Skrillex has been producing music on a commercial scale for over half of my life. Recess (2014), the electronic-virtuoso’s debut studio album, was released two days before my tenth birthday. It is the first album I recall listening to all the way through in my entire life, and it was on YouTube. Through iPod speakers. I recall loving some of the songs and hating others. That’s it.
Although Recess was an ambitious deep dive into various subgenres of dubstep (brostep, reggaestep, trapstep, and what can only be described as Skrillex-signature-squeakstep), critical reception upon release was mixed. Skrillex had recently signed with Atlantic Records after co-founding OWSLA, and mainstream music critics had little positive to say about EDM writ large back in the early 2010s. Recess is Skrillex trying out the music industry—maybe that’s why his single off the album is called “Try It Out (Neon Mix).” He expands upon the genre-blending sound he pioneered with an occasional cool track or heavy drop and incorporates subtle hints of unseriousness. Still, the overarching artistic intention (perhaps encapsulated by the monstrosity that is the alien-emoji album cover and promotional roll-out) is neither clear nor fresh.
Despite having a long-term predilection for dubstep, I’ve always been embarrassed by the genre. This quarter-century’s April Fool’s Day surprise Skrillex drop has changed all of that.
F*CK U SKRILLEX YOU THINK UR ANDY WARHOL BUT UR NOT!! <3 has officially separated the electronic music timeline into the pre-Skrillex and the post-. This unabbreviable 34-track, 46-minute behemoth reworks the conventional album format into a seamless mix, compresses songs to the bare, banging, bass-heavy necessities, and blends genres within and outside the scope of EDM.
Initially self-leaked via a fan emailing list on late-night March 31st, FUS inaugurates Skrillex’s return to so-called independent artistry. “SKRILLEX IS DEAD” is the album’s first track, clocking in at 51 seconds exactly. It layers a Dj Smokey monologue about Skrillex walking into the light to escape “the world…plunged into chaos” over a dreamy guitar arpeggio. Then, Dj Smokey tells us to listen to the entire album “start to finish.” Skrillex clearly thinks he has cast a lightning spell into a bottle, and what comes next verifies this as fact—crunchy saw melodies, raw synth harmonies, punchy wubs.
The most poignant instance of genre subversion comes with Skrillex’s treatment of the VIP. A VIP, short for Variation in Production, is an EDM-specific self-remix that depends on the existence of an original track. “WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING VIP,” which features melodic dubstep pioneer Virtual Riot, is not even a VIP because there is no original track titled “WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING.” In fact, there are multiple other fake-VIPs on the record—“SEE YOU AGAIN VIP,” “MORJA KAIJU VIP, FRICKY VIP,” “SAN DIEGO VIP”—and all lack an original release. The only song that is technically a VIP is titled “TEARS LOST DROP” and reimagines the heavy drill-step single “Tears” off Skrillex’s Quest For Fire.
The album eschews the more uninteresting parts of the electronic music formula: there are no generic build-ups or time-consuming beginnings. The more uncanny, experimental sounds are short-lived and often dampened by moments of humor. During “BIGGY BAP,” the first drop is literally “seized by Atlantic Records” and replaced with crickets. Subsequent drops are spliced with hilarious Dj Smokey adlibs (some favorites include “I HAVE SKRILLEX TRAPPED IN MY BASEMENT,” “MY LIFE IS IN SHAMBLES,” and the immortal “I HAVE CRIPPLING DEPRESSION”)
If there’s anything bad to say about the album, it’s that its brilliance is only fully perceptible with top-of-the-line listening hardware. Some of the more experimental tracks, like the sub-heavy, Burial-inspired “SLICKMAN,” necessitate quality over-ear headphones to experience in full, without which the clippy preset filters sound an awful lot like poorly mastered white noise.
There are other musical complexities sprinkled throughout the tracklist; “BOOSTER,” features a prominently high-pitched snare that rings slightly off-beat (Dj Smokey mentions the snare took two years to make). Such tricks are used sparingly in favor of merciless drops, boisterous percussion, signature vocal chops, and vicious synth melodies.
The final track (besides “AZASU,” in which Skrillex credits all the contributors, including the graffiti artist responsible for the album cover), “VOLTAGE,” is one of the more explicitly uplifting tracks on FUS. The drop is classic Skrillex, and the major-key piano leads and synth arps fit the lyrics snugly within the mix. Which, by the way, is a pitched-up and Vocoded Moore singing “You gotta believe in the voltage that lives inside us,” encouraging listeners (and note the third-person possessive pronoun), “so let’s buckle up and break our walls down.” Themes of togetherness have always been present in Skrillex’s music, but on FUS, Skrillex’s most collaborative work yet, these themes take on new life.
It is clear from the first listen that this is a new Skrillex, with a novel, yet recognizably self-referential sound. This is not an album as much as it is a portfolio, combined with Skrillex’s commentary on the music industry and himself. It is hilarious, it is virtuosic, it is infinitely replayable.
So what is the achievement of F*CK U SKRILLEX YOU THINK UR ANDY WARHOL BUT UR NOT!! <3, if it stands in a category of its own? As Warhol puts it, “They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” Thus far, there has yet to be an electronic musician to succeed at subversion on a scale like Skrillex. It seems that Sonny Moore is out to prove that art really is what you can get away with.