Exclusive | French DJ TRYM on His India Debut, Hard Techno, and Discovering Karan Aujla 

Ask TRYM which Indian city is going to rage the hardest this weekend and he deflects with a grin. "You tell me," he says. It is a deflection with a point — he is not here to rank crowds he has never played for. He is here to witness them. "A lot of artists have really hyped the Indian crowds for me," he adds. "I feel incredibly grateful to be able to experience it firsthand." The answer is relaxed, but the preparation behind it is anything but. 

In the weeks leading up to his debut three-city India tour — Delhi tonight, Hyderabad tomorrow, Bangalore to close — TRYM has been doing something that most international DJs don't bother with before a first visit: actually listening. Not to playlists or genre primers, but to the artists that Indian audiences are genuinely shaped by. He found his way to Karan Aujla first, drawn in by the production and the beats. Then deeper, to Shubh, whose moody, atmospheric strain of Punjabi hip-hop held his attention long enough to stay. "Maybe you will see some influences in my India sets," he says. 

Born Martin Lermurier in Paris in 1997, TRYM started making music in 2016, and his earliest real set as a DJ came on a farm outside the city for about 150 people where something clicked into place. His path ran through Possession, the Paris collective whose warehouse parties helped define the city's new-school techno culture, and it was there that he learned to read a room in the most raw and formative way. A Boiler Room set in 2022 introduced him to a far wider audience. The bookings escalated accordingly: Tomorrowland, EDC Las Vegas, Bootshaus, a sold-out all-day show at AFAS during Amsterdam Dance Event, and earlier this year a back-to-back with DJ Snake's The Outlaw alias at Ultra — two generations of disruptive French artists, one stage. 

Hard techno's global surge — it has been breaking festival and club attendance records consistently — provides the backdrop for his India arrival, but TRYM is careful not to let the wave do his thinking for him. He draws a clean line between the two kinds of crowds the genre commands. Festival techno audiences, he explains, are more fluid — moving between stages, there for the collective experience. Club crowds are a different proposition entirely: attentive, knowledgeable, harder to read and exponentially more rewarding when you do. The reason both keep showing up, he argues, comes down to something elemental — "people seek escapism in techno. You want to go to the club, the warehouse, and just forget about everything for however long you are there, away from reality and your phones, and just get lost in the music." 

He is equally clear about what separates artists who endure from those who chase the moment. Going viral is "an amazing feeling that validates all the hard work," he says, but creating solely for that reason "has never felt fulfilling." For TRYM, the crowd comes before the algorithm. It is the reason he still talks about a night-long set in a tiny Berlin venue, years ago now, with the kind of regard that suggests it never really left him. When it ended, the entire room spilled out together into the first light of morning and stood there in the street soaking in the experience of it all. "That direct connect and feedback right after the show, that community feeling," he says, "is what I miss the most about a smaller rave circuit." 

Before a debut show in a new country, he describes himself as curious, nervous, observant, and analytical, all at once. But what he keeps returning to is the practical reality: the first night sets everything that follows. "The first show really sets the tone for the rest of the cities," he says. "Let's see what Delhi has to bring to the table."

What he wants from the decade ahead distils to a single word: experimentation. Not reinvention for its own sake, but a continued refusal to be contained — more fellow DJs, new sounds, new rooms, the same restless motion that carried him from a farm outside Paris to Tomorrowland to a listening session with Shubh in his headphones before touching down in India.

"I want to continue to evolve as an artist," he says, "connect, learn, absorb, and enjoy this upcoming decade." The instinct that clicked on that Paris farm at 19 that music could create something immediate and human and real, in a room full of strangers, with no safety net has not changed. The rooms have just gotten bigger. India, it turns out, is just the next one.