Skrillex recorded the Bangarang EP between June and August 2011, roughly three months after someone broke into his hotel room in Milan, Italy and walked out with two laptops and multiple hard drives containing his entire body of work in progress. The theft reset everything. What came out the other side, released on December 23, 2011, was a seven-track EP that peaked at number 15 on the Billboard 200, reached number four in Australia, and earned five Grammy nominations. The loss made the record.
The Milan theft in March 2011 was not a minor setback. As Skrillex confirmed on social media at the time, the stolen machines held all his project files and a new album he had been building. He spent a week in crisis, then announced he would spend the rest of the year remaking what he had lost. The Mothership Tour, which ran 66 shows across North America and Europe from September 22 to December 17, 2011, became the laboratory. Most of the tracks that ended up on Bangarang were performed live on that tour before a single note was committed to a final mix. The exception was "Right on Time," the only track on the EP that had not been road-tested in front of a crowd.
The EP opens with "Right In," a solo Skrillex production that functions as a statement of intent: compressed, aggressive, and built around a bass drop that leaves almost no space for doubt. From there, the tracklist moves into "Bangarang," featuring rapper Sirah, whose clipped, percussive delivery locks into the track's moombahcore pulse in a way that makes the collaboration feel structural rather than decorative. Sirah also appears on "Kyoto," track six, where her vocals take on a harder edge against a drumstep framework that hits differently from anything else on the record.
Track three, "Breakn' a Sweat," is the EP's most audacious move. Skrillex built the track around vocal and instrumental material from the Doors, with Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger credited as performers. The songwriting credits include Jim Morrison, Manzarek, Krieger, and John Densmore alongside Skrillex. The result is a five-minute piece that holds the tension between two very different ideas about what a rock band can sound like, and it works because Skrillex treats the source material as architecture rather than sample fodder. The track was later featured in the 2012 documentary film Re:Generation and released as the EP's first official single on January 15, 2012.
"The Devil's Den," track four, is a co-production with Wolfgang Gartner, and "Right on Time," track five, brings in 12th Planet and Kill the Noise as co-producers and co-writers. Both tracks carry the collaborative credits through to the sound itself: "The Devil's Den" has a harder, more mechanical feel than anything Skrillex produces alone, and "Right on Time" builds into a feverish stretch of energy that reflects 12th Planet and Kill the Noise's bass-music instincts as much as Skrillex's own. The full producer credits across the EP read: Skrillex, Wolfgang Gartner, 12th Planet, Kill the Noise, and Varien, the last of whom arranged the "Skrillex Orchestral Suite," a medley of four previously released Skrillex tracks that appeared as a bonus track on the iTunes edition.
The EP closes with "Summit," featuring Ellie Goulding, whose voice carries the track's melodic weight across six minutes and fourteen seconds of melodic dubstep that sits at a different emotional register from everything that precedes it. Where the rest of Bangarang pushes outward, "Summit" pulls inward. It is the record's longest track and its quietest argument.
The second official single, "Bangarang" featuring Sirah, followed on February 16, 2012, and reached number four in Canada and number 14 in Australia. The EP's commercial performance was broad enough to confirm what the Mothership Tour crowds had already demonstrated: these tracks worked at volume, in rooms, on bodies. The five Grammy nominations that followed, including Best Dance Recording for the title track, were the industry catching up to something the dancefloor had already decided.
Bangarang arrived out of catastrophe and landed as the most commercially successful release of Skrillex's career to that point. The theft in Milan forced a rebuild. The 66-show tour stress-tested every idea before it was finalized. The EP that came out of that process is a record that sounds like it was made under pressure, because it was, and that pressure is audible in every drop.
