Why Electro refuses to stay buried
In dance music, no genre vanishes for good. Styles retreat, go underground, or get dismissed as dated, but the beat never truly stops. Electro is the clearest example: a sound that re-emerges every decade with jagged synths, heavy bass, and a knowing wink at futurism. Its latest return arrives in 2025 through Swedish producer Anna-My, whose radical remix of Fernanda Abreu’s 1990 track “Speed Racer” brings the genre’s velocity and grit back into the spotlight.
Anna-My’s rework is less revivalism and more collision. Abreu’s original, a landmark in Brazilian funk’s evolution, already channelled the pulse of city life in motion. Anna-My translates that into today’s language of house and underground electronics, layering hypnotic synths and a surging bassline that mirrors the blur of time rushing past a car window. “I’ve loved this song for so long, it’s been a staple in my sets for years,” she says. Inviting Abreu to re-record vocals and bass in Rio turned the project into a dialogue across generations and cultures, proving that electro thrives when it mutates.
This mutability explains why the genre refuses to stay buried. Electro first surfaced in the early 1980s with machine funk pioneers, then roared back in the late 1990s and 2000s during the bloghouse wave. Each cycle coincided with moments when electronic music felt too clean or too restrained. Electro cut through with distortion and excess, reminding listeners that dancefloors also need disorder. In 2025, when minimalism and subtle grooves dominate, Anna-My’s remix feels like a deliberate rupture.
Another reason for its resilience is that electro belongs to no single place. From Detroit’s early experiments to Parisian bloghouse, from Rio’s favelas to Stockholm’s underground clubs, it travels easily, absorbing local flavours while keeping its core DNA: synthetic immediacy, speed, and exuberance. That borderless quality makes it perfect for the streaming era, where tracks circulate globally in seconds and younger audiences encounter it as fresh energy rather than nostalgia.
The truth is that electro’s nature is to come back. It is a genre of acceleration, built for times when life feels uncontainable. Anna-My’s “Speed Racer” is not just a tribute to Abreu but a reminder of why electro always returns. It thrives on urgency, on motion, on the feeling that chaos can be cathartic. While other genres settle into heritage status, electro insists on revival. And that insistence, alive again in 2025, means the car never really stops.