John Summit & LAVINIA - Shadows (Ricky Remedy Remix)

The remix keeps John Summit and LAVINIA’s original vocal intact for a good forty seconds, lulling you into thinking this is a house record, before Ricky Remedy yanks the floor out and drops it into half-time bass. “Shadows” was already a big tune in its original tech-house form, one of those John Summit records that soundtracked every rooftop this year, and LAVINIA’s vocal is the real thing, smoky and a little desperate. What Ricky Remedy does is take that emotional vocal and weld it to a completely different body: trap-adjacent, bass-heavy, built for a much darker room. It has no right to work as well as it does. The tension between the airy topline and the guttural low end is the entire hook, that push-pull between pretty and ugly the best remixes live for. There’s a build about halfway through where the vocal gets chopped and stuttered into something almost anxious before the second drop lands like a piano shoved off a roof. I’ve heard the original probably fifty times this summer without choosing to, and this is the first version that made me stop and actually pay attention. Making a track everyone’s sick of feel dangerous again is the whole win here, and Ricky Remedy pulled it off clean. Worth it for the whiplash of that first switch-up alone.

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