A remix can be a footnote, or it can be a rupture. On Protected v2, Woesum chooses rupture, handing his Protected EP, released in March, to a roster of underground visionaries who tear it into radical new shapes. The result isn’t a tidy set of reworks but a parallel record, where each track is pulled into an alternate dimension and comes back sounding like something entirely new.
The source material matters here. The original EP was Woesum’s fourth project, a bass-heavy record that marked a turn toward more direct, club-friendly music. Where Blue Summer (2021) captured the raw energy of underground rap tapes and Paradise Tree (2024) drifted into lullaby-like ambience, Protected split the difference between trance euphoria and cloud rap melancholy. Built largely on instinct—many of its songs were finished the same day they were started—it tapped into the trance, Eurodance and house that Woesum discovered through his sister’s Limewire downloads, while keeping the skeletal bounce and emotional directness of the underground rap he came up in.
If Protected was a blueprint, Protected v2 is a stress test. Woesum handed the tracks to a small but solid crew of experimental producers—Kamixlo, Skin on Skin, Lauren Duffus, Hixxy, Joon Gloom, Eurohead—each bringing a distinct approach. The results prove just how sturdy yet pliable his material is. Unlike many remix records, there’s almost nothing redundant here, each producer pulls a track into their own gravitational field, emphasising different textures, emotions and intensities.
The new EP spins like a carousel of mutations. Skin on Skin opens by reshaping “Pressed” into punchy house grit, while Lauren Duffus drifts in the opposite direction, turning “L.L.L.” into something slow-burning and melancholic, closer to hypnagogic pop than club music. Hixxy pushes “Protected” into hardcore overdrive, Eurohead twists “Pressed//Protected” into a distorted blur, and the curveball comes from Jackzebra with DJ Ess, who recast “HowManyDays” as cloud rap, effortlessly pulling the project back toward Woesum’s roots.
Taken together, the EP feels like a curated dialogue—Woesum’s role here is that of a connector, bringing together producers from London, Stockholm, Sydney and beyond, asking them to map their own unique sounds onto one record. The international scope mirrors Woesum’s recent 13-date run across Europe and Asia, which has expanded his reach far beyond the Swedish underground where he initially made his name.
Usually, I tend to prefer original albums to their remixes—most of the time, you get a sense that the core magic has been diluted. But what makes Protected v2 compelling is that none of these tracks sound like polite variations. They take extreme liberties—sometimes brutal, sometimes tender—and in doing so, they highlight different facets of Woesum’s production DNA. Where the original Protected balanced trance shimmer with rap minimalism, the remixes push those elements to extremes, pulling the record apart in ways the original only hinted at.
The larger question is what a remix project can mean in 2025. If the old model was a marketing exercise, here the function feels more communal—a way of staging conversations between scenes that might otherwise remain siloed. For Woesum it’s also a way of marking how far his reach now extends beyond the Drain Gang orbit where he first made his name.