John Summit, Marathon Man

It’s a Tuesday night in early February, but the energy outside Los Angeles’ Reframe Studios feels more like a Saturday night mid-spring break. A mix of college kids, young professionals, and off-duty shift workers tug at microskirts and baggy jeans as they scurry from rideshares to join a line that starts about half a mile from the venue. The evening’s dress code is, apparently, no pants and boho belts for the femmes, “F*ck ICE” tees for the fellas. Sunglasses and vape smoke abound. A thumping bassline in the distances guides the way.

Inside the space, a 23,000-square-foot soundstage festooned with mirrorballs and laser projectors, all eyes are on John Summit, who is wearing his headphones backwards over his forehead — it’s kind of his thing — and doing something akin to jumping jacks in time with an imminent drop. The 31-year-old DJ-producer, label owner, festival operator, and social influencer is known for nothing if not relentlessly, indefatigably having a great time.

Compared to the sterile, self-serious headshots that populate many a DJ’s internet presence, a quick Google Image search of “John Summit” yields a man whose ecstatic countenance, in a different era, might have been immortalized in marble: There’s Summit in the booth with fists raised, head tossed back in exuberant ululation; Summit on stage throwing a “hang loose,” tongue cheekily jutting from the corner of his mouth; Summit at the decks, soaked in sweat, face contorted in something between laughter and disbelief, as if the crowd behind him weren’t paying fans, but several thousand friends who suddenly materialized to throw him a surprise party. This guy always looks like it’s his birthday.

Tonight might as well be: The occasion for the pop-up, as fans will find out in a few hours, is to announce the April 15 release of Summit’s second album, CTRL ESCAPE. Over the course of the night, he breadcrumbs the reveal with remixes and recent singles. He brings out frequent collaborator Subtronics and Colombian reggaeton singer Feid, who guests on the new album. And the set itself doubles as a spiritual preview of the genre-stretching vibes in store on the record. The night flows from the tech-house and trancey toplines Summit built his name on to the big beat of the Chemical Brothers, from his techno-fried take on Britney Spears’ “I Wanna Go” to sludgy, sinister dubstep.

About 90 minutes in, Summit triggers the rolling bassline of “Shiver,” his yearning 2024 chart-topper with reigning dance music vocalist and frequent collaborator Hayla. As the first chorus comes in, there isn’t a single person who isn’t singing along — to their friends, hands clapped to their chests in dramatic gesture; to strangers, arms open; and, of course, to Summit, who has shed his white button-down to finish the night in a tank top and is singing back most emphatically of all: “And I feel it now / Want this forever…”

And that’s how you know that on this night, John Summit is absolutely wiped.

The tell, he reveals when we meet a couple weeks later at Santa Monica’s posh Proper Hotel, is how early he drops “Shiver” into his set. “I was pretty sick that night, to be honest,” he says when I ask how he keeps his sets from feeling rote. If he’s flagging, “I put on one of my early records. I think ‘Shiver’ is always it. If I play ‘Shiver’ 10 minutes into the set, that means I’m pretty tired.”

He laughs, like he’s betraying his party monster lore. The song helps him “get a little crazy,” he offers. “ As much as I’m playing for the crowd, I am kind of playing for myself a little bit, too. That’s the way [I push through]. It’s never fake, the energy I’m putting out there, that’s for sure.”

“You have to be the whole supply chain. It’s not just DJing. You also have to produce. You have to run like 10 different social media accounts. You have to be a good influencer.”

You don’t get to be the leading force in dance music — or the top honoree of NYLON House’s inaugural Dance 100 list, as voted on by 60 industry insiders — without some hustle. At The Proper, a number of golf stars in town for the Genesis Invitational are hanging about — Tiger Woods passes us in the restaurant; Rory McIlroy stopped Summit at the elevator earlier — but Summit seems to be the most-recognized, or at least the most-approached, person in the building, and he accepts the attention from fans sweetly and graciously.

Clad in head-to-toe black Lululemon (he has a partnership with the brand, naturally), Summit looks less like the perpetually turnt party boy on Google than the grown-man-in-his-30s he actually is. He’s got babyfaced cheeks, yes, but with light stubble and jaw muscles that twitch slightly when he’s deep in thought. His famously giddy squint is tempered by the focused intensity of deep-set green eyes — what the looksmaxxing community might refer to as “hunter eyes.” Summit got in late the night before, technically early this morning, and he accordingly nurses an iced coffee. “I think I drink more coffee than anyone else on the planet,” he says. (Better that than booze, I joke, and he relaxes into a giggle: “I’m up there with the booze, too, don’t get me wrong.”)

