French producer Arthur Conseil — operating under the stripped, monastic alias ATH — has done something rather brutal here, and brutal is the correct word. He has taken m0n0 jay's stems and treated them less like raw material than like evidence at a crime scene, isolating and examining each element under cold fluorescent light before reassembling them into something that bears only a skeletal resemblance to the source. The commercial pop architecture? Gone entirely. The warmth, the camp, the high-gloss finish? Dissolved. What remains is the voice and the bones.

And those bones are extraordinary. The xylophone MIDI — which functioned on the original as a kind of pixelated sugar rush, a playful melodic hook — is here recontextualised as something genuinely eerie. Stripped of its pop scaffolding and dropped over ATH's relentless, abrasive trance/techno bassline (we are well north of 135 BPM, the tempo at which human civility apparently becomes optional), the motif transforms entirely. It does not charm you. It haunts you. It is the sound of something remembered incorrectly, a melody recalled at 3:00 AM when the rational mind has clocked off and left the subconscious in charge of the building.

m0n0 jay's soprano — piercing, breathless, described accurately in the press materials as "piercing" though that word undersells the physical quality of it — proves here that it was never merely a pop instrument. Conseil pushes it high in the mix not to foreground sentiment but to weaponise texture. The voice becomes industrial. It cuts through the bassline the way a fluorescent tube cuts through a dark car park, and the effect is equally unflattering and equally impossible to ignore.

The decision to release this as an Extended Mix exclusively on SoundCloud before its 21 May Spotify arrival is either astute or perverse, possibly both. Underground club DJs getting first access is the correct instinct — this track demands a sound system large enough to make your teeth feel loose, and streaming compression does it no favours. Played correctly, in a properly dark basement at the correct hour, the Candy Gym conceit pays off completely. This is not the gym as lifestyle aspiration. This is the gym at four in the morning when the power has flickered twice and nobody has left.

The broader artistic logic is sharp. m0n0 jay is demonstrating — rather aggressively, rather convincingly — that the viral pop identity and the underground electronic identity are not contradictions to be managed but tensions to be exploited. Most artists who attempt the genre-fluid pivot do so nervously, hedging, keeping one foot in familiar commercial territory. The ATH Remix hedges nothing. It goes fully, unapologetically into the dark, and it earns that darkness honestly rather than performing it.

On its own terms — as a piece of dark, hypnotic, physically demanding club music constructed from the recognisable ruins of a pop hit — L.L.L. (ATH Remix) is an unambiguous success. Power, not performance, the press release promises. For once, the press release is right.

*Released on SoundCloud now. Spotify: 21 May 2026.*