DESIREE Carries ‘Four Women’ Into A New Generation

DESIREE doesn’t really remake Four Women. She steps around it. Reworking a song like Nina Simone’s Four Women isn’t about changing it. The original doesn’t leave much room for that. Its stories are direct, unresolved, and still close to the surface decades later.

Written during the Civil Rights era, the track moves through layered portraits of Black womanhood, touching on race, identity and lived experience in a way that still resists simplification. Anything built around it has to account for that weight. DESIREE doesn’t try to take it apart. She shifts the environment instead.

Her version moves with a steady pulse, basslines carrying the track forward while lighter synths sit just above it. There’s movement, but it never feels like the focus has changed. The vocal stays central, cutting through everything else without being reshaped or softened.

“There are songs that already say everything,” she explains. “When I came to make this remix, I didn’t want to change what it meant.”

That approach holds throughout. A piano line runs quietly beneath the surface, holding a line between then and now. It doesn’t interrupt the track, it keeps it grounded, acting as a reminder that the source material is always present, even as the setting shifts around it.

What changes is how the song is experienced. The rhythm introduces a physical dimension, allowing the listener to move with it rather than sit still with it, but without reducing its meaning. The emotional core remains intact, just carried differently.

Sixty years on from its original release, Four Women hasn’t lost any of its clarity. If anything, placing it within a contemporary electronic framework highlights how little distance there is between then and now. The themes don’t feel revived or reinterpreted, they feel continuous.

In that sense, the remix doesn’t attempt to update the song or reposition it for a different audience. Instead, it creates another way into it. One that exists on the dancefloor, but still demands the same attention to what’s being said. DESIREE’s role here isn’t to redefine the track, but to hold it in place while shifting how it moves. And in doing that, she allows it to carry forward without losing where it came from.