Skrillex Fell In Wub Again

Skrillex is a master of misdirection whose trickster tendencies inform everything from his restless, global production purview to loopy release strategies. In 2014, fans playing a mobile game were treated to tracks from the forthcoming Recess as rewards. F*ck U Skrillex You Think Ur Andy Warhol But Ur Not!! <3, his latest album, was dispensed via Dropbox link sent to attendees of a recent show. These drops are so infrequent he seems to feel the spectacle is required. But the string of official releases has struggled to document Skrillex’s full multiverse of untitled loosies and remixes. If you had a favorite incarnation of the sound, you stockpiled files. You never knew what kind of beatmaker he would morph into. Recess reasserted dominance over a brostep empire careening over the peak of its cultural cachet; the 2015 Jack Ü album with Diplo made a beeline for twitchy pop and rap music; 2023’s Quest for Fire and Don’t Get Too Close carefully avoided the sounds that made him a lodestone for an entire subgenre, hinting at a deeper reconciliation between the artist’s past and present.

This month’s Warhol reintroduces the producer’s old sonic signatures to the world-traveled maximalism and mainstream pop cachet he’s developed since the mid-2010s. Blitzing through 34 tracks, it’s both a summation of the kaleidoscopic character of the OWSLA cofounder’s major-label tenure (the project is his final release on Atlantic Records) and a tribute to trap mixtapes of the early 2010s — a bit like a Resident Advisor mix that was also a Gangsta Grillz. Warhol is a very late-30s reckoning with all the selves the auteur has cycled through. It also moves in chorus with a wider retreat into nostalgia. Throwback package tours and album anniversary gigs are currently offering trips to old pop-cultural flashpoints like corporate-adjacent necro-indie and chart-topping nu metal. 2025 is such a gauntlet that Lil Jon reunited with Flosstradamus. Saving Warhol from the stuffiness of artists cashing out on feeding retrograde tastes amid an uncertain future is Skrillex’s textbook approach, a marriage of serious technique and cultivated silliness.

Warhol is a brisk dip in self-deprecating self-examination. He’s accompanied on this journey by phonk vet DJ Smokey, a blustering mixtape host treating the occasion like a forensic investigation into the murder of the artist. “Fuck Skrillex,” its lunatic narrator shouts in a frothy reimagining of Quest highlight “Tears,” “This is Sonny Moore!” The former From First to Last singer quickly reverts to his original pop-punk form in the booming “Things I Promised,” as abrasive noises buffet the ear at breakneck speed. But the croon doesn’t stick, and the beat overtaking it is also gone in a flash, dumped for a sultry remix of Brandy’s “U Don’t Know Me (Like U Used To)” which, itself, evaporates in under 30 seconds. Warhol feels less like a commercial product than a concerted clearing of one’s hangups and hard drives. Skrillex finally heeded years of pining in the fandom by dropping “Voltage,” the unfinished title track from a 2011 studio album dissolved into EPs after a hard drive went missing. A Jay-Z line spliced into the Brandy cut gives off Girl Talk airs, but the sustained muchness is very Skrillex, astutely mapping the divergent interests of a maestro whose clientele includes Justin Bieber, Bladee, Hikaru Utada, and Korn. Another jarringly rewarding sequence taps Sigur Rós’s Jónsi for “Look at You,” a thumper pulling off breathtaking tricks with reverb and space; Indian singer Naisha Bhargabi for the cluttered, disquieting “Gulab XX”; and R&B stars Starrah and Zacari for the windswept, soulful “Momentum.” Here, you see how genre crumbles into breading in the hands of a once-in-a-generation chop wizard. The older work also behaved this way but those songs felt more like meticulously designed theme-park attractions attempting to astound while adhering to the old songwriting conventions than this stream of shards of compositions you itch to see exploded into two-minute singles.

A certain flavor of enthusiast will probably argue that Skrillex Has Saved Dubstep with his return to plodding, buzzsaw synths and filter-modulated bass. He has, at a minimum, offered an exhilarating career retrospective and a point of pride for a scene that has yet to receive the softer reassessment other lightning rods for music nerd ire currently enjoy. The screaming “Spitfire” is the first in a tidal wave of tracks whose textural palette answers the question of what it might sound like if parakeets and elephants squared off in armed combat. The format of a classic mixtape — a dense flurry of ideas blasted out in howling confidence — allows the producer to dip into pockets he doesn’t need to commit to, and to drop ancient tracks into the mix. It’s also subject to the unwieldy, unvarnished nature of the tradition. It pushes toward sensory overload. Too much of the vaunted, woozy shrillness leaves you craving a wind down the album is also eager to deliver.

The flow feels like scrolling Instagram, seeing style epochs evolve and erode across subsequent selfies. The features underneath remain the same but the dressing readjusts perceptions. This survey of two decades of trends in the catalog identifies myriad directions for the independent future Skrillex spoke of last year. He can close the casket on the persona if the ominous proclamations interrupting the songs signal more than just the end of a record deal. He can slip into any of the dozen scenes perused here, making haunted pop in Reykjavik with Jónsi or expanding the fruitful collaboration with 100 gecs’s Dylan Brady that yields back to back bangers in “Booster” and “Zeet Noize” with Boys Noize. But maybe he’s just giving people what they want as social safety nets fail. This makes Warhol a dubstep counterpart to the Looney Tunes resurgence, a giddy revitalization of the tried and true in a moment where our resistance to such appeals has worn thin. Skrillex has fallen in wub again. Will you also be taking the plunge?

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