Boombox Blitz: Brijs restacks Jai Paul’s ‘Jasmine’ into arousing banger
The pop newcomer makes his mark on a cool cover.
Welcome to Boombox Blitz, an artist spotlight series showcasing overlooked singers, songwriters and musicians who are quietly taking over the world.
Jai Paul blew the music scene wide open with his 2012 track “Jasmine,” which was originally posted to SoundCloud in demo form. The bristly-haired rough-cut number injected ice into the veins, its lo-fi buzz tingling the blood cells and then fizzing out onto the nerve endings. Brijs‘ fresh-pressed update slicks back those loose strands and forces the listener into submission. “When it comes to heartbreak, what’s a guy to do?” he puffs into purple masses of synths, drums and guitar, spilling over each other into a twisting, ominous funnel cloud. “I’ve always heard a disco banger hidden somewhere beneath the magnificent depths of the original and finally decided to eek it out,” Brijs explains.
Through his shrewd lens, upending the original’s grittier catatonic state, Brijs is able to rediscover a modern classic. “Jasmine” breezes by, a rather spellbinding display of the 27-year-old’s potential. “I can’t speak for Jai, but for me, this song came to represent insecurity in two relationships with people who were way out of my league,” he continues, stressing his personal stakes in such a deliciously jaunty presentation. “I wanted to frame that bittersweet place between the flattery of the attention from that person we are infatuated with and the anxiety of believing they deserve better. The song speaks to an underdog in love.”
The accompanying visual is expectedly spacey, reaching into the mind’s darkest corners for a lurking and profound imagination. As Brijs laments a break-up, his boundaries breakdown, and he cascades through space and time, defying logic and honing in on the most cerebral of notions. “Make my dreams come true,” he swerves into a dense, frigid orbit of cosmic dust, pressurizing the song even further.
“Jasmine” anchors Brijs’ forthcoming, yet-untitled, debut full-player.
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