What Skrillex give us his second studio album after nine years of waiting, it means for the generation of those who listened “Scary Monsters And Nice Sprites” (10) on the iPod Touch coming out of high school both a cause for euphoric celebration and a painful reality check. Even without ever having disappeared from the panorama (Jack Ü next to Diplo y Dog Blood next to Boys Noize), a decade without the ambassador of the brostep in the front line is too long. When many of us had already lost hope of enjoying again Sonny John Moore in the singular, far from his facet as a producer, he appears (almost out of nowhere) “Quest For Fire” which, as its title suggests, represents a process of rediscovery and rewriting for the American. And that’s without counting “Don’t Get Too Close”, released just a few days later. After verifying that the dubstep rooted in the original YouTube that he himself inaugurated has been the founding seed of the current generation of PC Music (as crystallized by his recent collaboration with 100 gecs in “Torture Me”), Skrillex is now forced to return to his authorial prehistory, to rediscover fire.
“Please, don’t leave me like this”, the first single from the album implores us on the lips of Bobby Raps. The producer demands our forgiveness (and our attention) after this decade of waiting on a bass house song that, at the same time, is a statement of intent that is as precise as it is energetic. Yeah “Recess” (14) supposed a space governed by the heterogeneous and the conceptual, in “Quest For Fire” the experimentation will be in the boiler room or it will not be (yes, indeed, this is the song that the famous spontaneous of Fred Again.. stops without wanting to!). The tyranny of the bass will not be limited to unfolding in this “Leave Me Like This”, but it will be one of the backbones of this homogeneous creature with tendencies to hit, drum and vibration. And if not, ask “Rumble”, the darling of the album even before his birth thanks -again- to Fred Again.., one of the creators of this bastard cross between the forcefulness of Flowdan’s grime and the sensory violence of a beat that longs for dubstep crying at 140 bpm. This is how the star song of the album is crowned, showing that the new Skrillex teleports us to the club with blows, prioritizing physicality over melodic. again, yes “Recess” it was an odyssey sci-fi based on interference, “Quest For Fire” it is thematized through the elemental and the Paleolithic, with a stone’s throw.
“Hydrate” seems to follow this same maxim, whose subtle reggae elements seem to return us (in their own way) to the long-awaited times of “Make It Bun Dem”, and “Inhale Exhale”, a breathing exercise based on a trap base (and some oasis of hard bass) with Nitsa Club complex. The hard bass will also be present in the overwhelming “XENA”, collaboration with the Palestinian singer Nai Barghouti in search of a folkloric and territorial electronica, materializing a siren song invoking pogos with echoes of Baiuca. More at the beginning of the journey we come across “Tears” —perhaps the song that could best go unnoticed in “Recess” due to its intro somewhat influenced by “All Is Fair In Love And Brostep”—, a single that, even though it can be understood as minor , perfectly exemplifies the current validity of Skrillex’s alchemist spirit. Unpredictable theme, in constant metamorphosis and with experimentation with sound textures by flag. In the same dreamlike and ambient setting we find “A Street I Know”, which reminds us of the producer’s intrinsic virtuosity in terms of working with vocal chops, while indirectly vindicating the delicacy that Sonny has come to achieve in songs previous ones like “Summit” with Ellie Goulding or “Fire Away”.
It is essential to lose yourself in the mastery of “RATATA”, not only because of the Kafkaesque aspect of a collaboration between Missy Elliott y Quentin Dupieux (almost worthy of a script by Dupieux himself), but because of the fluidity with which two sounds that are so incompatible as the synthesizer of Mr. Oizo and Elliott’s R&B soul. For me, the most pleasant surprise on the album (perhaps because of the elegance with which it transfers the intractability of songs like “Burial” or “Dirty Vibe” to the terrain of voguing). “Butterflies”, single devised together with Four Tet that came to light in 2021, is then confirmed as premonitory, as that intergenerational bridge that allowed the passage from the techno of Dog Blood to the author’s house of “Quest For Fire”.
The voice of Swae Lee promises that “this is too bizarre” and, although it falls far short of what at some point we came to consider bizarre within Sonny’s discography, “TOO BIZARRE (juked)” ends up being a warm cameo from the most mainstream facet of producer on the album, a track that points to the radio while screaming (literally) in your ear. “Supersonic (My Existence)”, paradoxically, is presented as too bizarre for this project. Skrillex’s collaboration with josh pan (one of the exponents with the most personality of OWSLA) celebrates two years that don’t bother him at all, showing up at the party like a merciless electronic earthquake. If anything remains of the Skrillex of “Recess”it may have been buried under this rubble.
The final stretch of the album works for Skrillex as a safe space, as a refuge from melancholy and, ultimately, as a moment to be grateful that we continue to listen. In “Warped Tour ’05 with pete WENTZ” he shares an excerpt from an interview he conducted with the singer of Fall Out Boy when Sonny was still a member of the hardcore band From First To Last, almost twenty years ago! “Yeah, it’s pretty weird, kind of, it’s strange for us”, replies the young producer as his voice falters. Sonny shows up again in “Hazel Theme”, where he asks us for a minute before he can listen to the last song on the album. As if he’s preparing the next song before our ears, Sonny strips artistically. He starts playing a piano, and after a few seconds, “Still Here (With The Ones That I Came With)” plays, borrowing the harmony from the project’s opening track. If he started by asking us not to abandon him, Skrillex ends up celebrating the company, his family and, indirectly, the path to the rhythm of EDM.
“Quest For Fire” It is, of course, a paradigm shift. Skrillex innovates by replacing his previous dynamics —more prone to expansion, chorality and variety— with habits more focused on singularity, exploiting a sound space and squeezing its possibilities to the maximum. But at the same time Sonny signs off on a project that for some reason feels more communal than ever. This funeral of brostep it is at the same time a celebration of the present of the electronic scene, a sign that the producer wishes (and knows how) to live in the codes and sounds of the present. Together with his “OWSLA Worldwide Broadcast” (16), which should already be understood as the captivating mausoleum of the stars of the dubstep scene of the 2010s, Skrillex confirms with “Quest For Fire” that the page has been turned and that the fire has only just started (see you at Primavera!).
