NYC Rave Girls Built a 10,000-Member Community From Post-Party Reviews

From Coworkers to Dancefloor Curators

Kseniya Sovenko and Mary Wolff met as coworkers at a digital fitness company, but their friendship solidified on a boat. In 2021, Kseniya invited Mary to Hot Honey Sundays' annual boat party after noticing the house music Mary played in her fitness classes. "There's nothing like locking in a friendship by being stuck on a boat with someone you're hanging out with for the first time," Mary says. "We danced for hours."

The pair quickly discovered they were "twin flames in music," spending more nights on New York dancefloors and dissecting each event on the way home. In 2023, they posted an unedited clip of themselves reviewing a Tal Fussman and Echonomist show at the now-closed Kings Hall. The video caught on, and they began posting monthly event recommendations. Demand pushed them to a weekly schedule.

Curation Without Snobbery

On any given week in New York, there are roughly 200 electronic music events to choose from. Sovenko and Wolff sift through them all, applying a consistent filter: will the event be fun, will the space be good, and will the crowd show up to dance. Anything listed publicly on platforms like Resident Advisor, Dice, or Shotgun is fair game. Events that aren't selling tickets openly stay off the list.

"Those communities and spaces should be protected," Sovenko says. "And if anyone ever reaches out to us and says they don't want us to talk about their party, we will absolutely respect that."

The duo rejects the reflexive disdain for mainstream artists. "Mainstream artists are good, obviously so many people love them, and you're allowed to like what you like," Sovenko says. "Somebody might come into the electronic music scene because that's what they found first since it was the most visible. Later, it becomes their gateway into the local scene of smaller artists, and we should support that pipeline."

But a headliner's popularity doesn't guarantee a spot on their list. "When Dom Dolla comes to town, we don't need to promote his show," Wolff says. The local events are the ones that need the oxygen.

A Discord Server That Became a Movement

As their following grew, one request kept surfacing: solo ravers, many of them women, wanted to know how to find people to go out with. In June 2024, Sovenko and Wolff launched a Discord server. It started small enough that every message sent a notification, but it quickly scaled to over 10,000 members.

A few months in, the duo organized a meetup at a House of Yes show. Around 50 people turned up. "We took up the whole dancefloor together," Sovenko recalls. "We were all in the Onyx Room just dancing so hard together, and anywhere I looked there was a friendly face."

NYC Rave Girls now hosts no-phones parties and continues to publish weekly recommendations. Their strongest credential remains the simplest: they actually spend their weekends on the dancefloor.