Psytrance does not ask for your permission. It finds the frequency your nervous system is already running on and turns it up until you stop thinking and start moving, and that’s what happens when M0n0 jay’s ‘L.L.L. (Lift, Lift, Lick It)’ gets the remix treatment. The original was glitter gym pop with a filthy double meaning baked into every bar. This version strips the sweetness down to the signal and pumps that signal through a floor running at full tilt until your legs give. EDM and trance at this level aren’t genres so much as they are physical events, and whoever handed this track to a producer working in that space understood that the source material was already about bodies doing things at maximum capacity.
The original production was playful and slightly menacing, a xylophone moving over bass that arrived in your hips uninvited. The remix keeps that menace and feeds it about 40,000 volts. M0n0 jay’s vocals sit differently in this version, the polish scrubbed off, leaving something that sounds like exertion pushed past its limit into something almost ritualistic. The Stockholm powerlifter who built her entire sonic universe around strength and movement turns out to translate fucking perfectly into a genre where the whole point is endurance.
The lyric that made this song is still doing its work. “Lift, lift, lick it / Lift your lollipop / Don’t ever let it drop” lands differently at 140 BPM than it had any right to. The gym floor reading and the other reading both survive the remix intact because the remix is, at its core, about the same thing the original was about: sustaining the effort, staying in the rhythm, not letting anything drop. That’s powerlifting philosophy. That’s also something else entirely, and at this tempo, with this bass underneath it, the distinction stops mattering. Your body already knows which one it’s responding to.
Oh, and for the initiated – M0n0 jay is a Stockholm-based competitive powerlifter who treats music the way she treats a platform lift: full commitment, no spotter, all her. She runs her entire operation solo, which means the chaos and the glitter and every filthy double meaning you catch in the lyrics are decisions she made on purpose with zero input from anyone else. Her debut concept EP ‘Secret Selfies’ opened with ‘L.L.L. (Lift, Lift, Lick It)’ as its lead single, and she calls what she makes “powerlifter glitter gym pop,” which is somehow both completely absurd and the most accurate genre description you’ve ever read. The remix proves the music was always bigger than the format it arrived in.
