I had this weird blast from my past yesterday when I found out that Skrillex had released a new album. You’d know him from such hits as Bagarang, which I heard almost every single day in middle school, often played on repeat with others like Cinema, and First of the Year. So I felt compelled, as DJ Smokey suggests in his featured intro, to listen to the entire thing all the way through … all 30 tracks. DJ Smokey is of course best known for his producer tags, ranging from, “This some hot garbage, but I can’t stop listenin,” and “Legalize Nuclear Bombs.” Those are direct quotes from his YouTube channel, @DJSmokey666 AKA Evil Poison Incorporated / Nuke Radio.

It’s … not your usual music. I think part of the attraction is hearing noises that don’t really make that much sense somehow occupying the same rhythm. DJ Smokey is either the funniest, or the most unhinged producer on the planet, and he has the voice of a buttery angel. It’s an interesting combo with the rest of the hard-edged, industrial sounds Skrillex used to create the tracks. That’s just the intro. Almost every track features a new artist, each of whom complement the soundscape in unique ways. The next track, SPITFIRE featuring HAWAII SLIM (yes, there are lots of caps, this is not a formatting issue), for example is a song like I’ve never heard before. SLICKMAN is another that blew my mind, though that was Skrillex without any feature, proving he’s still the heart of the album.

But what does it actually sound like? There’s no way I can accurately describe it with words. You’d just have to hear it yourself.

I can talk about the humor, which is present for a certain type of person. I particularly loved how they used a censor noise, a painful, high-pitched bleep, to highlight some of the profanity from DJ Smokey. It makes it so much worse, but many of the songs are technically radio safe thanks to the censorship. Oh and the album was released on April Fool’s, and is titled F*CK U SKRILLEX YOU THINK UR ANDY WARHOL BUT UR NOT!! I promise I am not pranking you. There was even a most tasteful, “Damn Son, Where’d You Find This?” in HOLD ON. I wish I had found this on April Fool’s.

Not every song is so extreme as the album is generally. I thought that the times they decided to step on the brakes a little with tracks like RECOVERY and BOOSTER held the listener just on the border of being overwhelmed. Most of the tracks are only thirty seconds to a minute and thirty long, and try not to stay their welcome too badly. I think this is a massive improvement over the way I used to listen back in school, to the most hardcore tracks over and over again without any buffer. It got the best of having a ton of tracks while retaining an average album length and was a feature I appreciated immensely.

By the end of the album, I heard some more familiar sounds to those I heard in my school days. A welcome, if predictable bit of nostalgia that still felt like something new.

It was fun, though admittedly, even after hearing this stuff for so long, it did test my palette at times. I’m not sure I’ll be listening to this one over and over. But who knows? Maybe its like DJ Smokey said, and I just won’t be able to stop.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley