Acid Overdose (Blutonium Boy Mix) by DJ Neo

This is a fascinating choice for today, because this is a song that straddles a few lines.  Is it an acid song?  A hardtrance song? A hardstyle song?

Discogs calls it hardstyle and hardtrance, but of course, that's just a user-submitted set of labels and doesn't necessarily have to be definitive.  Curiously, it doesn't call it acid, which it obviously is as well.

Honestly, I think the DJ Neo Mix tends to be more hardtrance and this Blutonium Boy mix tends to be more overtly hardstyle.  That's sometimes true for other songs too—"Hardstyle Nation" in spite of the title, is clearly a hardtrance song when mixed by DJ Neo (although the Blutonium Boy mix is a classic of early hardstyle rather than hardtrance.)

But again; it's always curious that the lines between these genres are not hard, fast and easy to spot.  Plenty of tracks cross over them freely and ignore them to a great degree.

When I do "Contatto" one of these days, I'll have to do the one credited to Pacific Link and with a Luca Antolini mix, but I'll also put the one credited to Luca Antolini vs Steve Hill called RVRS Bass Mix.  That, more than most other songs I have, shows that telling hardstyle from hardtrance can be very difficult, because they're the same song with the same structure, and there's not a lot to separate them other than the addition of a bassline that sounds a bit more reversed in the one version vs the other.

Although, to be fair, that's a hardstyle song that sounds a lot like trance on the RVRS BASS version, and a hardtrance that shades towards hardstyle on the Pacific Link version.