Canadian electronic duo Purity Ring give a slick beat makeover to Lady Gaga’s “Applause.”

Their headlining show at the Fonda Theatre and recent collaboration with the UK’s glorious Jon Hopkins on the low-key breakbeat jam “Breathe This Air” identify Purity Ring as top new talent at the tipping point. “Applause” is a particularly impressive remix for which Purity Ring’s Corin Riddick dismantled the original, pristinely produced material only to rebuild it from the ground up. Riddick explained the intimidating project to Dazed Digital:

That’s why I did it. It’s such a challenge, not only to take a song that’s been so immaculately produced and try and put our spin on it, but also to even tread in that territory. I listen to a lot of pop music in my spare time, and I just thought the chorus was just huge and had a powerful delivery and melody in it. I wanted to see if I could just craft something around that in a way that it would make sense to me.

He continued:

The first thing I did was delete everything but the vocals. With a remix I don’t think any of the original instrumental should be used, so I just listened to vocals on repeat and took it back down to a blank canvas – just acapella, to imagine what could be around it. From there I start kind of building basslines and chords around it, so I think some of the chord progressions and stuff I ended up using were totally different from the original song.