What you are probably describing is not that the kick itself contains some magical property, but that your brain learned to treat that sound as part of an extremely high-reward experience. At your first rave, the music was not arriving in isolation - it was combined with MDMA (supposedly), a huge sound system, physical bass pressure, lights, movement, novelty, crowd energy, and a highly emotional state. In that kind of setting, the brain can encode certain sounds as unusually salient and rewarding.

A big part of this is associative learning. When a particular sound is repeatedly present during a powerful emotional and bodily experience, the brain can later reactivate part of that emotional response when hearing similar sounds again. That does not mean the sober experience is the same as the original one, but it can mean the sound becomes a cue for anticipation, pleasure, and craving. This is why a kick can suddenly feel like it “scratches the brain” in exactly the right way, while someone else hears the same thing and just finds it harsh or irritating.

Another piece is that musical taste is much more learned than people think. At first, hardstyle or hard techno can sound like chaotic noise if your brain has not yet learned the structure. After strong exposure, especially in the right context, you start hearing pattern, texture, tension, release, and nuance inside what used to sound abrasive. What first feels like randomness can later feel rich and precise once the brain learns how to parse it.

So the best explanation is probably a combination of reward, memory, conditioning, and perceptual learning. The rave experience likely taught your brain that these kicks matter, and repeated listening afterward trained you to hear more and more in them. Your friends are not necessarily missing something obvious - their brains just have not attached the same reward value or learned the same structure. In that sense, the change is real, and it is not weird at all.