AJ Solaris has been doing his thing under the M4TR banner for the better part of a decade — blending new wave, synthpop, disco, and funk into something that doesn't fit neatly into any one box, which is probably the point. Working out of Washington DC, he's quietly racked up 2.7 million streams across 4,000 playlists in 150 countries, and last year's Love Is the Revolution crossed a million on its own. So when it came time to figure out what to do next with that album, he did something pretty reasonable: handed it to two producers who know exactly what a dancefloor wants — and in doing so, found a way to carry his music, and the emotions packed inside it, into corners of the world it hadn't quite reached yet.

Those producers are not small names. Philip Larsen — Grammy winner, with credits alongside Kylie Minogue, Erasure, Soft Cell, and OMD — takes four of the five tracks and essentially rebuilds them from scratch, keeping the emotional bones while pushing everything else into club territory. Mr. Mig, who's worked with Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and Justin Timberlake, gets one song: Hooks, which he drags gleefully into Ibiza disco-funk and somehow makes it feel like it was always meant to live there.

Every track comes in two flavors — radio edit and extended version — which is how you end up with a 10-track album built out of five songs. It makes sense when you think about it: the radio edit is the song that fits into your day and invites to AJ Solaris's party; the extended version is what's waiting on the other side when the party turns out to be so good you stop checking the time.

Coup de Grace remix goes first because it's probably the most immediate thing on the album — the one with a chorus big enough to pull in someone who's never heard of M4TR before.

Philip Larsen keeps both guitars from the original: the quiet, almost tender one that carries the verses, and the funkier one that shows up for the chorus. Everything else gets rebuilt into something that doesn't stop. And that's the thing about this remix — there's something almost pitiless about how it moves, the synths especially, that sense of the world just continuing, the beat going, the dancefloor filling up whether you're ready or not.

It reminded me of the Pet Shop Boys trilogy produced by Stuart Price: that specific feeling of standing in the middle of a very loud, very alive room with something raw and bruised in your chest, the strobes catching it for a second, and then the music swallowing it whole again. Your pain is real, it's there, but the party doesn't care — and there's something almost comforting about that.

The vocals and guitars are the human part of the equation — and they hold their ground. The vocals are genuinely passionate, and the guitars are warm and human.

Probably the strongest impression from Coup de Grace is the chorus — it's the kind you sing with your whole chest, on that cruel dancefloor, surrounded (and likely joined!) by a hundred other people who've also been there, all of you broken and standing anyway.

Next up is The Spektre (Philip Larsen Do or Die Remix), and it's a strange and wonderful thing. The song is about obsessive love that lives entirely inside one person's head — a stalker who is completely invisible to the person he's fixated on. Which is a genuinely unsettling premise. But the groove built around it is sweet and welcoming: disco strings, talk-box (or is it vocoder?), brass, the whole thing lush and rich and almost overwhelming. Those dynamics — darkness dressed up as a party — is undeniable, and the music gives you no way out of it, same as the stalker gives his subject no way out of his head.

What Philip Larsen does with the arrangement here is quietly brilliant. The vocals get wrapped in synths that mirror and double them, and once you notice it you can't unhear it: the vocal is the person, and the synth layer around it is the web closing in. It doesn't announce itself, it just sits there, this second presence that moves with every word, and suddenly the song feels genuinely claustrophobic in the best possible way — the way a dancefloor can feel when you realize someone has been watching you all night. This version is close in spirit to the original but denser, fuller, loaded with details that keep revealing themselves.

Kill The Self (Philip Larsen Mad Dogs Remix) is a different kind of uncomfortable. It's about losing a friendship to someone's ego — that slow, hard-to-name grief of watching narcissism eat something you cared about.

The original already had that Depeche Mode and Gary Numan DNA baked in — the dark undertones, the careful tension. Philip Larsen takes all of that and just slams it into a groove that hits without warning.

What's interesting is that the potential for that was always there in the original — it just didn't go all the way. This remix does, and it doesn't look back. All that nuance and shadow the song carries gets this blunt, almost shameless momentum behind it, and somehow the two things — the darkness and the dancefloor — don't cancel each other out. They make each other louder.

The original version of Hooks was built around an acoustic guitar and a simple drum loop — modest, almost intimate — until a huge orchestral middle eight arrived and changed everything, pulling the song into something funkier, more Prince, more Chic. Mr. Mig takes that moment and spreads it across the whole track. The grandeur of that orchestral section gets dissolved into the mix, and those Prince-and-Nile-Rodgers guitars — the ones that only showed up later in the original — become the foundation everything else is built on. The groove that was soft and promising before is now a full disco machine. It's a remix that essentially asks: what if the song had always known where it was going?

Life Without Her (Philip Larsen Alchemy Remix) is technically the closest to the original of anything on this record — same bones, same emotional architecture — but the mix is bigger, busier, more populated.

And that extra density turns out to mean something. The original feels intimate, almost introverted, like a confession happening in a quiet room. This version puts you outside. The song opens with a reference to a busy street, and Larsen's arrangement makes you feel it — all that movement, all those people with their own lives and their own directions, nobody stopping. And somewhere in the middle of it is this person, heartbroken, convinced that life is over now because she's gone.

Except the music tells you something different. From up here, with all that space and noise around him, you can see what he can't yet: that life didn't end, it just got wider. It's a strange and quietly powerful thing to do with an arrangement — to use sheer fullness to suggest perspective, to make a bigger mix feel like looking back from a few years down the road and finally being able to breathe. And it's the right way to end the album. After everything that came before — all the obsession and grief and ego and loss — this one lifts you up just enough to remember what the music was for in the first place.