I know how you feel today. You need to hear some sounds that recognize the pain in you now. What I’m about to tell you may or may not fit the bill. That’s up for you to decide. But if you want to hear a couple of festival favorites cover the Verve’s immortal Britpop classic “Bitter Sweet Symphony,” we’ve got you covered.

“Bitter Sweet Symphony” is, of course, the majestic orchestral ballad that became a global hit and then a huge legal headache for the Verve in 1997. Thanks to a string loop that they sampled, the Verve had to give all the songwriting credit up to the Rolling Stones, and frontman Richard Ashcroft only just got it back in 2019. Hopefully, then, Ashcroft will get some money for this new version? It would be nice if he did.

The Knocks are a duo of dance producers from New York. We haven’t really talked about them on this site since they dropped a Cam’ron collab five years ago, but they’ve stayed busy. Mark Foster, meanwhile, is the frontman of Foster The People; he is ready to retire “Pumped Up Kicks,” his own big alt-rock hit. Foster has recorded a couple of tracks with the Knocks, and the last one, the shuffling and ’90s-sounding dance-rocker “All About You” came out earlier this year. (The video follows Foster walking down city streets, just like Richard Ashcroft in the “Bitter Sweet Symphony” clip, but he doesn’t bang into anyone.)

Today, the Knocks and Foster have dropped their version of “Bittersweet Symphony,” which sounds a whole lot like what would happen if the original had a lightly syncopated club-music pulse running underneath. Foster sings it a lot like Ashcroft, though his voice is slightly whinier. The Knocks’ production is very late-’90s. This is basically what might’ve happened if Fatboy Slim had remixed “Bitter Sweet Symphony,” which honestly should’ve happened. (James LaVelle from UNKLE did remix the original, but that’s just not the same.) Listen to the Foster/Knocks cover and the Verve original below.

UPDATE: As it turns out, this “Bitter Sweet Symphony” cover is part of Melody & Silence, a new EP on which Foster and the Knocks cover several ’90s hits. There are also covers of Beck’s “Devil’s Haircut” and Moby and Gwen Stefani’s “South Side.” You can hear all of those below along with the originals.