James K’s 2025 album Friend was a singular piece of work: fractured electronic pop that existed in a space between club music and something far more personal and uneasy. So when she announced that AD 93 was putting out a remix album, the question was not whether anyone would step up but whether the results would match the source material’s strangeness. Objekt and Jasss, two of the most reliably interesting names in underground electronic music, were among those who answered. The results, at least in the two singles released ahead of the full April 24 release, are genuinely worth your attention.

Objekt’s rework of “Play” is the headline here, partly because it represents his first remix in over a decade and partly because he treats the original with exactly the right amount of disrespect. He keeps what made the source material feel tense and elastic, then reorganizes it around a rhythmic skeleton that pulls things toward the floor without ever fully committing to being a dance track. It is a remix that sounds like a conversation between two very specific sensibilities, and the conversation is not entirely comfortable, which is the point.

Jasss takes a different approach on “N’Balmed,” which she reworks into something she describes as a psych-leaning redux. That framing is accurate but undersells how much the texture has changed. The original had a kind of clinical precision; this version breathes differently, with more space and more static. It feels less finished, in the way that a lot of music that matters feels less finished.

The full record also includes contributions from Roza Terenzi, Priori, Drew McDowall of Coil, Arushi Jain, and several others who each bring a genuinely different relationship to James K’s material. That variety is either going to make this an essential document of a particular moment in underground electronic music or a scattered collection that serves no individual track particularly well. The singles suggest it will probably land closer to the former.

What makes Friend Remixes feel like more than a contractual obligation is the quality of the roster and the specificity of what each artist chose to do. These are not people who submit loop-swapped versions and call it a day. James K’s original album earned this kind of treatment, and the artists she’s invited to reinterpret it are approaching the material as if it actually matters.

It comes out April 24. If you have not yet listened to Friend, this is a good reason to start now and come back to the remixes with some context for what each collaborator chose to preserve and what they chose to detonate.