Lorenzo Senni is an Italian producer who grew up straight-edge, playing in punk and hardcore bands in the town of Cesena, Italy, on the Adriatic coast. It’s a tourist destination, full of clubs with glass pyramids that stay open until dawn. In the late ’90s, when Senni was a teenager in skinny jeans, those clubs were pounding with trance.

Senni, who is 35, studied musicology in college, so he understands how to analyze a genre clinically; his punk background allows him a certain irreverence for those rules. On his most recent single, “The Shape of Trance to Come,” he strips away most of the fat from the genre. His songs plant a flag in trance’s concept of the buildup, but by removing the reverb, he leaves a sharp, brittle attack.

“I always experienced this music without taking any drugs or drinking any alcohol, being the only sober one,” Senni says. “So I tried to replicate and describe this approach in the music too—how would this music sound without that context around?”

Senni’s relationship to trance is based on nostalgia, but his generation’s experience with the sound is different from the millions of people who follow the strains of trance that are worshiped at festivals. They are dismantling its structure, examining it like an artifact. How do utopian sounds from late capitalism work in a Europe wobbling from economic and political changes?

Much of Senni’s early work is experimental, but when he started revisiting trance, he spliced buildups from trance songs into one long composition that he would perform live (he’s been building an archive of breakdowns for years). This enraged people.

“I had very, very weird responses, like people coming to me, saying like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ The middle finger—very angry people. ‘Man, where is the drop? Play some music!’” Senni recalls, laughing. “My relation to trance is always this expectation, the way it builds up: When the kick arrives, you are exploding with euphoria, but then you get bored again. That’s why EDM put this to an extreme: You need a buildup and a drop every 30 seconds. It’s globalization, you know?”

The starker version of trance that Senni and his peers have explored are now like sonic austerity measures—a market correction. In Stockholm, Cristian Dinamarca has been splicing those melodies into Latin rhythms. Dinamarca, 32, moved to Sweden with his family from Chile when he was 2, and grew up in the city’s outskirts, where pockets of immigrants lived. Hip-hop and trance were the sounds of those neighborhoods, and when Dinamarca was 13, he was in an afterschool program that taught kids how to DJ. The instructor used trance to help the kids learn, and the bug caught Dinamarca and his friends, who would run home from school at lunch to check on the songs they were downloading on slow connections.

The late ’90s were the early years of Love Parade, the wildly popular German dance music festival that drew audiences from across Europe. For Dinamarca and his friends, it was akin to a pilgrimage to Mecca. “But when I was 18, I realized that maybe that festival was kind of corny,” he says, laughing. “Like, you grow up.”

A few years ago, Dinamarca started sifting through YouTube, looking for the anthems of his childhood. He had been trying to fit the originals into his DJ sets, but the aesthetics weren’t working.

“The melodies fit, but the drops and the beat didn’t. It’s really straightforward music. What I play now usually has a lot more rhythm,” he says. “I always try to play for your lower body, not for your upper body. And I feel like trance music is just for your upper body. You stand like this [extends arms upward]—you’re not dancing sexy or anything.”

Himnos, an EP of Dinamarca’s trance hybrids, is a lusher examination of the sound than Senni’s work. Dinamarca keeps many of the ornaments but imagines them on a different dancefloor. (There’s a link to trance’s roots in the sample of a sample of Vangelis’ score for Blade Runner, which Oakenfold featured prominently in his 1994 “Goa mix” for BBC’s Radio 1, one of the most significant moments in the genre.)

This younger European generation’s relationship to trance is an inevitable step in the progression of electronic dance music. Trance is now in the part of a cultural cycle where it is discovered and used as a springboard for an entire subset of Europe’s population.

“Vinyl DJs and a lot of serious techno guys are not gonna touch trance because they find it tacky,” says Linda Lee. “But you see this open-minded young wave of people who just take what they want out of it.”

Lee mixes trance into her sets full of hip-hop and trap, but, like Senni, she sees the potential of playing with the form: She likes to slow trance songs way down and unleash them on audiences who may not have any idea what they are listening to. And like Dinamarca, she is part of a generation of Europeans who can look past the stigma of trance and explore the parts of it that may contain value to them.