Remix Albums Are Helping Pop Acts Live in the Moment Longer — And Feel Less Alone

In an exclusive interview, Porter Robinson discusses Smile :D Plus+, a collaborative remaking of his last album that builds on a trend led by Charli XCX, Zara Larsson, PinkPantheress, and more

When Underscores joined Porter Robinson on the Smile! : D tour in 2025, she noticed something unusual about his set. “Perfect Pinterest Garden,” a showy deep cut from the musician’s third studio album, didn’t sound quite the same. 

“You’re playing it one semitone down,” she told him. Underscores would know — it’s her favorite song on the maximalist pop record released in 2024, and she has an affinity for any song played in its original key. When Robinson made the adjustment during his next soundcheck, he saw her beaming.

That exact level of perception and specificity made Underscores a perfect recruit for Smile! : D Plus+, an ambitious remix album that dismantles and reassembles Smile! : D with appearances from 16 artists. During his hunt for collaborators, Robinson looked for people who bleed music. “They just care, and they’re actually deeply passionate, and the details matter,” he tells Rolling Stone. “The things that people might not even be able to hear — those things matter to them.” Underscores put her expertise to work on an explosive new version of “Perfect Pinterest Garden” alongside fellow pop disrupter Ninajirachi.

“[Underscores] and Nina just brought all of the life back into it,” Robinson says. “The added verses, the re-recorded parts, the way it’s kind of turned into an electro dance remix — it’s just brimming with life now.” 

Remix albums have been common practice for decades, but as audience attention spans dwindle and artists look for creative partnerships that are more personal than transactional, the pop remix album has an even greater function. Smile! : D Plus+ follows recent releases from PinkPantheress, Zara Larsson, Charli XCX, and more in pouring a little more love and a little more life into community and collaboration. 

After the Smile! : D tour ended, Robinson passed his time playing DJ sets that turned up the energy on some of his most contemplative songs. Smile! : D is his most cerebral release, a meticulous assessment of parasocial fan culture and external pressure that turns inwards. “I realized that a lot of people in the world had this notion of me that was just a totally incomplete piece of the picture, and that was scary to me,” Robinson says. He communicates so much on the record, but figured if anyone didn’t get it the first time, Smile! : D Plus+ might break through to them. “I care so much more about my pop songs than about high energy DJing,” he says. “I like both, but I care about my songs the very most.” 

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Robinson gave his Smile! : D Plus+ guests their pick of the original track list. “I didn’t want to force it,” he says. “I didn’t want to make them do a song that they weren’t feeling.” This applied even to songs already claimed by other artists — it’s why there are four new versions of “Cheerleader” and three of “Is There Really No Happiness?”, including one from Frost Children. The electronic duo of Angel and Lulu Prost are the only featured guests who also appeared on the original album. But where “Mona Lisa” takes a classic pop approach to affection, their distortion of the melancholic “Is There Really No Happiness?” amplifies progressive trance gate elements Robinson hinted at on his own. He’s always felt the song never got its proper due. 

“I always thought if you stripped the instrumental and just heard the vocal, you would hear it as this beautiful EDM melody,” says Lulu. “I wanted to pick one that wasn’t already pretty hype and turn it into something a lot more crazy.” Angel started by crafting a melody out of vocal chops from Robinson’s acapella recording. Frost Children’s dance music DNA took over from there. The final version runs for seven minutes, nearly twice as long as the original. “You could play this entire thing in a set and it takes you on a journey you get lost in,” Lulu adds. “Old trance songs are like 10 minutes long, and it’s just looping, and then finally a euphoric melody comes in.”

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Frost Children attempted to trim their edit down, but found themselves wondering, “What’s the point of making a remix if you’re gonna compromise everything again, anyways?” These days, the duo have an influx of remix requests coming in. Signing on for Smile! : D Plus+ was an obvious yes — Lulu got a tattoo for Robinson’s album Worlds when they were 17 and attempted to hide it from him while they worked together. “In high school, that era of Porter’s music meant a lot to us and still does,” they say. “I was too embarrassed to show him.” When Lulu finally revealed it, Robinson admitted he knew the whole time.

“Within this last year, we’ve seen the rise of so many artists who I think themselves would say that they grew up on my albums,” Robinson says. Being able to call on those artists now positions him as something of a mentor, but he’s also a fan. “Ninajirachi, Underscores, Frost Children, they’re forging their own path,” he adds. “They have a machete and they’re cutting through the wilderness and discovering something new.” The admiration is mutual, even as they become collaborators and friends. “All of us are gagged that we’re talking to him,” Angel says. 

Robinson liked the Frost Children version of “Is There Really No Happiness?”, but suggested they change just one chord to create a more euphoric feeling. It made all the difference. Before, Frost Children were never really sure how to make notes without overstepping. It’s something they’ll carry into their own work. Compromise is an essential component of collaboration — like when producer Margo XS had to sacrifice some of the ambient dreamscape French musician Malibu created for “Saturn’s Return” from Zara Larsson’s expansive remix album Midnight Sun: Girl’s Trip. 

“It was definitely too sleepy to get everybody, including the label, on board to put on a mainstream pop remix album,” Margo says. She restructured the song with songwriter Helena Gao, but saved Malibu’s mystique for the end, which brought an airy feel to its introspection. Margo and Larsson went into Girl’s Trip imagining what it would be like to make Midnight Sun over again, this time with the creative familiarity they’ve fortified in the past year. In that time, the album marked a true, long-awaited breakout for Larsson. Girl’s Trip allowed her to let that moment breathe, and share it with 13 other artists, including Margo, JT, Tyla, Robyn, and more.

