Producer Porter Robinson remakes SMILE! :D with Hatsune Miku, Galileo Galilei and 14 more

Porter Robinson has handed the songs of SMILE! 😀 to other artists. SMILE! 😀 plus+, out now through Mom+Pop and, in Japan, through Sony Music Labels, spreads sixteen tracks over two discs, and two of them lead straight to Japan: a Hatsune Miku version of “Cheerleader” arranged by Jamie Paige, and a cover of “Easier to Love You” by Galileo Galilei, the Hokkaido rock band that wrote “Aoi Shiori,” the opening theme of Anohana.

The rest of the guest list maps the scene that grew up around his records. Ninajirachi and underscores team up on “Perfect Pinterest Garden,” G Jones takes “Russian Roulette,” Leon Valley reworks “Kitsune Maison Freestyle” and jamesjamesjames closes the first disc with “Everything to Me.” “Within this last year, we’ve seen the rise of so many artists who I think themselves would say that they grew up on my albums,” Robinson told Rolling Stone.

He let each guest choose the song, even when someone else had already claimed it. “I didn’t want to force it,” he said. “I didn’t want to make them do a song that they weren’t feeling.” That is how “Cheerleader” ended up with four new versions: Nitepunk’s remix, one by Control Freak, the Miku rendition and Robinson’s own edit under the alias DJ NOT PORTER ROBINSON, the name he also shares with Ashelyy on a remix of “Knock Yourself Out XD.” “Is There Really No Happiness?” got three, from Frost Children, Atura and Joey Valence.

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Frost Children, the duo of Angel and Lulu Prost, are the only guests who also appeared on the original album, and they turn up twice. Their version of “Is There Really No Happiness?” turns the melancholic song into a trance track that runs past six minutes, built from vocal chops of Robinson’s a cappella, and they share “Mona Lisa (Maybe Mashup)” with G Jones. Robinson’s one note on their remix was to change a single chord so the drop would feel more euphoric.

Some remixes dig up where the songs started. “Easier to Love You” began as a Eurodance track inspired by Gigi D’Agostino’s “I’ll Fly Away With You” before Robinson turned it into a guitar ballad, and the Dutch hardstyle DJ Vertile pulls it back toward the dancefloor. “Some of the remixes are speaking to the DNA that was in the song from the very beginning in a roundabout way,” Robinson said. Galileo Galilei, whose cover of the same song sits on the second disc, are not new to his world: the band opened shows on his SMILE! 😀 world tour and had already recorded “Circle Game (Anohana Ver.)” with him. The original video for “Easier to Love You” was a stop-motion film by the Japanese animator Tomoyasu Murata.

“Year of the Cup” was the hardest song to flip. The original samples a Lil Wayne interview, and Robinson admitted, “It’s almost impossible to make a dance remix of it.” He found the indie-pop singer EJEAN through Instagram Reels and wrote that he thought they would make “the most heartwrenching version of this”; EJEAN answered with a stripped-back acoustic cover. Hearing someone else sing lines tied to specific moments of his own life, Robinson said, “gave me this twisted up feeling inside.”

He also named the ones that got away. Robinson told Rolling Stone he would have loved a K-pop act such as KiiiKiii or aespa to reimagine one of the songs, the way PinkPantheress recruited Seventeen for “Illegal.”

The source album, SMILE! 😀, came out on July 26, 2024, after Nurture in 2021 and his debut Worlds in 2014. Robinson announced the remix album on September 17, 2026, leading with the Ninajirachi and underscores version of “Perfect Pinterest Garden,” and released it in full on November 6, 2026. The Miku “Cheerleader” had been added on June 8, 2026, to the rhythm game Hatsune Miku: Colorful Stage! before landing on the record. The longest track is jamesjamesjames’s “Everything to Me,” at seven and a half minutes.

Robinson has said SMILE! 😀 was partly about the gap between who he is and how fans see him. On plus+, several of those fans now hold the stems.

Tags: electronic music, Hatsune Miku, Frost Children, Galileo Galilei, Porter Robinson, remix album

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