This Girl

This Girl: How a French House Edit Traveled from Australia to Global Chart Success

"This Girl" by Kungs vs. Cookin' On 3 Burners is a track with an unusual geographic and cultural journey that took it from the Melbourne soul and funk scene to a French DJ's remix and ultimately to the upper reaches of charts across Europe and the United States. The song's origins lie in the work of Cookin' On 3 Burners, a Melbourne-based funk and soul group who originally recorded "This Girl" in 2009 as part of their album "First Take." The song was a mid-tempo soul number that found a modest audience in Australia and among international fans of the neo-soul and rare groove revival that had been developing across the 2000s, but it did not achieve mainstream chart success in its original form.

The transformation of "This Girl" into a global hit came through the intervention of Valentin Brunel, a French electronic music producer who records under the name Kungs. Brunel was born in 1994, making him roughly twenty years old when he created the remix that would change the trajectory of both his career and the original song's commercial life. His version, released in 2015 and officially issued in 2016, took the vocal hook and melodic essence of Cookin' On 3 Burners' original and rebuilt it around a driving, sun-drenched French house production that owed clear debts to the Daft Punk and Cassius tradition of melodic, sample-based dance music.

The remix became a massive hit in France, where it spent multiple weeks at number one on the French Singles Chart, and then spread rapidly across European markets during the spring and summer of 2016. It reached the top ten in numerous countries including the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden, becoming one of the defining European pop hits of that summer. In the United States, the track appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 and performed particularly strongly on the Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart, where it was a significant presence for many weeks, demonstrating that its appeal extended beyond its native European context.

The production approach Kungs employed was deceptively simple. He isolated the vocal performance from the Cookin' On 3 Burners original and placed it over a four-on-the-floor kick drum pattern, a filtered bass line, and a bright, euphoric synthesizer riff that gave the track its characteristic feel of summery, uncomplicated joy. The genius of the edit lay in how completely it transformed the emotional register of the original material. Cookin' On 3 Burners' version was warm and soulful but relatively contained; Kungs's version was expansive and euphoric, designed for outdoor festival stages and car journeys in warm weather, and it communicated those qualities instantly and unmistakably.

The song received extensive radio play across European markets, particularly on the commercial pop and dance radio stations that had maintained enormous audiences even as streaming was reshaping listening habits. In France, the song became a genuine cultural phenomenon of the summer, the kind of record that plays from café terraces and open car windows and becomes inseparable from the memory of a particular season. This kind of seasonal cultural embedding is difficult to engineer deliberately but when it occurs, as it did with "This Girl" in the summer of 2016, it creates a longevity in the cultural memory that ordinary chart success cannot fully replicate.

For Cookin' On 3 Burners, the success of the Kungs remix brought their original work to an audience many times larger than anything they had previously reached, and introduced their name to millions of listeners who had not previously been aware of Melbourne's thriving soul and funk scene. The group had been operating within a devoted but relatively contained international underground of soul music enthusiasts, and the mainstream exposure created by the remix opened new commercial and touring opportunities. The collaborative credit "Kungs vs. Cookin' On 3 Burners" that appears on the song acknowledged the participatory nature of the creation, giving both the original artists and the remixer their due recognition.

Kungs himself was signed to Universal Music France following the success of "This Girl," and proceeded to build a career as one of the more prominent French electronic music acts of his generation. He released subsequent singles and albums that built on the melodic house aesthetic established by "This Girl" while demonstrating a consistent ability to create emotionally resonant, radio-friendly dance music. His emergence as a commercial force in French and European dance music represented the latest chapter in a long tradition of French house music production that had achieved global commercial significance since the late 1990s.

The song was certified platinum in multiple European countries and accumulated hundreds of millions of streams across platforms in the years following its release, confirming that its appeal was not limited to the specific summer-of-2016 context in which it first achieved saturation. It became a standard reference point in discussions of the French house revival and the broader phenomenon of indie soul and rare groove material being transformed into commercial dance hits through producer interventions, a practice that had become increasingly common as streaming made vast catalogs of obscure music accessible to a new generation of producers looking for source material.