Jessy Lanza - Slapped By My Life EP

The most personal music Jessy Lanza has ever made, and some of the most purely joyful. Released on Hyperdub in September 2025, Slapped By My Life is a bittersweet love letter written for her husband and frequent collaborator Winston H. Case while he was undergoing chemotherapy, the treatment cycle relentless and Winston largely bedridden, Lanza writing the song in the hours he slept. "I was desperate to feel something other than sadness," she has said, "to escape my mind and live inside the music, even for a few minutes. I knew this song would make Winston smile, and that was motivation enough."

The result is, remarkably, one of her most effervescent and dancefloor-oriented tracks to date, a co-production with Pearson Sound of Hessle Audio that moves at a speedy 158bpm with floaty, shimmering keyboards and rat-tat-tat percussion, bright and airy and saturated with a spontaneous joy that holds its emotional weight close to the surface. The wistful refrain "I'm gonna miss you when you go go go go" lands differently when you know the context, but Lanza has always understood how to make something that is simultaneously light and profound. The Existential Edit pushes even further into dancefloor territory, feathering the vocals and lending a fleet-heeled, footwork-inflected energy under the hood that gives the track a whole new dimension.

The physical edition includes two additional tracks exclusive to vinyl: "Limbo (Staying Home Dub)," a sleeker machine funk piece with a wink toward 1980s Madonna and Latin freestyle, and "Midnight Ontario (Waterfall Dub)," a finesse-filled piece of millennium-era UK garage that ribbons back to Lanza's earliest work and ranks among the EP's most quietly stunning moments.

Winston Case directed the music video himself, filming in New York City in a full-body cast and motorized wheelchair while being antagonized by FPV drones. The symbolism is obvious and it is completely, triumphantly earned.