The best remixes take a good song and make it better

Rounding up the best remixes means grappling with how baggy that term can be. A vastly different dance-oriented version of a song? Remix. A song more-or-less unchanged, besides the inclusion of a (new) rap verse on it? Remix. An old song sent back to the EQ board and given a fresh coat of paint? Often called a remaster, but sometimes just labelled a remix.

It’s the first two definitions we’ll concern ourselves with here. Both emerged around the mid 1970s, when the disco boom drove a demand for hit songs being retooled for playing in clubs, and the birth of hip-hop brought with it a modular way of thinking about music, with melodies, drums and vocals considered mix-and-matchable rather than being indivisible parts of a song.

Since then, the remix has become a ubiquitous part of pop, especially in the last decade or so, when digital music production and the “everything all at once” effect of streaming dismantled whatever was left of the integrity of individual tracks. Now everything is up for warping, extending and inverting. Here are some of the best remixes – and they might just top the originals.

“In for the Kill – Let’s Get Ravey Remix” by La Roux and Skream

La Roux’s “In for the Kill” was a compellingly anachronistic bit of 1980s synth-pop when it came out in 2009. That was when the bleeding edge of dance was dubstep, which was still (just about) a London phenomenon rather than one beloved by American frat bros. Skream, one of the founding producers of the genre, gave La Roux’s track an eerie makeover, complete with wobbling, overwhelming bass, and drums that – when they finally come in at 1:48 – hit like an earthquake. The breakbeat he introduces in the final section nudges the remix towards being a backwards history of British dance music.

“Step” by Vampire Weekend, Danny Brown, Heems, Despot