Cast your mind back to *Utopia*, taken around France, the Netherlands, Germany and the UK in June 2025. It was a record preoccupied with the body, ours individually and collectively, and with finding somewhere in the future for our feelings to live. Its mixture of Art Rock, Alternative Pop and Electro Ambient nodded towards Bowie's restless costume changes, Patti Smith's incantatory ferocity and Laurie Anderson's cool, wry futurism. It was cerebral stuff, but it never forgot to be sensual. "My Body" was the clearest expression of that tension, a song about flesh delivered through circuitry.
Enter Alessandro Baldessari, who met the band while writing orchestral arrangements for their night at Mexico City's Teatro de la Ciudad Esperanza Iris with the Orquesta Minería Pops. A man who has choreographed an entire orchestra around somebody else's melodies understands that arrangement is an act of generosity. Working with Utopia producer Zlaya Loud and Laurien SHE Snowapple, and passing through several versions to find the right balance, he has built something that feels collaborative in its bones.
The percussion arrives and stays longest. Layer upon layer of it, ticking, thudding and clattering, drives the track forward like a locomotive assembled from kitchen utensils and laser beams. Nothing fights for space. Each rhythm occupies its own corner of the stereo field, and together they create the sort of propulsion that makes standing still feel like bad manners.
The vocal treatment is the masterstroke. Baldessari chops the singing into rhythmic shards and rebuilds it as another instrument, so that a line which once flowed now stammers and ricochets. Paradoxically, this makes the voice feel closer. A singer fragmented by machinery sounds more vulnerable, not less, and the song's central preoccupation, what it means to inhabit a body in a world of screens and circuits, lands with fresh force. The original asked the question quietly. The remix shouts it across a crowded room, and the room shouts back.
Beneath it all, the bass synths pulsate and buzz with a pleasing menace. They rattle the fillings. Baldessari deploys them with a showman's instinct, surging when the floor demands release and retreating to leave those splintered vocals hanging in the dark. The tension and release is expertly paced, and by the closing stretch the track has the flushed, breathless momentum of the last hour of a very good party.
Crucially, the songwriting survives. Remixes too often flatten a tune under production bravado, but here the melodic architecture of the original remains visible beneath the strobing surface, like a handsome building under festival lights. Devotees of *Utopia* will recognise a favourite in new clothes, and newcomers need no homework to be swept along.
It also serves as a graceful curtain call. Arrived with a companion remix of "She Ella" on Friday 18 September, a year after the album, it closes the book on the Cyborg Art Pop phase before the band return to the studio to reinvent their sound once more. Given that Snowapple have spent fourteen years refusing to repeat themselves, the next chapter will be worth the wait.
For now, this is a gloriously noisy, intelligent and surprisingly tender goodbye. Play it loud, preferably in company.