Quest For Fire - Skrillex

The first of his two 2023 albums, Skrillex goes on his "Quest For Fire", and I reckon he found it.

Skrillex will always carry a legacy of revolutionizing the dubstep scene as the harbinger of brostep, and, love it or hate it, you can't deny that he completely upturned electronic music as we know it. And in "Quest For Fire", he's back to do it again — only this time not in dubstep, but in trap. The deep sounds of hybrid trap aren't necessarily new, but Skrillex lays his fingers on them and his magic touch awakens the trendsetter within him, and "Quest For Fire" suddenly jumpstarts its own sonic movement. It's far from just hybrid trap though — Skrillex takes equally lucrative jumps into house and even the 'deep' original dubstep, a respectful homage yet modern reprise on an old sound that faded away when Skrillex himself exploded onto the scene with his brostep. But one listen-through and you quickly begin to understand just why this project is so highly regarded — because, well, it's good. Chunky basslines stomp through powerful vocal features, low-frequency lead lines, and the masterful sonic engineering Skrillex has come to be know for over the years, and these elements all make up the crux of what "Quest For Fire" stands for. This is a style that, in my opinion (having not really gelled well with his aggressive brostep style of the 2010s), is one of his best, and subsequently one of the best that the mainstage EDM scene has on offer. The features and collaborators here are no joke either — Flowdan lets rip a couple of nasty verses on "Rumble" and "Hydrate", Porter Robinson works his melodic magic on "Still Here (with the ones that I came with)", Four Tet brings big name power and equally polished iconic production to "Butterflies", and Noisia unleashes a monstrous halftime drop onto the vocal-based soundscape of "Supersonic (my existence)". And still, despite all these massive collaborations, Skrillex continues to keep his hold over the stylistic elements of "Quest For Fire", with his sturdy basslines and respected sound design always shining through. 

Skrillex has produced something irresistable here, a project that will likely shape the path of electronic music for another era. But I can't help but feel like I saved a few less tracks than I expected to, in part because of the midsection of the project that simply didn't feel as engaging as the front and back ends of it. Adding that to the apparent lack of cohesiveness — even though it works well with his album "Don't Get Too Close" he released later in the year, and also has a couple of cool interludes, there isn't really any clear narrative element to latch onto — and "Quest For Fire" starts to suffer, just a little. But even if it might not be making its way into my personal favourite albums, it does retain both its quality and its cultural significance.