Last November, Skrillex wrote a series of heartfelt posts on X about the ups and downs of his career, with the careful self-awareness of someone who just got really into therapy. He spoke about wanting to make music to “provoke beauty and emotion” and said that his next album would mark the end of his relationship with Atlantic. Half a year later, that album finally lands—initially as a Dropbox link emailed to fans after an invite-only listening party in Miami, and then on all the usual streaming platforms. A bracing return to his dubstep roots, the album represents a hard left turn from the prismatic crossover pop and hip-hop of 2023’s double-album Quest for Fire / Don’t Get Too Close; the main emotion that FUCK U SKRILLEX YOU THINK UR ANDY WARHOL BUT UR NOT!! <3 provokes is someone screaming “LET’S FUCKING GOOOO” after a few too many shots.
The title sounds like a pisstake—but the record is a flex. Coming right after Skrillex’s triumphant return to Ultra Music Festival, the album crash-lands back into the crowded post-EDM scene he helped create, bouncing between dubstep, drum’n’bass, trap, and UK garage with a scattershot focus that no amount of Adderall could sharpen. With 34 tracks packed into 46 minutes, the chaotic pace and relentless gags make it sound tossed off. But it’s the first full-length that captures the true range of his music. It says, “I can make fun of myself, but I’m also fucking sick.”
FUCK U SKRILLEX YOU THINK UR ANDY WARHOL BUT UR NOT!! <3 is actually a cleaning-out-the-closet album—executive produced by Team EZY and Virtual Riot, with additional creative input by Eurohead and Varg2™, Skrillex’s only equal in bridging dance music’s high-low divide. Some of these tracks go way back to 2011, when someone stole the artist’s hard drives—and all his new music—in Milan. Other songs appeared in mixes, or are meta-remixes and flips of Kendrick Lamar, “Sicko Mode,” and other bits and bobs, with a cast of guests that includes everyone from Boys Noize and Sigur Rós singer Jónsi to upstart artists like Ilykimchi and Drain Gangers like Whitearmor. Not that you’d really know, because everything flies by so fast it’s hard to keep track of what song you’re listening to, never mind who’s on it.
That furious pace has always been key for Skrillex, whose frantic, stop-start DJ sets whip up Wholesome Mosh Pits on the dance floor. After so many reinventions, it’s easy to forget that Skrillex the Pop Producer or Skrillex the Credible DJ Heartthrob was once Skrillex the Most Hated Man in Dubstep. Serious Dance Music Heads, including yours truly, lost their minds when Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites came out, upending the tight-knit dubstep scene and hitting the wider dance music world like the musical equivalent of a bank float at a Pride parade. Skrillex ushered in an era of corporate EDM, and for a certain kind of dance music fan, he was the Antichrist. Until suddenly he wasn’t.
Then he was the nicest guy in the world, pretty handsome with his new haircut, and good at making what Justin Bieber called “expensive” sounds. Even Skrillex naysayers were forced to come to grips with his staying power, especially in the wake of his 2023 charm offensive that culminated in a headline slot at Coachella. But wait. You thought he had matured into an auteur? Bam—after barely a minute, FUCK U SKRILLEX YOU THINK UR ANDY WARHOL BUT UR NOT!! <3 swerves into one of his nastiest dubstep basslines in years, the kind that brings to mind matter disintegration rays and malfunctioning hydraulic machinery.
The album never looks back from there, peppered with increasingly stupid, Trap-a-Holics-style DJ tags. There are way too many examples, so I’ll just pick one: the Wuki collaboration “BIGGY BAP,” a trap-dubstep hybrid with three beat switch-ups. “I have Skrillex trapped in my basement! Play this at full volume or I’ll put him in the hole,” Haze says, before another voice halts the music: “This beat drop has been seized by Atlantic Records and has been replaced with silence.” We hear crickets that are quickly molded into a whole new beat, interrupted by more voiceovers: “Microwave meal for one type dubstep beat! My life is in shambles! I have severe depression!”
If that sounds exhausting, that’s because it is. This is the album equivalent of a YouTube party where everyone plays their favorite tracks for 35 seconds at a time and screams over them and sniffs a lot. The voiceovers get tiresome, and sometimes you wish a track would last longer than a minute. But there are so many ideas, so much life packed into every second, that it’s hard not to be bowled over by the sheer force of will. You will listen to these next 15 seconds of dentist-drill dubstep, and you will enjoy it.
As it careens towards climax, FUCK U SKRILLEX YOU THINK UR ANDY WARHOL BUT UR NOT!! <3 suddenly turns serious. Skrillex, who was once in an emo band, sings about “the voltage that lives inside of us” on “Voltage.” Originally the title track from the album he lost on his stolen hard drives, it’s a bit of feel-good closure, though the sickly sweet sincerity is almost abrasive after 40 minutes of relentless inside jokes.
But then again, Skrillex is remarkably sincere, and that’s why he’s still the king of this shit. He’s 37 years old and making music that runs laps around dance music producers 15 years his junior, youthful and seasoned at the same time. It’s hard not to love him when he’s singing something so earnest and hopeful, and warmth and purity radiate from the album; it feels like he’s throwing a party and you’re at the top of the guest list.
That feeling is what melts even EDM haters eventually, allowing him to infiltrate the corners of underground music that once tried to bar him entry. FUCK U SKRILLEX YOU THINK UR ANDY WARHOL BUT UR NOT!! <3 is a victory lap, the most fun “I told you so” you’ll probably ever hear. The title is a red herring, because no one would confuse Sonny Moore for an artist like Andy Warhol. He’s just Skrillex, writing some of the most ridiculous dance music ever made and making even purists fall for the wubs. If that’s not Pop Art, I don’t know what is.
Correction: A previous version of this review incorrectly credited Shadoe Haze for DJ Smokey's tags. It also incorrectly stated who executive produced the album.
