The Most Euphoric Needle Drop of the Year Is in ‘Anora’
Take That’s “Greatest Day (Robin Schulz Rework)” is the EDM anthem I didn’t know I needed.
The song pumps and blares twice during Anora, director Sean Baker’s adrenaline shot of a new movie about a Brooklyn sex worker who marries a fabulously wealthy Russian oligarch’s son. It’s the very first thing you hear, soundtracking a series of lap dances in a strip club, as the film’s star, Ani, sways her tinsel-flecked hair. And it comes back at the end of the blissy first act, when Ani and her new fiancé, Ivan, cap their whooshing romance with a quickie wedding at Las Vegas’ Little White Chapel. “Oh fuck yeah, I do!” Ani declares, in ripped cutoffs and a sheer bustier, before the pair hit a casino and declare their love to anyone who’ll listen underneath a giant screen of digital fireworks. The wedding montage in particular is an instant classic, made even more euphoric by the music pushing it to dizzier and dizzier heights. Holy shit, what is this song?! I thought in the theater over the weekend, gobsmacked.
The answer is quite simple, yet also kind of confusing. The song is called “Greatest Day,” by the UK boy band Take That, perhaps best known for launching the pop singer Robbie Williams’ career in the 1990s. But it originally came out in 2008, when Williams was no longer in the group—and when the boys had become men, with full-on David Beckham hair and stubble. The original “Greatest Day” hit No. 1 in the UK alongside a video awash in gold tones and sparkles in which Take That emote from the top of a Los Angeles skyscraper. It could be fairly described as Coldplay’s “Fix You” for people who think “Fix You” is too long and weird. Thankfully, that’s not the version featured in Anora.
Instead, it’s “Greatest Day (Robin Schulz Rework),” which sounds straight out of 2014’s EDM boom—when Calvin Harris, Avicii, and Galantis were CDJ prophets—but was actually released last year. Its existence is thanks to a Take That movie musical called Greatest Days, in which four adult friends get back together to see their favorite boy band of yore and grieve a dead fifth friend. (Take That’s synergistic lore is much more convoluted than I ever imagined.) I have not seen Greatest Days, but I feel confident in saying that Anora uses this song to much more powerful effect.
Which means the song’s, uh, greatness is largely due to one Robin Schulz. He’s a German DJ and producer who hit it huge in the middle of the last decade with car-commercial fodder like his remix of Mr. Probz’s “Waves,” one of three songs on Schulz’s Spotify profile that has zooted up more than a billion streams. (Yes, billion!) He’s been making music since then, ostensibly for people whose lives peaked in 2014; his 2023 album Pink includes a braindead refix of late Hawaiian singer Israel Kamakawiwoʻole’s version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World” and is somehow even worse that that description would suggest. But credit where it’s due: His “Greatest Day” remix is something to behold.
Even listening to the song on its own, divorced from Anora’s rush, is surprisingly satisfying. It hits every EDM beat you could hope for. There are fizzy build-ups before inevitable drops. There are little clap-clap accents. There is a breakdown, and then a snare roll, and then an explosion of aural cotton candy. Take That—along with another UK pop singer named Calum Scott, who was added to this remix for reasons that must involve contractual obligations—sing about seizing the day while you still can, “before we run out of time.” There’s a tinge of sadness and nostalgia too, just by the fact that the song comes courtesy of a past-due boy band and a has-been DJ; at least commercially, Take That and Robin Schulz’s greatest days are almost definitely behind them.
Baker, Anora’s director, mined similar soundtrack territory when he used Nsync’s “Bye Bye Bye” in his 2021 film Red Rocket, about the exploits of a lovable ex-porn star. But where that needle drop was more of a punchline, “Greatest Day (Robin Schulz Rework)” is a shortcut to pure, unironic euphoria in Anora. Hilariously, Baker and his wife semi-randomly found the song on Spotify when they searched for tracks with the name “Greatest Day,” because, as Baker told Variety, “it’s [Ani’s] greatest day.” Of course, every day can’t be great. Or even good. This is something Ani knows all too well before she meets Ivan, and she’ll quickly be reminded of it after their trip to the Little White Chapel. But for a brief moment in time, what could be the greatest day of her life actually is.
