Galantis knew he was playing with fire.For the Miike Snow member and co-writer of Britney Spears’ ‘Toxic,’ his new EP offers another personal lens on his creative approach.
While 2024’s Rx album explored neurodivergence and music’s therapeutic role, his latest project offering turns toward the songs that captured his imagination as a listener and the creative possibilities still waiting inside them, years after that initial connection took hold.Out now via Counter Records, The Devil’s Tax Return: Volume 1 finds the chart-topping producer reworking six songs spanning generations and genres.
Among them is a new interpretation of The Killers’ 2006 alt-rock classic ‘When You Were Young.’ The song’s arena-sized melody was the draw for Galantis.In a press release shared with EDM.com, he explains that he wanted to loop his favorite passages while introducing a playful “garage-born bass and beat.” His description gets at the project’s central impulse to take the moments that made these songs stick, and find new ways to amplify them.
Getting there, however, required a late intervention.Galantis told MusicRadar that he had repeatedly abandoned the rework and initially submitted the EP without it.
During Easter weekend, he requested another 48 hours, sped the track up to 133 BPM and found the garage direction was what finally made it click.Elsewhere on the EP, he reworks Feist’s ‘1234,’ Frankie Valli’s ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’ and José González’s ‘Stay Alive’ from the 2013 film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty starring Ben Stiller, among others.
On the Valli rework, Galantis preserves the chord progression through vocoders and soaks the familiar hook in reverb, effectively reframing the track’s most recognizable passages without surrendering its appeal.You can listen to The Devil’s Tax Return: Volume 1 below and find the new EP on streaming platforms here.
Scroll to continue more from edm ...