Audien brings Progressive House Never Died show to NYC’s Pier 17

Electronic music producer and DJ Audien, born Nathaniel Rathbun, recently descended on New York City for a run of interviews, fan events, and two performances, including a Progressive House Never Died headline show at Pier 17, as reported by Spin Magazine. The 2026 tour runs through 24 October.

PHND, as Audien’s fans know it, began at Miami Music Week in 2022 and has since grown into something larger than a touring event. It centres on the euphoric, piano-led festival house sound of the 2010s, and Audien has built a community around it, one rooted in a shared nostalgia for an era of open-air dance music that itself evolved from the darker underground club culture of the 1980s and 1990s.

From Mystic, Connecticut to a Grammy nomination

Rathbun’s path into music is a familiar late-2000s story in the best sense. Growing up in the small seaport town of Mystic, Connecticut, he and his older brother spent hours on PC and arcade games (World of Warcraft and Counter-Strike among them) while their mother brought jazz into the house and their father played guitar in the alternative and metal tradition. The crucial spark came from YouTube: edited game highlight reels set to EDM, known as 1.6 frag movies, introduced him to happy hardcore and trance at around age 16, in 2008. He began teaching himself to produce music on his laptop, developing an uplifting, piano-driven approach to trance and house in his bedroom.

Within a year, Dutch DJ and producer Ferry Corsten had discovered his homemade tracks and signed the 17-year-old to his label, Flashover Recordings, distributing Rathbun’s debut single ‘Rise & Shine’. The name Audien, incidentally, came from his friends, who thought it sounded cool, adopted initially as a joke, it stayed.

The wider breakthrough arrived in early 2014, when his progressive house remix of Bastille’s ‘Pompeii’ became a festival anthem and earned him a Grammy nomination. Over a 17-year career he has released two albums (2019’s Escapism and First Love in 2025) along with a string of charting singles. His 2015 country collaboration ‘Something Better’, featuring Lady A, reached No. 1 on the Billboard Dance Club Songs chart. ‘One Last Dance’, featuring Xira, accumulated more than 38 million streams on Spotify following its release in 2022.

New music and the Las Vegas Sphere

His latest single, ‘High Hopes’, arrived on 10 July, followed by the High Hopes (Remixes) EP later that month and a live acoustic piano version recorded with Shaun Farrugia, released on 17 August. ‘High Hopes is everything I love about progressive house,’ says Audien. ‘It has that feeling of hope, connection, and emotion that made me fall in love with dance music in the first place. Working with Shaun was incredible, and the moment this song came together I knew it was something special.’

Earlier in 2026, Audien opened for Illenium at the Las Vegas Sphere, which seats 17,500. The show sold out. In March 2026, he also appeared at Midline Miami for a PHND event, an Eventbrite listing from that date places the show on 26 March, running from 10 PM to 5 AM.

Asked about his current creative focus in a questionnaire format, Rathbun says he is working on ‘a lot of random but awesome songs’ while harbouring an ambition to score a film. His 2026 tour continues through 24 October.