If you’re reducing Kygo’s remix of “Wait” to mellow tropicalia, ready to perk that shit up (as this review does) in a sunny but inoffensive way: throw out those thoughts and spin the dice of empathy again. This remix is devastating. For me, and for other fans of the original who spent 2012  on their backs trapped on an intergalactic mountain, floating  through the nothingness of your own life space, “Wait” was the sounding cry of “Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming” that made us  remember dreaming was hindered by sleepwalking. It shattered us in all the right ways out of our stolid lives. It inspired us to drop from the skies and believe nothing would catch us.

The beauty of the original was in the starkness, in the impossibility of stepping even a foot forward. But not doing so would be catastrophe. Sure, your life was all corpses draped elegantly, escaping that through disassociation from  the space of others isn’t living. The protagonist in M83’s song was knocked back into his own atmosphere, but only out of the sheer, explosive revelation that he could feel again. At all. For that person, feeling anything was a revolutionary act. Doing anything but falling from space would have been an entire series of wars.

But Kygo’s remix is a redux for the moment when you’re heart is a little stronger. It’s for when exhortations need to be said twice to yourself. Those tropicalia synths aren’t ‘good vibes’, they’re your artieries restarting, your muscles tripping up because they’re covered in moth holes from all the time you just.couldn’t.move.  And now you’re guiding that spaceship, yourself even intact, home to Houston. That’s painful as fuck, but liberating—especially in the chorus, which hits with a solemnity here that feels like a call to action we all could use.

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