Summit’s days would be marathon ones even if he weren’t also training for the actual LA Marathon in early March. “It’s tough because I constantly have shin splints, and then I’m jumping around on stage,” says Summit, who clocks around 15,000 steps per gig and is no stranger to playing 10-hour sets at Club Space in his home base of Miami. (He ultimately finishes in 3 hours, 30 minutes, and 12 seconds.)

Routine is a luxury for DJs, but if he had one, it would go something like this: By 7 a.m., he’s working out — running, weights, and, when he’s in Miami, Pilates. “ I’m the only dude with like 29 girls in a class, but I’m not complaining.” By 10 a.m., he’s rolling A&R and marketing calls for his label, Experts Only. (He’s also signed to Interscope imprint Darkroom.) Then it’s on to production calls for any of the 30-plus live events he’s helming or headlining between February and November. Right now, that includes an Experts Only ski weekender in Vail this month, Lollapalooza, a summer residency at Ibiza’s UNVRS — Summit is the only American DJ to land the coveted gig on the island this summer — and his Experts Only Festival in New York City in September. Calls wrap by late afternoon; if he’s home, he heads to the studio and works “pretty much until I get burnt out.”

“There are a lot of festivals and clubs that are like, ‘It was an amazing night ‘cause we made X amount of money!’ But look at the comments online. No one was happy.”

“You really have to be the whole supply chain nowadays,” Summit says. He has only known success in a post-COVID music industry: He started teasing his breakthrough single, “Deep End,” on TikTok in May of 2020 and quickly signed with the label Defected before watching the song take off among would-be clubgoers. Being a DJ today — a successful one, anyway, the kind who plays stadiums and tops the dance charts — requires being a full-blown artist-entrepreneur, he explains.

“It’s not just DJing. You also have to produce,” he says, counting on his fingers to underscore the list of demands. “I have my own record label. I have my own events. I have my own festival, my own merch line. You have to run like 10 different social media accounts. You have to be a marketer, basically. You have to be a good influencer nowadays, too.” His unfiltered social presence is no small part of his appeal: On X, he’ll shoot his shot at Rosalía and get stoked about going viral on gay Twitter for a shirtless performance while also critiquing ICE raids. “As an absolute workaholic, I do love it. It used to be, though, you can just f*ck around all day, sleep to 3 p.m., DJ at night, have fun. But you get left in the dust if you do that nowadays.”

Raised in the suburbs of Chicago by a commercial airline pilot father and real estate agent mother, Summit (born John Schuster) came of age alongside the first wave of mainstream EDM in the U.S. in the 2010s. It was the era of FOMO, faceless headliners with six-figure gig fees, DayGlo-clad millennials blacking out to dubstep, and spectacular stage production that catapulted festivals like Coachella and Electric Daisy Carnival into the zeitgeist. “ I didn’t feel personally connected to any of those DJs in the 2010s,” he says. “I have a super strong American crowd force, and there weren’t too many big American DJs [back then].”

He was, however, in the historic backyard of house music, so while he whet his palate watching artists like Deadmau5 at Lollapalooza, he was also catching local greats like Green Velvet in the warehouse scene. “It’s  sweet when you’d go to these intimate events and everyone’s kinda wearing the same merch and have the same pins in their hats and all of that, and then you'd start seeing these people at festivals and stuff,” he says. “You automatically have a way to connect.”

“If I release a record and it flops, who cares? I guess it makes sense to be risk-averse if that’s all you got going on, but we can do whatever the hell we want.”

Summit was studying accounting at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign when he taught himself how to use DJ equipment by watching YouTube tutorials. He began playing open-format sets at local bars, but he didn’t find his calling as an artist until he started attending smaller, boutique festivals like Electric Forest and Summer Camp and subsequently discovered underground labels like Dirtybird and Night Bass. “They were very community focused,” he says. “They would put on small artists that only had a thousand followers, but it was all about the music and it wasn’t really about work because the rest of EDM just went so commercial and so pop — which is funny ‘cause, you know, people consider me a pretty big commercial and pop DJ now.”

It’s an ethos he’s trying to capture with his Experts Only brand, launched in 2022. When he was first coming up, Summit — with his penchant for big melodies and a songwriter-first approach — struggled to find a home among house/tech labels, which favor music for club shows over anthemic bangers. But the labels that sought the latter sound, he says, were risk-averse with higher barriers of entry, typically locking artists into longer-term contracts. So Summit decided to make the platform he wished he had, and he now uses it to boost others seeking the same.

