Martin Garrix Boston Concert — Next Date & Ticket Alerts

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About Martin Garrix

Martijn Gerard Garritsen was born in Amstelveen, in the Netherlands' Randstad metropolitan belt just south of Amsterdam, on May 14, 1996. He started playing guitar at eight, was given a copy of FL Studio in his early teens and began posting bootleg edits and original productions on SoundCloud and YouTube as a hobby through middle school. The story that has been told repeatedly in interviews — and that he has not denied — is that watching Tiësto perform during the opening ceremony of the 2004 Athens Olympics on Dutch television, at age eight, was the formative moment that put dance music on his radar as a possible career rather than a side interest. He enrolled at Herman Brood Academie in Utrecht — a Dutch vocational program oriented around producing and engineering pop and electronic music — and started releasing original tracks through small Dutch dance labels while still in school. His first major single, Itsa Game with Jay Hardway, landed in 2012. BFAM with Sander van Doorn appeared on Doorn Records in early 2013. Animals — written and produced largely by Garrix in a bedroom studio in Amstelveen, with the synth-saw lead that became the song's signature designed on a Roland JP-8000 emulation — was released through Spinnin' Records in June 2013 when he was seventeen years old. The track climbed to number one on the UK Singles Chart, peaked in the top ten in Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy and the Netherlands, broke into the US Billboard Hot 100, and became the breakout dance record of that summer. He played Tomorrowland for the first time later that year. Wizard followed in 2014; Tremor with Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike landed the same season. By 2015, with a string of festival-edit collaborations behind him, he was being routed onto the Ultra Miami main stage and into a sold-out Madison Square Garden show as a teenager. The contractual dispute with Spinnin' Records and Scooter Braun's MusicAllStars management broke publicly in 2015, with Garrix arguing that the deal — signed when he was a minor — gave Spinnin' too much control over master recordings. The case settled, Garrix exited both Spinnin' and the Scooter Braun management relationship in 2015, and STMPD RCRDS launched in 2016 as the imprint that has handled every Garrix release since. The Spotify catalogue from that point — In the Name of Love with Bebe Rexha (2016), Scared to Be Lonely with Dua Lipa (2017), So Far Away with David Guetta featuring Jamie Scott and Romy Dya (2017), Ocean with Khalid (2018), High on Life with Bonn (2018) and the festival anthems Pizza, Forever, Animals (rebuild) and Limitless — has driven streaming totals into the multi-billion range and put Garrix consistently among the top five most-streamed dance acts globally. The Area21 collaborative project with American producer-rapper Maejor, launched as an animated alternate-universe persona project in 2017, released its first full-length album Greatest Hits Vol. 1 in 2022 and produced singles including Spaceships, Glad You Came (a reworked cover) and a strand of cartoon-fronted releases that exist as a separate creative outlet alongside the Garrix-proper catalogue. Sentio, released in 2022, was Garrix's first proper artist album under his own name — a gathering of singles, collaborations and new productions including Reboot, Carry You with Third Party and Oaks featuring Aloe Blacc — and marked the formal shift from singles-and-festival-edits to album-cycle thinking. He has topped DJ Mag's Top 100 DJs reader poll five times — in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2022 and again on a more recent cycle — making him one of the most decorated artists in that poll's history, and was the first artist born in the 1990s to top the ranking. Off the road, he is based primarily in Amsterdam, where STMPD RCRDS operates from offices in the city center, and his label roster has included Mike Williams, Brooks, CMC$, Justin Mylo, Matisse & Sadko, Loopers and a longer string of producers working in the big-room, future-bass and melodic-house lanes. He is publicly close to the Amsterdam Dance Event organizing structure and has appeared on multiple ADE panels and keynote slots in the past several years, and his label-night appearances at ADE in October each year tend to be among the more closely watched programming for industry attendees. The persona on stage is more reserved than the showman archetype of the late-2010s EDM era — Garrix does not run the catwalk and dramatic-pause production of a Hardwell-era main-stage show in quite the same way — and the live focus stays on the music, the visual programming and the production rather than on personality theatrics. The most reliable single distinguishing feature of a Garrix set is the willingness to drop unreleased material early in the live cycle: ID tracks at Tomorrowland and Ultra have become a structural feature of the touring calendar, with full releases announced weeks or months after the festival debut.

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