Review
Genre and Mood
Gorgon City wrote Unmissable as a bright, soulful pop-house single with Zak Abel on vocals, and DJ Anna takes it somewhere much darker in her remix. Deep house warmth, a house pulse and a techno producer’s sense of pressure meet in a mood that is hypnotic, groovy and full of longing, the original’s romance recast for a club at two in the morning.
Song Summary
The song is about someone you simply cannot overlook, and the original delivers that feeling with an upbeat, radio-friendly shine. Anna brings it, in Your EDM’s words, back to the deep end of house music with a heavy bassline and stretches it to almost eight minutes, using Zak Abel’s soulful voice in fragments and echoes rather than as a full pop performance. The memorable detail is the bass, deep and relentless, carrying the whole remix on its shoulders.
Musical Breakdown
Intro
A long, DJ-ready opening lays down kick, hats and a dark atmosphere, patient and focused, with no hint yet of the pop song inside.
Build-up
The rolling bassline arrives and the groove deepens, each loop adding a little more weight and a little more tension.
Main Section
Fragments of Zak Abel’s vocal float in, chopped and echoed, turning the hook into a memory drifting through the mix rather than a chorus to sing along to.
Bridge
The drums pull back and let the voice hang in the dark for a moment of longing before the floor gets its release.
Climax
The bass and drums return together with the vocal snippets layered on top, the remix at full force, hypnotic and physical.
Outro
The elements peel away slowly, leaving a long rhythmic tail for the next record to blend into.
Concepts in Focus
A remix reworks a recording’s parts into something new, and this one shows how far a remix can move a song along the line from radio to club. The original, written by Gorgon City with Jonny Coffer and James Napier, is a deep-house and garage-flavoured pop single of three and a half minutes; ANNA keeps the vocal but treats it as raw material.
What replaces the pop structure is the bassline. Heavy and rolling, it is the remix’s real hook: the part that moves bodies and holds the attention while the vocal comes and goes.
The length makes it an extended mix in spirit: long, sparse intro and outro sections exist so that a DJ can blend it with the records before and after. Compare how another remixer handles a Gorgon City single on the same remix album in Gorgon City – Ready For Your Love (CLOSE Remix).
Artistic Context
Gorgon City are the London production duo of Kye Gibbon and Matt Robson-Scott. “Unmissable” was released on 28 August 2014 on Virgin EMI as a single from their debut album Sirens and reached number 19 in the UK and number 5 on the UK dance chart. This remix appeared on Sirens (Remixes), released on 7 April 2015. DJ Anna, the Brazilian DJ and producer Ana Miranda, now known simply as ANNA, grew up in Amparo in São Paulo state, where her father owned a club, began DJing as a teenager and started producing after moving to the Czech Republic in 2009; she later became one of techno’s leading names, releasing on Kompakt and Drumcode.
Impact and Reception
When “Unmissable” came out as a single, Your EDM noted that the ANNA remix led the pack of alternative versions, contrasting its heavy bassline with the original’s pop-ish vibe. It is on this playground as an example of a remix that finds a second song inside the first. Give it the full eight minutes and let the bassline do the talking.
