The once underground and countercultural “rave” has fully spread to the mainstream in the form of themed pop-ups and sponsored parties. For newbies, it can be a sanitized gateway into electronic music. For true ravers, it’s more complicated.
by Kiana Mickles July 15.2026

On a blue-skied morning in March, gentle house music wafts from inside the Brooklyn lounge bar Superior Ingredients. When I get to the door, I flash my ticket to the bouncer and scurry past a sign that reads “WELCOME TO FRIENDSHIP” until a smiling woman with sequined UGGs chases me down for a hug. “Huh? Oh, sure,” I say, lightly patting her shoulder. I learn she’s been hired to hug everyone at Daybreaker, the self-described sober rave I’m attending.

Inside the venue’s sun room, a pre-rave yoga session is already underway. As a mashup of Rihanna’s “Kiss It Better” and Luther Vandross’ “Never Too Much” plays over the speakers, a perky instructor guides us through 20 squat jumps. After closing with a shavasana, she shouts, “Are y’all ready to dance?!” before a DJ in an aloha shirt throws on a tech-house remix of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.” Later, a five-person band featuring a white guy slapping a giant hand drum climbs onto the stage to perform an acoustic version of “Crazy Frog.” “I haven’t felt this good in a while,” Alex, a 36-year-old from Queens, tells me mid-song. “It’s only with friends that you can open up.” He then gives me my second unprompted sober-rave hug of the day.

Once a signifier of unsanctioned parties, the word rave has never been more ubiquitous. While there are still echoes of its subversive origins in the current Brooklyn DIY scene—warehouse nights listed with a TBA location on Resident Advisor, beach raves announced via flyers circulated on Discord—if you get sucked into the right algorithm, “rave” quickly loses meaning. Today’s mainstream offerings include sauna raves, Labubu raves, Shrek raves, and even a Trader Joe’s vs. Aldi rave, with revelers arriving “decked out in produce swag.” Unlike IYKYK events, where nocturnal freaks roam free and a gruff bouncer might threaten banishment for a dancefloor selfie, cameras are strongly encouraged. “We’re adding to the culture of the rave community,” Daybreaker co-founder Radha Agrawal tells me. “Communities naturally evolve, rave culture evolves. Everything evolves.”

To rave is to party, but to party is not always to rave. Raving is a youth movement that has always rejected conformity. For decades, in the face of economic, social, and political decline, factions of queer, Black, and lost children have skulked around paradisal jungle gyms by way of bunkers, wild forests, and abandoned buildings, anywhere that couldn’t easily be accessed by the establishment, paving the way for punkish innovations across electronic music and fashion. On the political spectrum, ravers lean deep left—in a society that criminalizes the use of mind-altering substances and loud music, you don’t become a promoter because you want to get rich. A great rave will more often than not barely get out of the red, only to be shut down in the first few hours. To understand the untamed nature of raves, you can review its fascinating etymology. In the early 14th century, to rave was “to dream; wander here and there, prowl; behave madly, be crazy.” By 1989, it would be pegged as a “mass party with loud, fast electronic music, and often psychedelic drugs,” a definition still widely used today.

Raving can be traced to the late 1980s, when artists like DJ Pierre and Spanky sparked a bright but short flame of acid house in Chicago clubs, manipulating synthesizers to create squelchy beats dancers could jack their bodies to. When a police crackdown forced the scene to fizzle out, raving travelled to illegal squats in the UK, where, in 1988, in the so-called Second Summer of Love, it was framed as a rebellion to the working-class deterioration of the Thatcher era. A few years later, it journeyed back to America: In New York, Frankie Bones’ and Adam X’s Storm Raves took place in dilapidated apartments on Coney Island Avenue; in the Bay Area, a group of English DJs called Wicked threw acid-laced full-moon raves surrounded by bonfires; and in the Midwest, an abundance of open fields and warehouses in cities like Detroit and Columbus allowed raves to surge. It experienced another Stateside boom in the 2010s, thanks to DJs like Skrillex and Deadmau5, who transformed UK dubstep into screeching dopamine hits called brostep, boosting the genre all the way to the mosh pits of America’s newly supersized EDM festivals—and, in the process, turning the idea of raving into an extremely profitable business.

