The Sonny Moore Exit Interview
The Aural Arms Race and My Insatiable Need to Be Understood
When I was in middle and high school, I performatively hated Skrillex. I derided his music as cheap trash—slop, as we would call it now—while listening to (and making) music that owed its existence to him and his label OWSLA: Kill the Noise, KOAN Sound, The M Machine, Moody Good, Porter Robinson, Tennyson; music I consider integral to the shape of my soul. I would put The M Machine’s Metropolis (2012-2015) twin-EP in a museum. I consider KOAN Sound and Tennyson high watermarks for complexity and craft in music. But Skrillex was just bro music, so I claimed.
But Sonny Moore is pushing forty now. And I am now old enough to admit that yeah, Skrillex rocks. Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites (2011) was good. In fact, it still holds up. And on April Fool’s Day, 2025, Skrillex released an album/mixtape/DJ set entitled Fuck U Skrillex U Think Ur Andy Warhol but Ur Not!! <3 (2025). This album is simultaneously a bird-flip to Atlantic Records, an official release for many unfinished or live-only “secret tracks,” and an April Fool’s joke. But it also amounts to an exit interview for the decade of music that I will carry into my senescence.
The Aural Arms Race
In the late aughts, music production software got good enough to fit on consumer laptops: Ableton, Logic, Reason, and most famously cracked copies of FL Studio. This revolution in audio technology kicked off an arms race to generate the most insane sounds hitherto known to man. Now-famous artists like James Blake, SOPHIE, and Grimes got their start in this era, posting work on early platforms like MySpace, SoundCloud, and Bandcamp.
Moore was among that cohort. He was already a reasonably famous musician, as a lead singer on the mid-2000s emo band From First to Last. After two albums, he went solo under the name Skrillex. Calling his music “dubstep” oversells the influence from UK grime, drum and bass, and garage, music with a specific history and vibe associated with London raves and pirate radio. (That said, artists like Flux Pavilion and Skream were already moving towards this harder sound.) I think Moore’s previous work on Heroine (2006) is a better point of reference for his early electronic work like My Name is Skrillex (2010): the fast rhythms, heavy guitars, and running-makeup-teen-angst vibes of From First to Last simply translated into a new audio palette, as Moore discovered an toolset that allowed for harder sounds than any guitar could manage at the time.
When considered against its contemporaries at the time, the opening to Black Sabbath (1970) is The Hardest Shit You’ve Heard In Your Life. But compared to the first drop on Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites (2011), with its buzz-saw bass sounds, disco embellishments, and chopped-up, pitch-shifted vocal samples, Black Sabbath sounds like returning to Marlboro Reds after taking 12mg Zyn pouches. Skrillex’s first “real” EP appears fully-formed, but the style was immediately distilled and proliferated like aural moonshine as the ur-sound for Call of Duty headshot compilations. The sound was so extreme and risibly hypermasculine that it was almost immediately parodied, most famously by the Dubba Jonny UKF Dubstep Tutorials that I was too young to recognize as a love letter to a genre that didn’t entirely start with Skrillex.
The Sound of the Factory
As Skrillex has matured not only as a dubstep musician but also as a pop producer and label executive, his genre preferences (and features list) have expanded over time—in fact, Fuck U Skrillex ends with an individual shoutout to everyone featured on the album, including the unknown vandal who spray-painted a wall with what is now the album’s title. And that’s just the people in the studio. “ZEET NOISE” reminds me of Surgeon’s Manhattan soundtrack from Midnight Club: Street Racing (2000), a game I was too young to play competently at the time. “ANDY” riffs on defamiliarized ‘90s R&B for exactly sixteen bars before dropping into a riff on that 2013-15 window when rappers wanted to sound like dubstep. “MOMENTUM” brings out the deep-fried 808s I remember from 2016 Dylan Brady tapes, and the drop from “G2G” is straight deep-fried hyperpop. It took me several listens to recognize “THINGS I PROMISED” as a riff on the closer track from Bangarang (2011), Skrillex’s first full-length album, but one listen to nominate “BIGGY BAP” as the best fakeout drop in dubstep history, beating out Dubba Jonny’s “Not Another UKF Dubstep Tutorial.”