According to Hayla, his ability to move between scenes is core to his appeal. “John has such a great scope of style within dance music — allowing very emotional songs to live alongside heavier-hitting dance/electronic tracks, taking audiences on a real journey, [and also] bringing the high-end show stage production to the club scene, living side by side in harmony,” she says. “You can tell he really loves what he does.”

Today, Experts Only has helped launch rising stars like Max Styler, Layton Giordani, and Devault along with releasing music from heavyweights like Green Velvet and Kaskade. “If I like a record, we’ll put it out the next month if we want to.  There's no f*cking rules to it at all,” Summit says. “I remember when I was sending demos, sometimes they’d be like, ‘Oh, we’re booked out for a year.’ I’m like, I don’t have time to wait a year. That’s insane.”

And this is where being a very busy man comes in handy. “If I release a record and it flops, who cares?” he says. “I guess it makes sense to be risk-averse if that’s all you got going on, but I’m kind of in this awesome spot where we can truly just do whatever the hell we want.” That’s also true of Experts Only Fest, whose independent feel is a point of pride for Summit. He’s not anti-corporate — “Who doesn’t like more free tequila at a festival?” he says of brand partnerships — but “the success of the festival does not come down to the bottom line. It comes down to the fan experience,” he says. “There are a lot of festivals and events and clubs and stuff [where] they’re like, ‘It was an amazing night ‘cause we made X amount of money.’ But look at the comments online. No one was happy. There was no space to move on the dance floor.”

“A lot of people put on this facade to escape who they really are. I felt like I was holding myself back when I couldn’t talk about who I was or where I came from.”

By now, the idea of chasing your bliss and prioritizing happiness above all else is as well-trod as a live laugh love sign, but for Summit, it’s the only way he got anywhere. A year and change into working as a CPA, with his second life moonlighting as a DJ-producer eating up all his attention — noticeably so, to his bosses — Summit got fired. “From there I had to decide. I could have gotten another accounting job. I decided to go all-in on DJing,” he says. “But at the end of the day, I wanted to escape the control of the corporate world.”

The title of his new album, CTRL ESCAPE, is a nod to his desk-job days. (So is its release date: April 15 is Tax Day, after all.) You get very familiar with keyboard shortcuts when your life is spreadsheets. “The function opens up the start menu, kind of like you’re restarting your life a little bit,” Summit says. “I didn’t want to do CTRL ALT DELETE, where you delete everything. It’s more about a fresh breath and starting something new.”

It’s hard to understate how important this myth-making is to his fandom. At the Los Angeles pop-up show, a number of attendees veered into cosplay territory with their own pseudo-accountant looks, sporting white button-downs, backpacks, and even “Summit CPA” name tags inspired by the similarly branded mugs he sells on his website. “ I think a lot of people put on this facade and persona to kind of escape who they really are. And my brand has always been about being as real as possible,” he says. “I don't really give a f*ck. And it's been super liberating for me, ‘cause I felt like I was really holding myself back when I couldn’t talk about who I was or where I came from.”

“It’s wild that I’m the one that helps provide the escapism for people nowadays. It’s a responsibility that I do not take for granted.”

Summit points out that what drew him to dance music — what made him fall in love with it — was the same as most folks. He was stressed out, studying nonstop for an exam for a career he felt numb toward. His then-girlfriend was cheating on him. He saw little on the horizon to look forward to other than that next hit of release on the dance floor. “At night at the club, I could forget about it all. That was what brought me peace,” he says. “It’s just wild that I’m the one that helps provide the escapism for people nowadays. It’s a responsibility that I do not take for granted.”

Escapism — also the new album’s original working title — is arguably the whole raison d’être of dance music. But maybe what Summit offers, in repping for a new wave of dance music fans, is less the aspirational reprieve of his predecessors than an avatar for the post-lockdown grind generation proving it’s still possible to chart your own course.

John Summit is not a stoic European in a black V-neck on a Vegas billboard; he’s a sincere, kind of goofy guy from Chicago who hated his day job and wears his headphones backwards. He tweets at fellow celebrities like he isn’t one of them. He used to be broke and couchsurf, so he makes a point of booking shows with “a proper GA ticket” alongside the bottle service gigs. He missed the dance floor during lockdown, so he made a song hoping to connect with his people — and stumbled into a stratospheric career.

“It is cool to have someone have your same upbringing, backgrounds,” he says of his place in dance music. “You watch the Olympics and you can really connect with someone that was maybe from your hometown — and now he’s doing the downhill skiing or whatever.”

Top image credit: Wild West Social House vintage cardigan; Hanes tank; Giorgio Armani pants; Talent’s own jewelry; Alexander Digenova shoes