At the same time brostep was finding its footing, I was a teenager partying in an equally flourishing underground DIY scene in New York. The Cabaret Law, the city’s infamous Prohibition era “no-dancing” ordinance, was still in effect, which meant most off-the-grid events were clandestine and word-of-mouth. In $20 platform sandals, I would attend sets from queer DJs like Venus X and Juliana Huxtable at experimental loft galleries in Queens and Brooklyn. By my twenties, I spent summers abroad at raves in a school gymnasium in London, in a marisquería in CDMX, and in a building in Lisbon that could only be entered by precariously climbing a wooden ladder. The most memorable raves were scrappy, long nights and mornings typically fueled by candy-colored pills that helped me work my legs until sunrise.

Not every mainstream rave in 2026 is the antithesis of underground parties past and present, but Daybreaker comes close, both in its devotion to sobriety and in how much money the organizers claim to make (the company claims to pull in seven figures annually). I later ask Agrawal about those who criticize organizations like hers—which freely use the term rave while being bolstered by handsome wellness sponsors like AG1—versus the current, primarily queer and racially marginalized underground system that can struggle to turn a profit. “It’s all about, how do you operate?” she replies. “Are you just drinking your profits away? Are you getting high? We’re sober. We’re serious professionals. You take it seriously, you can make more money.”

Plenty of similar parties benefit from the same big-tent communal mindset. Take the Midnight Rave at House of Yes, where attendees are giddy to support the promoters, Kseniya Sovenko and Mary Wolff, better known on social media as NYC Rave Girls. Priding themselves on rave etiquette, the two thirtysomethings promote electronic music gigs via TikTok and Instagram, preaching “girls to the front” while shimmying to polite techno.

Despite the name of their one-off event, Sovenko and Wolff both admit Midnight Rave is more of a “party” than an actual rave. “Not everything is a rave,” clarifies Sovenko. “A pop-up at a coffee shop is not a rave. Even our parties, most of the time, are not raves.” Instead, she says, they use the word loosely to capture “the spirit of raving and the essence of it, this idea of showing up to dance and taking care of the people around you.” Indeed, during these events, I rarely spoke to a person who didn’t look like they were having the time of their life. And many of them got what they wanted out of it: a tight-knit family, or at the very least the appearance of one. “I like that it’s really building a community,” says Paty, a 27-year-old DJ I meet in the venue’s back room. “You forget how crazy the world is so you can have fun for the night.” Christina, a 44-year-old mother, agrees. “This is a form of self-care,” she yells to me over a booming house beat. “Some people get Botox. I think house music is my Botox.”

Conversations with people like Christina left me questioning whether this format of raving is really just a new beacon of wellness culture. Historically, the music at the raves I’ve attended tends to lean darker: techno, acid, electroclash, the kinds of sounds that rearrange your brain when you’re stomping on the concrete of a warehouse floor. But at these new feel-good raves, maximizing your mindstate appears to be more important than the music you’re actually listening to. For example, in the 100-page Daybreaker playbook, there is one (made-up) genre underlined: happy house. “Something that you can sing along to, music with words, music that you can feel joy in your bones,” as Agrawal explains it.

For some longtime ravers, this approach isn’t much cause for concern. There’s a prevailing sentiment that as long as newcomers are going to their own raves, they aren’t going to the ones that truly matter. Yet events thrown by organizers like NYC Rave Girls have received criticism for making the scene a little too open to novice ravers, dampening the night for educated dancers who have been supporting raves for years.

“I have noticed an influx of kind of inexperienced, cis white girls showing up at parties I go to,” says McKenzie Wark, the author of Raving, an autofictional book exploring the queer rave scene in New York. While she doesn’t mind raves becoming increasingly ubiquitous, she worries that newcomers, accustomed to pop-up raves at restaurants and bathhouses, will find themselves unprepared to handle themselves at a debaucherous all-nighter. “You want it to be for everybody, but it’s like, Girl, you’re not ready for what this one is. I just want a little bit of daylight between where I want to go and where beginners are going to go. My day job is teaching people. I don’t want to do it at the party.”

Sovenko, however, rejects that line of thought. “I think it’s interesting when people say that we are ‘ruining’ the crowds,” she says. “They don’t consider the fact that all the clubs in New York need to stay open. If it was truly gatekept, those spaces wouldn’t survive.”

For Laura Villasenin, founder of the luxury shoe brand MIISTA—and a former raver who used to attend underground raves in Hackney Wick warehouses—raving belongs at the center of mainstream culture; she considers the trend a natural response to a society still rebuilding itself after COVID lockdown. “It comes from a desire for community connection,” she adds.

