Announcing today that her second album ‘Industrial Mind’ will release in May, and putting out its gritty second single ‘Synthetic Collapse’, Rebekah is entering a new era. The seasoned techno innovator spoke to Noctis about reinventing and challenging herself across the record, her position as a figurehead for women’s rights in dance music, and the need to move from awareness to action to tackle harassment and assault within club spaces.
Softly spoken, you might not imagine that by night Rebekah Teasdale commands crowds across Europe with ferocious industrial techno and brutal hardcore. The Birmingham-born, Berlin-based DJ, producer and label owner has been making music since 2007, and DJing for even longer. Widely regarded as a techno heavyweight, her list of collaborations across decades in the dance music industry is staggering, and she’s released music for influential platforms such as CLR, Modularz, Perc Trax, Mord and Soma – the latter with whom she released her dark, stunning debut Fear paralysis in 2017. Only a year later, she was named DJ Mag’s best producer of 2018, with her hybrid industrial techno sets fusing her production expertise with the thumping ebb and flow of her transcendent DJ sets. “Before covid and the lockdown I was on this crazy trajectory already,” Rebekah recalls. Playing more gigs and festivals than ever before, she was burning out. When the pandemic forced the world – and the clubbing scene – to a standstill, she returned to a changed landscape determined to challenge her own opinions, opening up her perspective rather than closing it off. “I forget that when I was 18, I was dancing to Whitney Houston remixes in a club in Birmingham and loved it, I was off my nut basically and it was so much fun,” Rebekah explains. “And for me to want to take that experience away from younger DJs and younger people, I had to really question myself… it’s not about me and what I think that they should listen to. You can’t enforce people to see it your way.”
Since the pandemic, she’s been on this journey of self-rediscovery, overcoming loss, personal health scares and deep diving into harder genres more than ever before. “Life is really short,” Rebekah tells us. “You start losing people when you get older and it starts putting things into perspective. I wasn’t wanting to be scared anymore, I want to have fun when I DJ, feel free and play music that I like and enjoy – evolve into something else, something more positive really.”
My post-techno revolution is being open to other genres, to be pushing the boundary of what I want to listen to and want to play.
After wanting to do a second album for the past few years, the stars began to align towards the end of last year, having moved agencies, already sitting on a few tracks, and with more space for studio time in a quieter gigging schedule. Finding now was the right time, Rebekah’s 13-track sophomore release Industrial Mind will be released to the world in just two months now, on the 29th of May. “It’s the accumulation of being immersed in this hard dance area, listening to lots of hardcore, some hardstyle and everything in between,” she says of the album being a musical reinvention. “For me techno is so pure: you’re creating within the box, and it’s incredibly difficult to step out.” Experimenting more with sounds, samples, and melodies, alongside taking a more playful, less serious outlook, Rebekah found freedom through creating music beyond these boundaries. Her 2024 Go Hard Or Go Hardcore project, which grew into a myriad of shows, two giant VA’s and an apparel line, represented both a tribute to 30 years of hardcore and a provocation to the world of hard techno, paving the way for what Industrial Mind would become. But as she explains, “the Rebekah sound of pretty intense arrangements is still there” on her new album. It’s a part of herself, and something she can’t escape.
It’s an album that crystallises Rebekah’s reinventive exploration of the worlds of hard techno and industrial hardcore and hardstyle, blurring the lines between the genres with her own signature brutalism. Amidst almost volcanic layers of kicks, Rebekah incorporates some particularly memorable vocals across the album, from the looping stabs of the breakneck ‘Echoes’ to the excellent vocal sample that dominates ‘Biggest Baddest Mother’, a track that led the album’s direction since Rebekah finished the song in early 2025. Laughing, she explains “this is a big tip now – because everybody’s using splice – if you don’t use splice and you find your samples elsewhere, then they’ll be a lot more original.” The album’s introductory opener ‘Updating Mainframe’ does much to establish Rebekah’s own voice at the centre of the chaos. Gritty metallic stabs interject between her heavily modulated vocals, narrating “warning: do not update the installation”, and “error” with cybernetic intensity. By the end of the track, we’re greeted with the words “welcome to Rebekah 2.0”, before catapulting straight into the title track ‘Industrial Mind’, where an almost-unrecognisable Rebekah repeats “Biomechanic… AI computers… synthetic matter… Industrial mind.”
In the last week of February, Rebekah released Industrial Mind’s first single ‘Don’t Let Go’, a genre-bending collaboration with young Italian producer Hellish. The track originated from an unfinished track he’d sent to Rebekah, before the pair worked together to perfect the final product: a high-octane tune that balances intense percussion with softer pads and an ethereal female vocal sample, building into one punishing techno drop. “I played this track and was like oh my gosh this is so beautiful, and maybe something that I would not have chosen myself vocally, so I have to give him the credit here,” Rebekah recalls. “I get such a good reaction from that record whenever I play it.”
