Afrojack and Hardwell’s Incredibly In Demand Collaboration Is Dropping Friday

This track, now known as ‘Hands Up’ has been teasing our ear drums for over 6 months now. Since we first heard in Afrojack’s Ultra Miami set, we have non stop been waiting to hear a full studio version. We got the updated version two weeks ago in Hardwell’s ‘Hardwell on Air’ but still – we are yet to hear the track in full from beginning to end.

Finally it has been announced that ‘Hands Up’ will be officially dropping on this Friday. So after over a half a year, we are only a few days away from hearing this show stopping Dutch House tune in full. Take a listen to the preview below.

3 days left! 🙌 @afrojack @mcambush
Pre-save https://t.co/yWJVLtPNVb pic.twitter.com/iwEkHWUjvF

— Hardwell (@HARDWELL) October 3, 2017

https://twitter.com/HARDWELL/status/915237266200576010

‘Hands Up’ officially landed on Friday, October 6th, 2017, arriving via Wall Recordings with a feature from MC Ambush handling the hype-man vocal duties over that unmistakable big-room stomp. Given how long fans had already been living with festival rips and radio-show snippets, the eventual full release felt less like a surprise and more like a long-awaited exhale — this was a track that had been road-tested in front of massive crowds for the better part of a year before it ever touched streaming platforms.

That kind of extended rollout was pretty typical for the Afrojack and Hardwell camp during this stretch of their careers. Both Dutch producers came up through the same big-room and progressive house scene in the early 2010s, and pairing two of the genre’s biggest festival headliners on one track guaranteed it was going to get the widest possible test run before release — Ultra Miami mainstage, Hardwell’s own “Hardwell on Air” radio show, and eventually the studio drop itself. It’s a rollout strategy that made a lot of sense in the mid-2010s festival circuit: let the track prove itself in front of tens of thousands of people first, then let the anticipation do the marketing for you once the single actually hits.

For fans who’d been chasing shaky festival phone-cam clips of ‘Hands Up’ since early 2017, the October 6th release meant finally getting the studio-quality version — full arrangement, proper mix, and MC Ambush’s vocal locked in from start to finish, rather than whatever fragment happened to survive a mainstage set at Ultra.