It is one in the morning and a Lykke Li song has somehow become a weapon, which is not a sentence I expected to type this year. Future Fear already lived on The Afterparty, the album where she finally gave in and made the breakup record a dance record, and Killen. takes that impulse the rest of the way. He keeps her voice almost untouched, that specific Swedish melancholy that always sounds like it is being sung through a closing door, and builds a patient, pulsing house track underneath it until the sadness has a four-four heartbeat. The restraint is the trick. He never buries her and never chops the vocal into confetti the way lazy remixers do; he just gives the grief somewhere to move its feet. There is a long stretch in the back half where a single synth arpeggio keeps climbing and climbing and refuses to resolve, and that unresolved feeling is the entire point of the remix. It is music for crying on a dancefloor, which is the oldest and most honest thing dance music does. The Afterparty was already her best work in years. This makes one of its saddest songs impossible to sit still through.
January
Chrome Daydream
Chrome stars, jelly hearts and holographic colour. A nod to the glossy, optimistic graphics of the early web.