By Katie Li

October 14th 2025

If I’m ever driving while listening to 212 producer-DJ ali rq, steer clear and fear me—her mixes make stillness feel illegal. She DJs like the drop is the default state rather than a patiently-earned climax, hurling you straight into high-impact transitions that all but beg you to hit the gas. It’s perpetual velocity. Virtually no intros or outros, just relentless buildup and dropmixing that blurs every track into an hour-long, energetic combustion.

Take it from her Live From Earth mix, where the only extended lull is theatrical: the intro track, so epic, it’s fitting for an MMA walkout. You’re first thrown into party chatter (which appropriately includes someone declaring “I am crazy”), followed by a coy “hi, it’s ali” that quickly melts into guttural distortion—then comes her signature signal: “pretend like you’re dancing in a movie.” Within seconds, she layers instruments until the sound is EDM-fueled chaos: 8th-note vocal chops, whiplash backspins, a muffler-modded racecar’s engine that doubles as both a riser and a synth, and BPMs that never dip below 140. And if that’s not dancefloor seduction enough, she’s also got a talent for turning dirty talk rhythmic. Her Nothing Radio set’s first act is wordplay at its finest—loops of “do it from the back” transition into ” “f**k me hard” and, then, “bite my p**sy,” until the spell’s finally broken by a deconstruction of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”—linked loosely by words and, more explicitly, by an air of provocative temptation. It’s messy, it’s maximalist, it’s pure movement.

Yet, take away the CDJ and 4 am tweakers and, somehow, she’s even more exciting: recontextualizing voices from Tumblr favorites Halsey and the 1975 to 2010s electropop visionaries Icona Pop and Dev with sparkling, serotonin-soaked flips devotedly engineered for bodies in motion.

Operating in the same nostalgic purgatory as 10cust and Shigecki, ali rq is a pioneer of today’s remix culture that’s dedicated to reenergizing post-Y2K, pre-2016 mainstream anthems: symptomatic of some sentimental collective consciousness that’s allergic to most pop on the radio today; bar Tate Mcrae, maybe. It’s a phenomena that’s become contagious among Gen Z’s underground audiences, who I can only speculate both ¹long for the innocence which we first enjoyed music with (i.e., Kesha, Gaga, Justin Bieber) and, ²have developed a musical form of avoidance from today’s bleakness and division. Just listen to ali’s remix of Icona Pop’s “all night” and feel the anxiety leave your body and get replaced with a dissociative childlike joy… And while remixes have been pivotal to electronic music since its inception, this new ali rq-led generation of remixers is creating its own genre more structurally complex than a simple house or techno edit: some vague hybrid of electrohouse, dubstep, complextro, europop, and classic EDM. It’s got an innate sense of irony that stems:

1. In part from the awareness of how overplayed these songs have previously been, assuredly sitting in their release year’s Billboard Hot 100,

2. In part from the absurdity of how chaotic the song’s become,

3. And, in part from the fact we unironically enjoy pitched up, chipmunk vocals without thought.

Born long before she touched DAWs (if you’re curious, she’s a reformed Ableton user after switching from Logic early this year) or CDJs, ali rq’s remix instincts fittingly stem from that mid 2000s to mid 2010s era—Zella Day, Flume, the xx. True to her impeccable taste, she puts a special emphasis on Halsey, the only artist whose been lucky enough to receive more than one ali rq flip:

“Halsey is my favorite from that era because of her ability to create a world within her album, like bitch… she made Badlands! Can you conceptualize making that?”

Yet, it might just be her childhood favorite, Vanic, whose influences feel most deeply rooted in her productions, the Trap Nation icon who was also a Halsey appreciator and transformed piano ballads like Birdy’s “Skinny Love” into a melodic dubstep masterpiece. While different in genre and sound, it’s not far off from Ali's remix of frequent collaborator and popstar Cece Natalie’s “loud,” which takes the original’s midtempo, soft synth sound and turns into an aggressive club-ready banger that, true to her style, contains multiple drops that never get old. In it, there’s buzzy, elastic basslines, complextro-style glitches, heavily noisegated synth chords, and instrumentals that feel like they literally answer the vocals—all serving as part of ali rq’s signature production language.

Still, it’s her vocals that truly set an ali rq mix apart—not in the in-tact vocal stems of whatever pop song she’s deconstructing, but in the vocal mutilation that ensues when she chops them up and spits them out as pure syllabic and rhythmic texture. She’ll take something poetic and emotionally loaded, like Halsey’s “everything is gray. His hair, his smoke, his dreams,” and absolutely obliterate it into “ah ah oo it oo ah oo it oo ah ah oh oh oh oh it”: glitchy brain-scratching gibberish so addictive that crowds have literally started singing the chops back to her like it’s perfectly normal. (She credits Ninajirachi’s “Ninacamina” for the inspo—makes sense, both share a love for vocal chaos). And no one is safe from this vocal dismemberment; in her remix of Camila Cabello’s “I LUV IT,” we hear the faintest remnants of “I go soprano” get sliced into microscopic pieces and played like she turned Camila into a piano plugin. Maybe she’s pulling from one of her childhood favorite songs, Terror Jr’s “3 Strikes,” which also flexes iconic vocal chops famously rumored to be sung by Kylie Jenner (I’m still convinced…). She’s already called dibs on remixing it next, and I can’t wait for someone to make that 80 BPM cultural reset finally mixable.

We might have to exercise a little patience; she’s easing off remixes to double down on original productions, quietly plotting her takeover by sending beats to artists who will undoubtedly be unable to resist. The first taste hits this Friday with her work on MGNA Crrrta’s “Pür,” but until then, she’s everywhere. In NYC alone, she’s a staple—the Box, Le Bain, the Stranger, Jean’s Lafayette—where she’s witnessed enough unhinged nightlife (specifically, “dicks out, shit smeared”) to last a lifetime. We caught her just past 4 am, post-show at No Strings x Start Now Change Later’s “Dollhaus” event, where we walked from a corner deli to, according to her, “Bushwick’s most cursed corner” at Myrtle and Broadway: where she’s played one too many shows... She’ll pop up at a frat in Irvine (for some reason); jet to Berlin later this month; then, sweep across the entirety of North America on Isabella Lovestory’s Vanity Tour, an early career big break that’s taken up most of her September schedule and has just a few shows left you can catch if you’re lucky. 

Now’s the time: go run up her remixes, stay tuned for “Pür” and, per her request, “let her cook”—because when her next projects drop, you’ll want to sing the chops back too.

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Watch our full conversation with ali rq below.

Look familiar?