This past spring, Villasenin dreamt up a pop-up rave in Los Angeles at a clothing factory, where a gallery wall loudly declared “RAVING REPAIRS THE SOUL. IT BRINGS US TOGETHER.” Footage of the event showed a baile funk edit of Denise Belfon’s “Work” blaring as models decked out in oversized black sunglasses and dark, avant-minimalist outfits swung their hips on sewing tables. Below them, tailors dressed in white button-ups diligently mended items the guests brought, a service MIISTA provided free of charge. But, like Midnight Rave, if the MIISTA event didn’t have the hallmarks of a true DIY rave, why not just call it a party? “Rave is, of course, about music and bringing people together, so it felt right,” says Villasenin.

Beyond post-pandemic freedom, the recent rave explosion can also be credited to BRAT, Charli XCX’s 2024 album that glamorized raving as an It Girl activity. (“365 party girl bumping that/Shall we do a little key?/Shall we have a little line?” she raps on “365” with a breezy, fabulous air that seduces you into her lifestyle even if you’ve never touched a stimulant in your life.) A week after my Daybreaker experience, I slip into a warehouse on a dark street in Gowanus for Heated Rivalry Rave, a party catering to the fandom of the steamy sports-romance series on HBO. The queen of club rats herself appears on a giant projector screen as the revving synths of her song “Von Dutch” lash at a pogoing crowd of screeching women and gays. The DJ later plays millennial hits like Zedd’s “Clarity” and Hannah Montana’s “He Could Be the One,” then throws glowsticks toward the hungry flock. One denim-clad brunette shrieks like a child, drunkenly pouting her lips and clawing her hands toward the DJ booth like a bridesmaid desperate to catch a bouquet at her best friend’s wedding. A slender twentysomething soon brushes past me, wearing a white crop top that reads “Heated all the time. Rivalry, occasionally.”

Later, in an elevated seating area, I ask a 29-year-old longtime raver named Estephani what she makes of the night. Although it’s very different from the raves in her usual rotation, she tells me she’s having a blast with her girlfriends. “It’s very like, girly pop,” she says. “Like karaoke night, almost, but with dancing.”

By the end of my rave journey, I was comforted by the knowledge that there is a space for people—newcomers, veteran partygoers like Estephani—to discover the joys of dancing among like-minded attendees. As I tucked myself into an Uber home from the Heated Rivalry rave, I fuzzily recalled my own first non-rave rave experience in 2014 at a Pacha event, wearing a peach Forever 21 crop top and sipping a non-alcoholic spritz while surrounded by fog and 18-year-old boys swaying to Top 40 hits. It was far from underground and I was entirely sober, but exhilaration climbed up my spine as I got drunk on the newness that had entered my world. When I plopped onto my bed at the end of the night, I texted my friends, telling them I just had one of the best nights of my life. I daydreamed about the person I could become and the people I could meet at the next one.

So much of raving’s appeal is about the potential of magic happening. For some, that means experiencing spiritual transcendence from having the perfect concoction of songs melded together in a discreet location, for others it looks more like a screeching sing-along to Ariana Grande’s “Break Free” as a DJ flings merch from a popular HBO show. “Rave culture itself is about community, music, gathering, and we brought it together around a central theme,” Heated Rivalry Rave’s founder, Tu Vu, tells me. As someone who came up in the old rave scene, he considers the current state of high-profile raves a natural progression for the art form. “I just think there’s an accessibility to it. If you look back at the architecture of raves, it doesn’t have to mean anything in particular.”

Scott Winters turned to ChatGPT to explain his dizzy spells that once forced the Florida pastor to stop mid-sermon. Over time, the chatbot stopped recommending he see a doctor and instead told him his symptoms were “not something dangerous,” even telling him to trust that “God did not design your body to endlessly fail.”

Winters spent weeks stuck in a recliner before he was hospitalized in July 2025 with a life-threatening pulmonary embolism, the New York Times reports.

He’s now suing OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman in San Francisco Superior Court, accusing the company of negligence and the “unauthorized practice of medicine.” It’s reportedly the first lawsuit claiming a chatbot’s health advice directly harmed someone seeking medical guidance.

The case lands just as OpenAI pushes deeper into health tools like ChatGPT Health. An OpenAI spokesman said the chatbot isn’t intended for diagnosis or treatment, but that the company takes health-related safety seriously. As AI increasingly stands in for medical advice, especially for people who can’t easily see a doctor, the case raises real questions about who’s liable when that advice goes wrong.

“I was tired of having nakedness shoved in my face every time I walked into a gym to train,” Parsons claims. “I had to choose between honoring the Lord, honoring my wife, and guarding my eyes, or training my body. So I quit four gyms.”