Larsson initially planned to release a traditional deluxe edition of Midnight Sun, with a few remixes and new songs. But Margo and MNEK, who also worked on the record, “felt a lot of freedom and excitement by being able to take these stems and flip them on their head.” It’s how they ended up with an elevated R&B version of “Blue Moon” featuring Kehlani. Robinson felt similarly revitalized by stripping back to the bare bones. “Some of the remixes are speaking to the DNA that was in the song from the very beginning in a roundabout way,” he says. “Easier to Love You,” for example, started as a Eurodance song inspired by Gigi D’Agostino’s “I’ll Fly Away With You,” but ended up as a sensitive guitar ballad. Smile! : D Plus+ brought that original sound back through Dutch hardstyle DJ Vertile. 

Margo describes the art of the remix album as community building, and sees it as a response to years of indifferent pop features that seemed to serve little creative purpose beyond boosting streams. “OK, you got this feature — but the production doesn’t change over it. It feels phoned in. It feels like you were just trying to maybe combine audiences and get some more love from the algorithm gods,” she says. “People got a bit fatigued from that way of working.” A remix album, on the other hand, “makes it feel very intentional in these collaborations and allows people’s identities to really flourish, and then continue to create a community around a certain style of music.”

The creation of Girl’s Trip overlapped with the release of Fancy Some More?, a remix album from PinkPantheress that revamped her mixtape Fancy That? “We were definitely inspired by her willingness to platform alternative producers and alternative voices on a pop record,” Margo says. The project features everyone from JADE and Anitta to Basement Jaxx and Kaytranada. “It just made it feel like the sky was the limit in terms of what we could do in terms of production and features.” Like, Smile! : D Plus+, Fancy Some More? includes multiple configurations from different artists. There’s a version of “Stateside” with Kylie Minogue, another with Bladee, another with Groove Armada, and of course, the breakout remix featuring a killer verse from Larsson. 

After trading aesthetics in the “Stateside” video, PinkPantheress and Larsson appear together again on the Girl’s Trip version of “Midnight Sun.” An innovative producer herself, PinkPantheress and her collaborator Count Baldor worked closely with Margo to shape the song. “I really relate to how committed she is to doing a sonic aesthetic across a whole record,” Margo says. Charli XCX was in the same headspace when she released Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat in 2024. “There’s still so many different versions of that song that could be made using a tiny element of the production from the original, or a tiny reference to a lyrical concept, or a literal lyric,” she said at the time. “It can all be deconstructed and put back together again. Why not? Why just be like, ‘It’s the album, and it’s done?’”

The possibilities are endless, especially when it comes down to locking down features. For Girl’s Trip, Larsson reached out to potential collaborators via DMs, shifting her approach depending on whether she already had an existing relationship with them. Sometimes MNEK made the connection. Margo can’t quite remember which route led to Shakira featuring on “Eurosummer,” but does recall the craziness of that particular yes. “We gotta figure this out,” she thought. “We gotta make this a bop.” It wasn’t the only version they made. There’s a “Eurosummer” remix with Romanian dance-pop stars Alexandra Stan and Inna sitting on a computer somewhere. “I know that has been very wanted by the internet, and there were a lot of rumors going around about it,” Margo says. “It does exist. That’s all I can say.”

Robinson’s process was far more free-flowing in comparison. He primarily reached out to friends and people he thought would be cool to spotlight, like the indie-pop singer EJEAN who he found through a twist of fate (read: Instagram Reels, in an incredibly rare instance, he says). “I would love to hear your version of ‘Year of the Cup’ because I think you would make the most heartwrenching version of this,” Robinson said in a message to EJEAN. 

“Year of the Cup” is not really the kind of song you can flip. The original ballad samples a Lil Wayne interview from 2009 in a way that is both disjointed and completely enchanting. “It’s almost impossible to make a dance remix of it,” Robinson says. EJEAN covered it instead. Their stripped back acoustic version is the standout moment on Smile! : D Plus+. 

It struck Robinson to process someone else singing words that hold so much weight to him. “When I heard them say ‘something’s in the air like vanilla,’ or these experiences where I know specifically where my two feet were in the world when those moments happened in my real life,” he says, “it gave me this twisted up feeling inside. It was like, ‘I wonder what that means to them.’” Even beyond lyrics, the sheer tone of a voice can communicate emotion so differently. Turnstile showed as much with Never Enough: Versions, a 22-track cover project with a host of guests including Hayley Williams, Elton John, and A. G. Cook. “You put everything into making an album,” Robinson says. “Anything that you can do to refresh it and remind people of its importance and remind people of what it means to you, and extend its lifespan culturally — I think there’s good reasons to do that.”

There’s a certain trust and vulnerability required to let another artist reconfigure songs born from such specific experiences and perspectives. Sometimes, doubt gets in the way. Robinson considered reaching out to Jane Remover to participate in Smile! : D Plus+ through the rapper-producer’s EDM side project, Leroy. There were threads of influence and connection there, but they hadn’t properly met before, so he decided against it. “I was too shy to ask,” he says. “I should have just asked.” He would have also loved to hear something from Smile! : D reimagined by a K-pop artist, like KiiiKiii or Aespa, similar to how PinkPantheress recruited Seventeen for “Illegal.” 

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These crossovers are as exciting for the artists as they are for the audience. They offer something new without completely compromising the original listeners fell for, while also potentially expanding their palette. “It’s a non-algorithmic, non-AI way of finding new things you like, and you’ll never find the end of things that you like,” says Angel. The special moments created on these projects — whether something as explosive as “Stateside,” or Lorde and Charli XCX working it out on the “Girl, So Confusing” remix, or Robinson pouring back into a lineage of his own influence — are the product of true connection.

“It’s so amazing for me to be able to hold hands with those people and the respect is so mutual,” Robinson says. “And doing it as a way of celebrating the album, it’s a win-win for everybody.”