Her second single ‘Synthetic Collapse’, releasing today, leans heavier on industrial elements. Featuring distorted, alarm-like blares and effects, the synth-heavy track is out today, along with the announcement of the album. “It’s Klangkuenstler without the trance”, Rebekah remarks, whilst also voicing her fondness for the addictive hook “wake up, in reality”. The album’s third single, coming a month later towards the end of April, will be ‘Cry Baby’, a collaboration with the Dutch acid techno DJ and producer Reinier Zonneveld, blending the pair’s credentials as innovative techno heavy hitters into one unique and unforgettable track.
A personal favourite track of Rebekah’s from the album is ‘Losing Grip’, an expletive mix of rapid-fire synths, hammering kicks and attention-grabbing heavy metal vocals from the talented Mimi Bark. Produced with hard techno DJ Malke, who mixed and mastered all of Industrial Mind, the track epitomises Rebekah’s more experimental approach with Industrial Mind, pushing herself and her sound into new territory. “It’s hard to play that track because it’s just so epic,” she tells me. “What I like about it is that it doesn’t follow the obvious arrangements… I didn’t want to do an album that’s just 12 tracks of really functional, obviously arranged tracks that are going to hit the dance floor.”
“They’re for the dance floor,” Rebekah adds with certainty, “but almost doing it in a different way.”
Over the past few years, Rebekah has been at the helm of multiple movements advocating for women, trans and non-binary people in the music industry and for greater safety in clubbing spaces. Along with fellow DJ, producer and record label owner Sydney Blu, she launched the 23by23 campaign in 2021, championing better gender representation on label rosters, as well as bringing attention to how gender intersects with race: women, trans and non-binary artists of colour remain underrepresented on dance music labels today. In September 2020, Rebekah launched her Me Too #ForTheMusic campaign against sexual assault and harassment in the music industry with an open letter demanding accountability and better safety guarantees throughout the industry. She also was the executive producer of the 2024 short film ‘When The Music Ends’, which delved into three everyday clubbing stories to demonstrate the power of active solidarity in making the darkest parts of clubbing spaces safer. With recent allegations of sexual misconduct and assault by multiple DJs within the hard techno scene over the past month, Rebekah reshared the video to her Instagram page, writing “this film is an answer to the question of what can we all do to make the scene better and what accountability really looks like.”
Acknowledging there’s much more that needs to be done, Rebekah took a moment to consider how much has changed across her three decades in the industry. When she was starting out, while there were other women DJs in the scene, the male-dominated field enacted a form of divide and rule. “Lisa Lashes, Anne Savage, they were already a bit older, already in a different generation bracket so it was tougher to meet these girls and let them lead the way. Because it was so heavily male dominated, it was just men leading the way, and the message that we had was ‘you’re not in competition with the men, you’re in competition with the women’ – which was clearly not true, it’s just a conditioning to keep us in a place where we don’t get above our station, which is fucked… I was in silence probably for 20 years about the stuff that had happened to myself, so now I think things are speeding up a little bit more, women are speaking out more, so it’s progress, but it’s slow progress.”
Now, as a role model for aspiring female DJs and producers herself, Rebekah’s looking to transform awareness into actions that make dance music safer, more inclusive, and more diverse. She remarks how lots of abuse and harassment comes from the corporate world, with HR failing survivors and protecting predominantly male higher-ups. “We need to look at how we can put better reporting systems in place, where there are better policies around these… suspension until they’ve got to the bottom of the allegation, things like that.”
It’s zero tolerance policies across the board that we need to implement more.
Another change Rebekah would like to see is industry-backed funding for survivors to take their perpetrators to court, given that frequently high-powered perpetrators use expensive lawyers to pay their way out of any accountability or consequences. With some prosecutions acting as a proper deterrent, she believes there could be some real headway, instead of the current system where “the perpetrators are just getting away with it continuously, and then that keeps people in silence across the board.”
“It’s about the willingness of the scene and the industry,” she reflects. “Is the industry ready for change, like radical change? When I go to places like Ibiza for IMS (International Music Summit) and I just see a sea of men all working in the industry, we’re not there yet. We need to have more women in higher positions to balance it out a little bit more.”
It’s an issue that also needs to be reframed under the realm of health and safety, not just diversity and inclusion, Rebekah believes. “We put so much money into fire regulations, you know alcohol awareness, things like that, and drugs awareness, and I think this is just another topic that needs to be put inside that box. It’s not an outside topic that we don’t talk about only when it raises its head, we’ve got to get on top of it now.”
With Industrial Mind releasing on the 29th of May, a new era beckons. Teased during recent sets in Brussels, Italy, London and across Germany, audiences across the world are already bracing for its shredded textures, corrosive rave lines and cyborg-coded energy. Rebekah 2.0 already is – and will continue to be – a force to be reckoned with across the world’s dancefloors and within a change-averse music industry.
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Words: Taran Will
Photography: Marco Trunz