Cascada returns with the single ALIVE, 21 years on from Everytime We Touch

Cascada has released "ALIVE," a new single out through UMG and the next step in a chapter that opened earlier in the summer with "YOUtopia." It arrives 21 years after "Everytime We Touch" turned the act into a fixture of post-millennium dance-pop.

The track is built the way the old ones were. Natalie Horler's voice opens it before the song climbs into a soaring, vintage-sounding drop aimed straight at a peaktime dancefloor. The lyrics deal in resilience: coming up for air after a difficult stretch and turning setbacks into fuel, which is the emotional register the project has always worked in.

Horler is direct about the balance the record is trying to strike. "We feel incredibly lucky to have been making music for such a long time, but of course your sound naturally evolves," she said, adding that the aim is to combine what fans already know with new inspiration so nobody gets left behind.

That is a harder job than it sounds for an act whose two best-known songs, "Everytime We Touch" and "Evacuate The Dancefloor," still move through festivals, clubs and the internet's nostalgia cycle without any help. A new single competes with its own catalogue before it competes with anything else, and "ALIVE" is a descendant of that sound rather than an attempt to recreate it.

The single is filed under electronic and pop, and its date sits on the release calendar. It lands in a busy stretch for dance singles built around a vocal, including Above and Beyond's deep house track When You Believe with Victoria Horn and Space Laces finally releasing the dubstep single Hazard Pay.