Not Just Anybody

Skrillex and Four Tet featuring Starrah “Butterflies”

Skrillex is not famous for being subtle. His best known tracks are absurdly energetic and loud, and his best remixes are like the audio equivalent of dousing a song with hot sauce. “Butterflies,” a collaboration with Four Tet, doesn’t quite do either of those things but that doesn’t make it disappointing. It’s more like a seamless merger of both producers’ aesthetics that results in a straight-ahead dance banger with a somewhat zoned-out atmosphere and a sophisticated approach to manipulating vocals for melodic and textural effect. I think left to his own devices Four Tet would be much less likely to present Starrah’s vocal as plainly as it sometimes is through this song, but the contrast of his more abstract style and leaving whole chunks of this track to be as straight-ahead pop as one of Skrillex’s songs with Justin Bieber is a more “best of both worlds” than “mild compromise.” There is some hot sauce effect going on here – the track thumps a lot harder than Four Tet would normally, but it’s still relatively restrained by Skrillex standards. I suppose this could be interpreted as “maturity” but I hear it more as Skrillex exploring new ways to go hard to avoid repetition and reliance on gimmick.

Buy it from Beatport.