Some remixes chase the club. This one hands you a tissue on the way in. Lykke Li and The Magician just reunited on Lucky Again, and instead of a festival banger he built a melodic house floor big enough to feel everything on.
He keeps it patient. Shimmering piano, a hypnotic percussion loop, synths that widen like the room is growing around you, and Lykke Li’s vocal right out front where it belongs. The first time that chorus lifted over the groove I got chills. Melancholy and moving at once. A lesser edit buries a vocal like this under a drop. He leaves it out in the open.
Here is the part that gets me. The Magician built his career on a 2011 Lykke Li remix of I Follow Rivers, and the two had never met until now. ’15 years ago, I made a remix that changed my life,’ he wrote, and after all this time he ‘finally received my first message from Lykke.’ The whole Magician run is here, from that Rather Be flip to this reunion with Lykke Li.
This is a sunset song, the kind that lands when the sky goes orange and half the floor is quietly in their feelings. Lucky Again is out now on Neon Gold and Futures Music, the first of a summer of Afterparty reworks. Fifteen years for a text back, and it was worth every day.
Listen on: YouTube · YouTube Music