But the sound is predominantly 2010s dubstep, not as it was but as it I remembered it. Early dubstep was certainly more lushly produced than, say, Daft Punk’s Homework (1997) (which does not hold up), but classic tracks like Flux Pavilion’s “I Can’t Stop” (2010), Nero’s “Promises” (2011), and Knife Party’s “Destroy Them With Lazers” (2011) come from an era that had not considered that the second drop could sound different from the first drop. With fifteen years of advancement in workflow and style, the snares have more bite, the bass sounds have more texture, and the background flourishes fill the soundscape better.
I still think the early shit slaps, and I think EA was right to score their rebooted SSX (2012) almost entirely with then-state-of-the-art dubstep and drum & bass tracks. But with Fuck U Skrillex, I no longer have to explain the genre with music I must make excuses for.
Yet I still feel compelled to explain the genre. Why?
Why Do I Feel I Must Explain Myself?
As intimated by earlier pieces on this blog, I am single. And despite moderate (and formerly my best) efforts, I have been that way for some time. In those efforts, I have sought means of explaining myself to the women I have asked to like me. As a relapsed Twitter addict, I am good at condensing my first impressions into something impressive, but my fourth-date explanations of who I really am have always been theoretical exercises. However, upon the surprise release of this album, I found a neat encapsulation for a core part of my soul.
This era of 2010s SoundCloud music was my One Thing during adolescence. I didn’t have a personality before music. I developed things to say to people because of Bad Panda Records, Secret Songs, and PC Music. I got hooked early on music by SOPHIE, Lido, Mura Masa, Cashmere Cat, Umru, Danny L Harle, Dylan Brady, Alice Longyu Gao, Glaive, and most legibly to you Charli XCX. I was there for Vroom Vroom (2016) and Pop 2 (2017),1 and I take pride in that because this era of music formed the foundation of my personality. My hunt for The Hardest Shit on SoundCloud has informed my aesthetic taste writ large. I like Brutalist architecture for the same reason I like Noisia. I like Cy Twombly in the same way I like Arca. I have compared a Dorian Electra cover of Ariana Grande’s “Positions” to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917).
And throughout the 2010s, music was my introduction to the creative process. I started with a cheap Yamaha keyboard, a Shure SM58 plugged into a Macbook via a Blue Icicle, and GarageBand loops. From there, I branched into the chiptune tracker Sunvox, the iOS version of Nanoloop, and a Teenage Engineering OP-1 I still own ten years later. It’s all on my Bandcamp. Those years in The Lab taught me the beginner’s mindset, gave me the thrill of posting something that was at once rudimentary and the best I could manage, and proved that I was more than what was legible to my elders. At age fifteen, I could do something beyond the ability and comprehension of everyone around me, save for the one friend who explored this music with me. I’m still friends with him. And with Fuck U Skrillex U Think Ur Andy Warhol But Ur Not!! <3, I can condense these formative experiences into something that works as a 5K Race Day Playlist. Behold! This is my art taste. This is my sense of humor. This is my work ethic. And this is the kind of music my children will roll their eyes to as teenagers.
But even the hope that one artwork could explain me is delusion. Since my 2020 apotheosis of Twitter brainrot, I have tried very hard to fold nuance into my soul. My road bikes are not in this album, nor is my coffee habit, nor the books that have shaped my worldview. And even if my soul remained compressed enough for a Carrd page, it would be grandiose to ask an external mind to know me as well as I know myself.
But on the flipside, I have grown tired of titrating myself for public consumption, of crafting a bespoke face for every social circle and a tailored aux selection for every carpool. None of these people get Skrillex—only a refined aesthetic palette that I infrequently attribute to my decade-plus as a musician. Occasionally, people notice that I am more than what I reveal. A particular piece of attire, a long-shot reference, an offhand reference to a thing I did. I have come to enjoy the dopamine hit of people concluding that I’m cool.
They don’t know the half of it—primarily because I don’t tell them.
But in the kaleidoscope of bass drops in Fuck U Skrillex, I can explain the degree to which I got The Sauce. I can loop “REDLINE DASH” and in sixty seconds tell someone, “This is what I’m about.”
Contraband with a bag full of cash
Empty street for a redline dash
This writing reflects my views alone, and does not reflect the views of SemiAnalysis. This is not investment advice. For analysis on semiconductors, AI, energy systems, industrial inputs, or utilities, visit https://semianalysis.com
“Performative male” my ass; I’m a better tarot reader than you are