Skrillex’s first studio album, Recess, has just been released as of March 18th, 2014, and whatever you’ve heard of Skrillex before, you can chuck that right out the window. Sonny Moore has revamped his style to a point where you wouldn’t recognize it if you didn’t know it was him. With genres ranging from dubstep and moombah to drum and bass, trap and chillout, an album cover featuring an emoji, and hitting the number one on iTunes albums, Skrillex is on a roll.
With the more stereotypical subgenre Skrillex helped invent, brostep, he credits the genre in the first track, All Is Fair In Love And Brostep featuring the jungle duo Ragga Twins. The first drop is nearly identical to Zomboy’s song Terror Squad, and Skrillex even borrows a sample from Zomboy’s Mind Control but cuts it off halfway. Then with an explicit phrase telling everyone he’s back, he completely repolishes the drop to an absurd amount.
Moore also includes the Neon Mix of his song Try It Out, that he did with fellow artist Alvin Risk. The original mix of this track was featured in the video game Call of Duty: Black Ops II. Skrillex also teamed up with Ragga Twins again to make the drumstep track Ragga Bomb.
Skrillex experimented with other genres such as trap with Stranger ft. KillaGraham and Sam Dew, chillout with Fire Away ft. Kid Harpoon, and an obscure, what-genre-is-this with Doompy Poomp. My personal favorite of the album was Recess, with a catchy vocal chorus and a less bass heavy drop reminiscent of big room house, which has just recently blown up (see Martin Garrix – Animals).
If you haven’t purchased any Skrillex albums but would like to journey to other sides of EDM, Recess is a great place to start. Just note that 4 out of the 11 songs contain explicit lyrics, but there is a clean version available on iTunes. At a price of 10 dollars and a variety of genres to choose from, purchasing Recess is well worth your money.