They played it around the world for months and kept it back: ARTBAT and David Guetta have finally handed over a track you recognise in the first seconds

ARTBAT and David Guetta have released a joint mix of Somebody That I Used To Know — the Gotye and Kimbra song that became one of the most played records in the world back in 2011. It arrived on Friday, September 4.

The release was uploaded by ARTBAT themselves on their own channel, while the comment came in a joint Facebook post by the duo and Guetta.

The original was written by Australian Wally De Backer, better known as Gotye, with New Zealander Kimbra on the second voice. The song came out in 2011 on the album Making Mirrors and spread across the world's radio the same year.

The track they played all summer but would not hand over

The most interesting part here is not the release itself but everything that led up to it. For months the mix lived in sets as an unreleased ID: thousands of people heard it at festivals, recognised it from the opening bars and could not find it anywhere.

Guetta played it at Tomorrowland on Saturday, July 18 — he says so himself in the description of his own video from that set. ARTBAT dropped the track during the festival's second weekend and in Ibiza at [UNVRS] on the very first day of September.

“Big day today: our mix of Somebody That I Used To Know is OUT. We've been playing this one around the world for months now and watching you all scream every word has been insane. There's something so special about the emotion and energy of this song. We're so happy it is finally yours,” the artists wrote.

There are two versions: the main one runs three minutes fourteen seconds, the extended one five thirty-six. The original vocals of Gotye and Kimbra were kept up front, and underneath came a heavy low end, cinematic strings and the mid-track build the duo is known for.

One more detail that is easy to miss: the record did not come out on UPPERGROUND, ARTBAT's own label. The rights to the original sit with Gotye's side, so the release went through his imprint Samples ’N’ Seconds Records under exclusive licence to Eleven: A Music Company, with distribution handled by Universal Music Australia.

Who ARTBAT are

This is a Kyiv duo: Artur Kryvenko and Vitalii Lymarenko, known by the nickname Batish. The name is put together from their own — ART and BAT. They met at the end of 2014, played their first show together early the following year and put out their debut release Mandrake in August 2015.

Then came Solomun's Diynamic, a DJ Awards prize for breakthrough of the year and the Stars of the Year title from Mixmag in 2019, a Cercle set on Sugarloaf Mountain in Rio, their own label UPPERGROUND from 2021 and a debut in the DJ Mag Top 100 — seventy-third place last year.

Earlier we reported how many Ukrainians made it into the programme of Amsterdam's ADE.