The need for speed: From Springsteen to SZA, where did the rapid-fire remix trend come from?

Between mainstream artists and emerging indie acts, sped-up remixes of existing songs are fetching millions of streams every month. Nadine Smith brings us up to speed on the DIY history behind the industry’s latest trend – and where it can go from here

For almost as long as there’s been recorded music to play, people have been playing it at the wrong speed (Getty Images)

To be alive today can feel like a perpetual state of acceleration, overloaded as we are with information and stimulus at a whirlwind rate. It makes sense, then, that over the past few years, pop music has quite literally been speeding up. If you’ve been on TikTok or hit shuffle on a ready-made Spotify playlist in the past year, you’re probably familiar with the sped-up remix: from mainstream pop stars like Miguel and SZA to emerging indie acts, artists have racked up major streaming numbers with high-pitched and extra-fast remixes of their existing work.

The result is exhilarating. Take “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” as an example. The Tears for Fears hit from 1985 is a classic pop/rock karaoke staple, but turn up the tempo and it becomes a thumping club beat. Meanwhile, a remix of Jason Derulo’s “Whatcha Say”, which samples Imogen Heap’s folktronica ballad “Hide and Seek”, has both artists sounding like they guzzled a litre of helium. It’s not just the voices that change; the extra-fast “A Thousand Miles” turns Vanessa Carlton’s iconic opening piano line into the kind of hyper-charged loop you might hear on an old-school rave track.

For almost as long as there’s been recorded music to play, people have been playing it at the wrong speed. It’s an experience we all know, whether that’s spinning an LP at 45 RPM or accidentally hitting fast-forward on a podcast. From chipmunk soul to the literal Chipmunks, there have been countless creative and commercial uses of pitch-shifting. It’s a technique that became even more prevalent with the rise of digital samplers that enable the human voice to be manipulated beyond recognition.