Lil Texas at ZAI Las Vegas

Artist Profile

About Lil Texas

Lil Texas, born Samuel Barry, is a hardcore electronic music producer from Dallas, Texas, now based in Los Angeles, whose work defines a specific subgenre he has come to call 'Texcore' — a maximalist approach to speedcore and hardcore that reaches 200 BPM and treats velocity and volume as primary compositional values. His background is unusual within hard dance: raised with roots in jazz and classical music, he was a member of a band before shifting his creative direction entirely toward electronic production, bringing instrumental training into a genre not typically associated with formal music education. He attended Jesuit College Preparatory School of Dallas and then studied production at Berklee College of Music — a rigorous academic background that informs the technical precision underneath his deliberately overwhelming sonic output. He began making music in 2012 and had his formal hard dance debut at Basscon: Wasteland in 2018, the Basscon event series that also programmes wasteLAND at EDC Las Vegas — creating a direct institutional connection between his live performance context and the stage he now headlines. The Basscon audience's appetite for the fastest and most intense end of the hard dance spectrum aligns precisely with Lil Texas's output: his 200 BPM Texcore represents the outer limit of what contemporary hard dance production reaches in a club or festival context, making him one of the most sonically extreme live acts on any festival programme. Source: edm.fandom.com/wiki/Lil_Texas, insomniac.com/music/artists/lil-texas, tunicastudio.com/lil-texas-hardness-loudness-and-speed