There’s nothing chill about Going Up. It’s a full-body jolt — dark, industrial, and alive with that pulse you feel before you even hit the warehouse door.
The new banger from San Francisco’s Truthlive (aka Evan Phillips) hits like a manifesto in motion — a hard reset where techno, hardstyle, and big-room collide in one brutal release.
After topping Beatport’s New Releases with October Summer and Love & Respect, Truthlive drops deeper into the rave underground — louder, heavier, more deliberate. Going Up doesn’t look back; it climbs through distortion and doubt toward something raw and human.
We caught up with him to talk darkness, sound systems, and why even the hardest beats can be a form of healing.
It’s not my favorite thing to admit, but I probably feel darker and heavier more often than normal these days. I think a lot of people do. Don’t you?
Going Up hits hard from the first drop — what sparked it?
I suppose going hard in real life. And for when the hard times are going. Both. If that makes sense? It is definitely a smack to the face kinda song. It goes hard. It’s very much not chill.
You’ve called it a shift and a return. What are you coming back to?
On Going Up I am coming back to the first emotional response of when becoming immersed at an underground or rave.
That intro feels like walking toward a warehouse — was that deliberate?
Yes. It was very deliberate. That was actually the core inspiration to the whole song. That along with the elevator sample I used for the vocal. There is this special feeling you get walking up to an event, the first time you can make out and even feel a bit of that bass rumble from the distance, feel it grow and more frequencies become clearer, walking up, getting to the door, through the door, all the way in. The song follows that arch. This song is warehouse, underground, and rave tribute music. Straight up. Nothing ambiguous about it.
This sound’s darker, heavier — what pulled you into that zone?
It’s not my favorite thing to admit, but I probably feel darker and heavier more often than normal these days. I think a lot of people do. Don’t you? If you have a head and a heart, how can you not? The world is still full of beautiful people, beautiful experiences, beautiful things. Yet there is also a big dark heavy cloud. This isn’t inherently a political song, and the fact it could be is something that probably won’t even cross the minds of most… but it also very much is, at the same. Fascism is a really dark and heavy thing to confront. Isn’t that part of why we seek community via raves, to escape and transform? Dark and heavy can be turned from sad, scary, and hard, to expression, joy, and connection. That’s a beautiful thing about music. Even dark and heavy music. It’s a way to process.
You blend techno, hardstyle, and big-room. What connects it all for you?
The thickest thread between the genre influences you can hear on this song is energy. High energy. High tension. Major release. Big and loud shit. It feels more like a marriage of techno and electro, in my opinion, but who’s to say? It doesn’t really matter, does it? It’s either gonna make you feel something and respond, or not.
Going Up — elevation or escalation? What does it mean to you?
I got the vocal sample from an elevator, literally, a real elevator. And elevators are a lot like life. We go up. We go down. We try to get to the place we want, get off there, stay there as long as we can, but in order to get there at all, or ever leave, we are going to need to go up, and to go down, along the way. That sounds like I am speaking in riddles, or being tongue-in-cheek, but I am being dead serious. So, it can be elevation or escalation, or many other things. It’s subject to who is interpreting it and what the situation is. That is also by design. I mean shit, this is also a great gym or workout song. Same energy, same going up mindstate. This track is applicable to so much.
Years around sound systems — how did that shape your ear?
One thing I have always known, but have come to deeper understand more recently-music is ultimately about feeling, not technicality. Genre is dead in my personal musical world and how I navigate it. Vibe is the ticket. Being around so many different types of music means I get to ride with lots of vibes. And that’s a way to live in my book. A way to stay alive and curious.
Chaos vs. control — how do you decide when to let it explode?
Do we truly decide when to explode? I am not sure it would be exploding if we had that much control over it. Life is constantly on the edge of chaos and control. Mere existence is such. Macro to micro. Relativity to quantum.
Rave culture’s back. How do you push it forward without repeating it?
Rave culture is back? Where? I am from the SF Bay Area. Rave culture never went anywhere. It’s been through cycles for sure. Different sub genres lead the charge at different times. Commerciality versus underground has its own waves. In that wave, I am not worried about repeating things. I don’t stick to 1 or 2 lanes to take it in or contribute. I think we can call back and repeat, and innovate. It’s all the same body. But I will also say it is cool to see how big they are everywhere now. It’s also not cool how expensive they have become in order to see and hear the big impact names. The festival rave model is amazing, yet also economically exclusionary. Maybe a lesson we can learn and not repeat is to restore some of the accessibility of raves. At their purest form, aren’t they really the safest space for all the weirdos, outcasts, and freely expressive spirits, irrespective of economic status? I am all for business booming and art creating a means for so many people to thrive, but the popularity of it all has drawbacks too.
When the beat stops, what do you want people to feel — release or rebirth?
For me, this song is more of a release to me than a rebirth. At least artistically. It felt like it needed to be made, and shared. It does feel a little bit like a rebirth too, in the sense that it’s the beginning of an extended run of intention for my music career. I had been on autopilot for a long time. I am in press gas mode now. I have releases ready to go. And this is track 1 in that sequence.
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