Born From Ash: How Tragedy Forged ZHU’s BLACK MIDAS

Some artists make music. ZHU makes worlds. And his latest one was born from ash.

When the Palisades wildfires tore through Southern California in early 2025, Steven Zhu — the Grammy-nominated producer, DJ, singer, and instrumentalist known simply as ZHU — lost nearly everything familiar to him. His land burned. His neighborhood was decimated. His house and studio survived the flames, but smoke damage had made them completely unlivable. Faced with no home, no studio, and no fixed point on the map, he did what artists have always done in the face of chaos: he kept creating. He loaded up a Mercedes Sprinter Van and drove, crossing the country for the better part of a year — reaching out to artists online, tapping into different regional scenes, and recording wherever the road took him. It was, in the truest sense, a return to his roots.

What emerged from that year of displacement is BLACK MIDAS, a 14-track album that lands like a late-night transmission from the open road — restless, hypnotic, and unmistakably alive. Released April 24 via Broke/BLACKLIZT Sound Syndicate, the project moves fluidly from deep house warmth to the colder, harder edges of melodic techno, with every track carrying the emotional weight of a man rebuilding himself from the ground up.

2025 was survival mode.  This album represents surviving.

~ZHU

The album opens with a moment that is equal parts eerie and poetic. A voice asks, “What color do you see in my future?” The response comes in Turkish — recorded during a traditional coffee reading, a kahve falı, in Istanbul last December — and the fortune teller’s answer is delivered without hesitation: “All black.” It is a striking entry point and an honest one. This is not a record that reaches for easy optimism. It lingers in the shadows, and it wants you to follow.

Darkness here, though, is not despair. It is atmosphere, and it is intention. ZHU has spent a decade — evolving from mysterious newcomer to global electronic headliner — understanding that the best club music doesn’t just fill a room, it transforms one. BLACK MIDAS does exactly that. “LEVELZZZ,” featuring South Africa’s GCBestBelieve and HNTR, was crowned “sexy and darkly chugging” by Billboard. “BURN,” with Joyia, smolders with a slow-building intensity. “5STARR” is ZHU’s clever reinterpretation of R&B duo THEY.’s infectious “5 Star,” and collaborations with Mahmut Orhan and ZONLY push the collection further into inventive sonic territory. Meanwhile, HNTR — who also breathed new life into ZHU’s breakout hit “Faded” with a remix that helped reignite his connection to the global dance community — proves to be one of the most fruitful creative partnerships on the project. To close things out, “RAINDOWN” winds the journey down with a slow, hypnotic groove that eases the listener off the dance floor and into something more introspective.

The philosophical engine driving all of it is ZHU’s fierce commitment to doing one thing fully rather than two things halfway. He describes it with a characteristically vivid analogy:

If I’m going to gorge on something that’s all butter and sugar, I’d rather be in New Orleans to get the most soul-drenched food possible. But if I’m eating something healthy, I don’t want any additives or anything. So for music, I’m going to make music for dancing and everybody better be dancing. If I’m making music for listening, I’d better make sure everybody’s ears are up. I don’t really want to do two things at the same time.” It’s techno as an attitude — uncompromising, fully committed, and allergic to the middle ground.

~Zhu

Where ZHU is now,” he’s said, “is anywhere but in the middle.”

That ethos extends well beyond the studio. Throughout 2025, ZHU threw himself deeper into the global dance music community than ever before — performing alongside Mathame in Bogota, joining deadmau5 on Coachella’s Quazar stage, staging a surprise pop-up after a Bonnaroo weather shutdown left fans stranded in Nashville, playing Brooklyn Store House in New York City, appearing at Lightning In A Bottle, and sharing stages with Paul Kalkbrenner and Mahmut Orhan. As the year wound down, he headed to Istanbul for a headlining set at the VW Arena, then crossed to London for a celebrated turn at the legendary Drumsheds — all while developing BLACKLIZT, his accompanying nightlife warehouse concept that brings the world of BLACK MIDAS into physical space.

In 2026, he returned to Ultra Music Festival for the first time since his debut there in 2017, delivering a presentation that nobody in attendance will forget anytime soon: performing in the round, surrounded by mannequins, with the stage itself set on fire. He followed that with appearances at SXSW, a run of tour dates across Australia and Alaska, and there is still more to come — including Into The Horizon in San Diego and Tomorrowland in Belgium, with further dates expected to be announced.

For those who have only encountered ZHU through speakers or a festival livestream, it’s worth noting that he is far more than a DJ. He is a live performer in the fullest sense — a singer and instrumentalist whose shows blend his razor-sharp production instincts with his own voice, sleek synth melodies, billowing basslines, and hooks that lodge themselves somewhere deep in the chest. The result is something hypnotic and dual-natured, sultry and sinister all at once. It is the kind of performance that leaves a room permanently altered.

What makes ZHU’s story compelling isn’t just the music, or even the spectacle surrounding it. It is the willingness to sit with uncertainty — to let loss and upheaval shape something genuinely worth hearing. Leaving a bit of darkness and space for the listener to explore their own curiosity.  For an artist who lost so much and rebuilt everything he knew from scratch — his home, his neighborhood, his studio, his sound — that openness to the unknown isn’t just a creative philosophy. It’s proof of what happens when survival becomes art.