For more than a decade, Randall’s Island belonged to Electric Zoo.The festival returned to the island nearly every Labor Day Weekend from 2009 onwards, growing into a 100,000-person event and New York’s flagship dance music festival.
However, it was marred by bad weather, messy logistics and alarming safety issues over the years.The final nail in the coffin was its 2023 edition which canceled its opening day at the last minute, opened late the next day and ended with fans storming the gates on Sunday.
Electric Zoo hasn’t returned since, and Avant Gardner, the Brooklyn Mirage parent company that bought the festival in 2022, later went through Chapter 11 bankruptcy.So when John Summit brought Experts Only to the same grounds in 2025, the debut carried tremendous weight for New York’s electronic music scene.
Summit was putting his own brand on a site that had become synonymous with festival chaos.Fortunately, the community had faith.
Tickets sold out, the event drew 50,000 people, and it filled the void as the region’s largest dance music event.This year’s edition, which took place over two days last weekend, raised the stakes again.
More than 60,000 fans came through across the weekend.In a city where local regulations, permits, transit and noise ordinances make large outdoor events notoriously difficult to stage, that kind of scale is rare.
Although the inaugural edition leaned heavily on house, this time, Summit’s curation stretched much further.From OMRI.’s indie dance to Taiki Nulight’s bass house and EDM Class of 2026 LYNY’s trap, the curation spanned across the electronic music spectrum.
Summit himself played 2 solo sets plus a closing B2B with Subtronics.Levity was revealed as a surprise dubstep headliner a month before the festival, and GRiZ’s saxophone-fueled funk-heavy set was his first performance in New York since 2023, which made Experts Only Festival feel extra special this year.
Just as important, the weekend...