Some songs don’t just exist, they haunt the collective memory, looping endlessly through car radios, dance floors and the internet’s more chaotic corners. VAN PLETZEN and SOSSI’s take on ‘Maia-hee’ knows exactly what it’s dealing with, and instead of resisting that weight, it leans all the way in.
The second single from VAN PLETZEN’s forthcoming fifth album, ‘Maia-hee’ arrives as something deliberately excessive. A fever-dream rework of the global juggernaut originally known as Dragostea din tei, this version doesn’t attempt subtlety. It stretches the source material into something louder, stranger and more self-aware, a track that sits somewhere between tribute and playful distortion.
There’s a knowingness to it. The original melody remains intact, that instantly recognisable hook still doing most of the heavy lifting, but everything around it feels heightened. Synths shimmer with a hyper-colour intensity, rhythms push forward with a kind of cartoonish urgency, and the whole thing carries the sense that it could unravel at any moment, but never quite does.
Peach van Pletzen frames the track less as a remake and more as a cultural echo, a melody that has travelled far enough to belong everywhere and nowhere at once. That idea sits at the core of this version, a song that has already passed through multiple languages, interpretations and generations now re-emerging again, slightly warped but still intact.
SOSSI’s presence adds another layer, pulling in early 2000s pop nostalgia and refracting it through a distinctly local lens. There’s a thread of homage running through the performance, not just to the original, but to the broader pop landscape it helped shape, the kind of maximalist, unapologetic energy that defined a particular moment in time.
Importantly, ‘Maia-hee’ doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is. It embraces its own absurdity, amplifies it, and turns it into the point. Nostalgia is pushed to its limit, then flipped into something immediate again, a track designed as much for the algorithm as for the dance floor.
What emerges is less a revival and more a mutation. Familiar, but slightly unhinged. A reminder that some songs never really leave, they just wait for the next version of themselves to arrive.
Stream it HERE.
VAN PLETZEN will perform in Cape Town this weekend –
Friday, 27 March: District, Cape Town with SOSSI
Saturday, 28 March: Die Naguil, Paarl with SOSSI
In May VAN PLETZEN is taking the “Maia-hee” magic to Amsterdam and London:
Thursday, 7 May: Luxor Live, Arnhem (Netherlands) with Early B
Friday, 8 May: Melkweg, Amsterdam (Netherlands) with Early B
Saturday, 9 May: Simplon, Groningen (Netherlands) with Early B
Thursday, 14 May: Halfmoon Putney, London (UK) with Early B
Go HERE for tickets.
