The venue’s well-curated Steam Wednesdays series brought The Field’s cinematic techno to the stage in August savvy Dutch tropical house producer Bakermat plays there Sept. This small club in Denver’s nightlife Cap Hill district is known for nabbing sleepers you wish you’d have seen here when you discover them a month after the gig. In other words, if you can’t find what you want here, you need to get out more. Summer Sundays is a killer day party on its rooftop, so you can tan while you twerk. Each of its four floors typically has a different DJ playing variations of the genre du jour: hip-hop on Thursdays, Latin dance on Fridays and a melange of techno, house, Top 40 and retro jams on Saturdays. But you will find Lipgloss, an award-winning indie dance night that whips up forgotten bangers on Fridays, when it’s not busy hosting indie-themed brunches and DJ sets from Arcade Fire’s Win Butler (who played September 10 at Bar Standard) elsewhere.Ī mid-sized venue in Denver’s well-established Capitol Hill nightlife district, Vinyl is the go-to spot for work-a-day weekend clubbers.
You won’t find a dress code or champagne mop in the venue’s surreal, Clockwork Orange-inspired rooms. Tucked behind a garage door in an unassuming alleyway off Broadway, Milk Bar prides itself as a club for people that don’t like clubbing. In fact, for maybe the first time in Denver’s club history, you can’t. Just remember: You don’t have to fit it all in one weekend. And for those who favor old-school raves, prowl the warehouses along city limits and you’ll probably hit pay dirt by way of Whirling Dervish, a 25-plus-year veteran party producer that hasn’t let the city forget dance music’s fringe roots.Īdd legacy clubs and, yeah, the whole legal weed thing, and it’s no wonder Denver’s relative middle of nowhere has caught fire. Invisible City, a secretive collective centered around a temple-turned-clubhouse in Sloan Lake, throws playful parties that evoke the costumed fun of the Burner community. DeepClub has kept warehouses, basements and bars throbbing with house, techno and other euro-style dance music for the past seven years, until recently in hard-to-find spots (they currently have a monthly residency at Zeppelin Station’s Big Trouble). You have to put your ear to the ground to find Denver’s most exhilarating nights. Promoter Ha Hau’s production platform Triad Dragons throws Denver’s splashiest dance parties in the heart of the city: The carnival-esque Global Dance Fest in the summer, held outside of Broncos’ Mile High Stadium, and New Year’s Eve rager Decadence, which regularly nets a who’s-who lineup on the biggest party night of the year. How Selling Out Colorado's Red Rocks Amphitheater Became a Milestone for Dance Artistsīut you don’t have to leave town to get your hair blown back. (Alison Wonderland, Above & Beyond and REZZ take over the Rocks in September.) The venue’s schedule skews toward dance and creeps into fall, so if you haven’t been, what are you waiting for? That might seem like a hike until you consider fans travel thousands of miles to catch a show there, below the stars and above the Denver skyline.
The towering, 9,500-person natural amphitheater is a 45-minute drive out of town. There’s plenty to keep fans here busy while they’re away: The biggest night of every electronic artist’s tour happens just down the road at Red Rocks. Now, artists like Late Night Radio, GriZ and Maddy O’Neal have run with that torch, playing pop-up sets on rooftops and small clubs on the odd nights home from globe-trotting tours. Local legends like Pretty Lights and Big Gigantic helped light the fire in the late 2000s, establishing the city as a funk-electronic haven. Swing through Capitol Hill or River North (RiNo to locals), two of the city’s fast-growing nightlife districts, and you’ll see that movement is already underway. But if fewer neighbors means fewer noise complaints, Denver is prime real estate for a dance revolution. If you’re fiending for a wild weekend vacation, the lonesome west probably doesn’t spring to mind.