return More Meaningful
Headhunterz’s mainstream detour wasn’t a small experiment; it produced genuine crossover records with hitmakers like KSHMR and Krewella, proving he could compete outside hardstyle’s harder, faster confines. That track record made his eventual return all the more significant, since it wasn’t a case of an artist failing to make it elsewhere and retreating to safer ground. Instead, this announcement read as a producer who had genuinely tested his range across multiple corners of dance music and ultimately chose hardstyle on its own merits, not out of necessity.
A Return That Reshaped the Hardstyle Scene
Headhunterz’s comeback carried outsized weight in the hardstyle community given his stature as one of the genre’s defining voices going back to the 2000s. His return helped reinvigorate interest in hardstyle at a moment when much of the broader EDM conversation had shifted toward future bass, trap, and bigroom house, and the emotional, deeply personal framing of this announcement, all handshake, humility, and hard-won clarity, set the tone for a new chapter of releases that reconnected him with the fanbase that had followed him from the genre’s earliest days.
