In 2011, French producer-songwriter Madeon mixed 39 of his favorite songs into a 204-second supercut of pop ecstasy. Nearly a decade later, a mysterious specimen named leroy emerged on SoundCloud with a rapidfire update to the format that fries pop anthems and underground hits in a tank of acid. The alias belongs to Jane Remover, who released a trilogy of leroy tapes under the jokey label “dariacore” in 2021 and 2022. Jane didn’t mean to coin a genre; the tag was a joke about how the leroy mashups were themed after the titular ’90s cartoon. But the label was soon adopted by a fleet of international EDM pyros who put their own creative spins on the high-BPM style. Dariacore has evolved into one of the most thrilling musical developments of the decade, and Jane’s fifth tape under the leroy handle, status update music, might be its most unwieldy experiment yet.
The genius of these mashups isn’t just their rattling speed (the style is sometimes also called hyperflip), although that certainly made them intoxicating to kids nursed on nightcore. This isn’t chaos for chaos’ sake; the real art lies in the nerdy design and deft manipulation of samples. Jane was partly inspired by the cybernetic beehive of “Sick & Panic” by Vektroid—one of the founding mothers of vaporwave, another internet-centric genre so reliant on samples it can’t be monetized. Producers pull the perfect seven seconds of a classic melody or memorable line, and the best stuff is silly as hell. In leroy’s dariacore trilogy, every obscene drop was eased by Yeat howling, “She eat me up like Beni-bachi” or the charming gibberish of cartoon gossip: “Think you can walk in here to the big boyfriend cafeteria to smoochy-smooch on my football man? Ha!”
status update music roars and gyrates like a more agitated sibling of Jane’s 2025 album Revengeseekerz, torching over 150 samples in a vortex of ragey EDM. When Jane isn’t madly tweaking the DAW knobs so popstars stutter like wasted cyborgs, they’re gleefully spraying a flamethrower of hideously distorted kicks. Opener “IF YOU THINK I’M A BITCH, YOU SHOULD MEET JANE REMOVER” unleashes something like a structural thesis, tearing from rock to jerk to bubblegum bass to hardstyle. The sweetest part comes halfway through when, blooming like a flower out of the radioactive heap, a chipmunked 22-year-old Britney Spears launches into “Toxic.”
As on Revengeseekerz, the composite of sounds forms a cheeky smirk: Dare me not to go harder. Behind everything is a sense of playfulness, the ultimate weapon against the cynicism, nihilism, or overwhelm that might result from confronting the omnipresent online availability of every piece of recorded music. Instead, Jane defaces the archive, turning a hard drive of frozen waveforms into songs that sound alive and optimistic.
Powering the reckless ecstasy is a new level of emotional specificity. “#BOYLETMEKNOW” functions as both a morass of quivering sound and a sample-collage text. The ghosts of a generation of pop girls—Tinashe, Carly Rae Jepsen, Doja Cat, Kim Petras—team up to call out to a boy who won’t text Jane back. There’s a poignance to the way the music comes out as a tumble of atemporal yet strangely coherent stems, mirroring the way memory can work.
Elsewhere, on “GET UGLY,” Jane channels Zara Larsson for what feels like a sci-fi manifesto depicting music-making and performance as a body-bloodying struggle akin to mortal combat. “Have you ever seen a pretty girl get ugly like this? Messy like this?” Larsson chants, her voice ripping apart in the smog of metal riffs and flesh-eating kicks. These tracks are basically Jane assembling a who’s-who of dream dinner guests and serving them a gourmet bomb. No one is spared: Waka Flocka Flame and Janet Jackson, SOPHIE and underscores, Pokemon and Donkey Kong and Counter:Strike characters all get blown up as Jane collapses the boundaries between regions and genres, mainstream and niche.
status update music trickled out in the form of loosies every few weeks, allowing listeners time to relish every cluttered detonation. Taken as a whole, the album’s polyrhythmic frenzy sometimes feels more numbing than electrifying. Compared to previous leroy releases, the tracks are longer (some reach nearly six minutes), more overproduced, and brasher; it’s not so much a dopamine IV drip but a full-on hydro cannon. By the fourth or fifth rawstyle freakout, the beats start to feel like an iron mallet whacking your brain. Jane could’ve lightened the load by pulling from leroy’s bag of tricks, like the completely unexpected genre switch-ups that decorated dariacore 3, or dariacore 2’s better ratio of goofy levity to ballistic drops. Instead, you have to wait patiently for the CPU-cooling piano and acoustic guitar comedown that hits two-thirds of the way through “CHASE THIS FEELING” or the glittery Willow cover on the closer.
Jane has described status update music as “my life as I lived it from may 2025 to may 2026,” a period that encompasses their Revengeseekerz tour—and the album’s exhilarated and exhausted feel probably reflects Jane’s long year of no-holds-barred mosh warfare. Indeed, some titles directly reference Jane’s near-fetishization of stage rage (“CROWDKILLING 101”) and tracks sputter with fan noise culled from sets and relevant samples: “I’m gonna need you guys to make out with the person that’s next to you,” goes a hyped-up Miley Cyrus at the start of the gale-force “LOVE.ANGEL.MUSIC.BABY.”
Last month at Coachella, Jane Remover “collaborated” with leroy for the first time with a piece of that song, taking the speakers to pound town with a doomsday “leroy remix” of their ♡ EP’s pillowtalky “Music Baby.” “KILL EACH OTHER!” Jane howled on the biggest stage of their career as kicks rained over the crowd and influencer types probably ducked for cover or got baptized. Between the flickering lights, on the edge of the stage, I thought for a second that I caught a ghost dancing giddily—the spirit of leroy finally escaping the screen.
