Skrillex dropped the Bangarang EP on December 23, 2011, via Beatport, two days before Christmas, with almost no advance runway. The announcement had come eleven days earlier, on December 12, via Twitter. The release date followed on December 21. Two days after that, the music was out. Six collaborators, seven tracks, thirty minutes, recorded across the Mothership Tour between June and August 2011, produced almost entirely by one person in transit. The EP did not arrive as a considered statement. It arrived like a set that had already been road-tested in front of thousands of people, because it had.
Bangarang is Skrillex's fourth EP, and it is the record that confirmed the scale of what Sonny Moore had built. The title track, featuring rapper Sirah, became a single on February 16, 2012, and the video accumulated nearly a billion YouTube views. The EP itself peaked at No. 14 on the Billboard 200. At the 55th Grammy Awards in 2013, it won Best Dance/Electronica Album, and the title track won Best Dance Recording. Those numbers are the result, not the argument. The argument is in the construction of the thing, in how Moore assembled six very different collaborators and made them all sound like the same room.
The tracklist is the clearest evidence. It opens with "Right In," a solo Skrillex track that functions as a pressure test, all compressed bass and fractured rhythm, before the title track arrives at position two. "Bangarang" (feat. Sirah) runs three minutes and thirty-five seconds and sits in the moombahcore pocket, Sirah's rap vocals woven through the drop rather than placed on top of it. Sirah recorded those vocals in her bedroom, on a laptop, and you can hear birds in the background if you know to listen for them. The rawness of that recording is part of the texture. Track three, "Breakn' a Sweat," is where the EP makes its most audacious move: surviving Doors members Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger contributed vocal and musical material to a drumstep track that runs over five minutes. The songwriting credits include Jim Morrison, Manzarek, John Densmore, Krieger, and Skrillex. That is not a collaboration that should work on paper. It works.
"Kyoto," the fourth track, brings Sirah back, this time in a harder register, rap-metal energy over brostep architecture. "The Devil's Den" at position five is co-produced with Wolfgang Gartner, and it is the EP's electro-house pivot, the track where the tempo logic shifts and the room gets wider. "Right On Time" at six is co-produced with 12th Planet and Kill the Noise, and it is the only track on the record that had not been performed live during the Mothership Tour before the EP was recorded. Every other track had been tested in front of crowds. "Right On Time" was the one built in the studio without a live reference point. It closes the standard edition with a glitch-hop drop that lands differently because of that context. "Summit," featuring Ellie Goulding, closes the main sequence with something closer to trance than dubstep, Goulding's voice riding a melodic build that has no interest in the aggression of the preceding six tracks. The iTunes edition added a bonus track, an orchestral medley of four previously released Skrillex songs arranged by producer Varien.
The production credits across the EP tell the story of how Moore worked. The liner notes read: all songs produced, recorded, mixed, and mastered by Skrillex on the Mothership, all over the world, except "The Devil's Den," produced by Skrillex and Wolfgang Gartner, and "Right On Time," produced by Skrillex, 12th Planet, and Kill the Noise. "Breakn' a Sweat" was recorded at The Village in Los Angeles. Everything else was made in motion, on a tour bus, between shows. The EP's thirty-minute runtime is the compressed output of a summer spent in transit.
The backstory behind several of these tracks adds weight to the record. Skrillex had been working toward a full-length album called Voltage. In 2011, his hard drive was stolen, and the album was cancelled. Tracks including "Kyoto" and "Summit" had been intended for that LP. They ended up here instead, which means Bangarang is partly a record about salvage, about what survives when the larger plan collapses. That context does not change how the music sounds, but it explains why the EP feels denser than its runtime suggests.
The title itself comes from the battle cry of the lost boys in Steven Spielberg's film Hook. Sirah's lyrics on the title track reference that directly, addressing her "lost boys" throughout. The EP was announced with almost no lead time, priced accessibly, and Skrillex publicly indicated he did not mind if people shared it freely. The guerrilla release strategy matched the music: fast, physical, built for immediate use. The physical CD followed on January 24, 2012, and "Breakn' a Sweat" had already been released as a single on January 15, giving the Doors collaboration its own moment before the title track single arrived in February.
What the Bangarang EP demonstrates is that the dancefloor is a laboratory. Moore had played these tracks live, watched how crowds responded, and then recorded them. The collaboration with the Doors is the extreme case of that logic: take something from a completely different musical world, run it through the system, and see what holds. What held was the drop. What held was the rhythm. The EP went two-for-two at the Grammys because it earned those wins the same way any good club record earns its reputation, by working in the room first and on record second.
