The Singles Jukebox

Emile Simon brings us an artist whose rejected stage names include DJ Sabrina the Teenage Carpenter…

[Video]
[7.82]

Emile Simon: The opening seconds of “Anything Lost (Can Be Found Again)” announce a song of towering excesses, and its eccentric intro keeps its promises. “Anything Lost” is partly catchy dance-pop, partly busy EDM, and always zany plunderphonics. The bulk of the song is made from a Porter Robinson-esque vocal chop paired with a swift house beat, but detours abound, from acoustic drumming, breakbeat passages, and sections where Sabrina’s idiosyncratic sampling takes the spotlight. Sabrina’s contradictory impulses in terms of sampling have always been a big part of her appeal, drawing from ’90s R&B to 2000s pop all the way to YouTube vlogs, but rarely has she made it sound so expertly woven in: Ashanti and Stevie Nicks (among many others) flash up for brief seconds, before the song makes other left turns. “Anything Lost” is also an exercise in tension building: the different sections keep upping the stakes until — in typical Sabrina fashion — the song reaches its climax in its last third by introducing a pair of frenetic vocal samples that serve as the song’s definite hooks. They would be strong enough to stand on its own for the rest of the tracks, but Sabrina adds an extra batch of synths and vocals, resulting in a psychedelic triumph. It sounds like abandonment — dive deep enough in the music, and everything will be alright.
[10]

Melody Esme: Okay, it turns out the wrong way to get into her music is “trying to find time for all three-plus hours of recordings she released in 2024 right in the middle of EOY season until you’re so stressed you turn it off,” and the correct way is “listening to one eight-minute track, singled out for you, and zoning out until you forget what you’re listening to but dig it a lot and think it sounds a bit like Discovery-era Daft Punk.” If I’m lucky, I’ll make it through her back catalog by the summer, at which point she’ll drop a five-hour album and I’ll have to catch up again. I will listen to that album, though. If you have a name like DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ, I’ll follow you into any abyss. Especially if our descent is scored by dance music this uplifting.
[9]

Iain Mew: The best evocation of the sound of standing outside a party since Mondo Grosso’s “Labyrinth,” except in this case it’s more like standing in a courtyard between several different parties, blissing out as the drifting winds change the mix to and fro.
[7]

Will Adams: Pretty, euphoric, fills the same slot in my brain that old Fred Falke productions do. But as the song stretched past the five minute mark, the luster faded. Is there a 7″ edit out there, or will I have to make one myself?
[6]

Leah Isobel: Sledgehammer-subtle, drenched in three too many layers of irony, and way too long. I like it!
[7]

Katherine St. Asaph: Pop as background music. I promise that’s a compliment.
[7]

Julian Axelrod: I have a vivid memory of playing this Miguel x Cashmere Cat remix in the car with my dad, who has wide-ranging but incredibly particular musical tastes. To my surprise, he loved it. “It’s like candy,” he said with a smile. “Candy can be bad, but when it’s good it’s really good.” I wonder if my dad would fuck with DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ, who approaches dance music with the maximalist mentality of a kid in a candy store. Why settle for one drop when you can have ten? Who says a pop song can’t last twelve minutes? If you’re constantly reaching new euphoric peaks, do you ever have to come down? “Anything Lost (Can Be Found Again)” is as thrilling as any song from Sabrina’s 2024 opus Hex, but analyzing her music in a traditional single context is like reviewing only the green M&Ms from a party-size bag. Whether you’re in it for eight minutes or 90, it’s hard not to get lost in the sugar rush of synths, samples, and spoken-word interludes. This is some really fucking good candy.
[9]

Ian Mathers: This sounds great the whole time it’s on and even at a mere eight minutes and change is strangely exhausting in its formless maximalism. It feels like it’s always peaking but never going anywhere; if this came on in the club I would enjoy myself but if they put on a whole album or even a few more tracks I would be so tired, physically and emotionally. I could say this about everything I’ve heard from DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ, which means I respect the work but I’m not likely to seek it out myself.
[7]

Claire Davidson: I remember listening to Makin’ Magick a few years ago, and the emotion it inspired most in me was frustration. Yes, DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ can frequently blend together a sweet melody with a catchy vocal line, for example, but her strategy of endlessly saturating the listener with bursts of concentrated euphoria, often without a real anchor grounding her compositional sprawl, paradoxically read to me as more false than not. I’m sure she’s evolved greatly over the seven years (!) since that release, but “Anything Lost (Can Be Found Again)” has many of the same problems I initially found in her work. I do appreciate the image of golden-hour music festivals the song conjures, thanks to its wistful vocal samples, bright, spacious synths, and thumping beat that feels pulled from a decade-old EDM track. That being said, the downside of constructing a song around a kaleidoscope of fragments, all of which seem to form a background for a centerpiece that never arrives, is that there are no real dynamic shifts to make the song’s richest moments truly rewarding. Combined with the stream of platitudes that comprise the song’s few intelligible lyrics, the experience feels, at best, like the synthetic imitation of a better product—its pleasures tangible but fleeting, and all transparently engineered.
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: The greatest version of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” is not the one that appeared in Titanic or the edit that featured on Let’s Talk About Love; it’s the “Dialogue Mix,” which ramps up the emotional valence by ramming out-of-context Leo-and-Kate line readings into its swell. (“Go on, I’ll get the next one!”/”No! Not without you!”) It’s a smash-cut to the feeling; three hours of film concentrated and distilled into a few freighted words freed from the bounds of plot or character. DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ uses dialogue the same way: as great vessels of meaning that gain power by being unmoored from the identifying source details that fix them in space and time. “Anything lost can be found again,” reassures a voice — no particular voice, but a determined one — which loops and repeats itself over the burbles and stutters of cheap post-Mylo filter house. If hauntology found the uncanny in lost artefacts of the past and chillwave discovered comfort, Sabrina finds connection. The future-that-never-was might not have been lost. Maybe it’s waiting to be found.
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: Me two minutes in: a classic. masterpiece. the best thing happening in music. Me four minutes in: this is kinda going a bit long, is the song almost done? Me six minutes in: this sounds amazing, how do they do this!??! Me seven minutes in: well done DJ’s Sabrina and Salem, you two are excellent DJs. Me eight minutes in: THEF-ITSOVERWHYPUTITBACKON Me 0:00 seconds in: a classic. masterpiece. the best thing happening in music.
[10]