Butterflies

"Butterflies" is Skrillex at his most weightless, and the credit list explains why: Four Tet's touch is all over the airy, granular texture, and Starrah's writing gives it a heartbeat instead of a drop. The track floats on chopped vocal fragments that shimmer like light through water, pitched up until they read as instruments rather than words, over a garage-inflected shuffle that keeps the pulse gentle and hurried at once. There's no aggression here at all — the bass is round and warm, and where a 2011 Skrillex would have inserted a detonation, this one lets the arrangement simply open, a curtain drawing back. Starrah's vocal is close-mic'd and unadorned, sitting slightly behind the beat, singing about the physical symptom of infatuation as if describing a mild illness she doesn't want cured. The emotional landscape is anticipatory nervousness rendered as beauty: that stomach-flip before you say the thing you can't unsay. Culturally it belongs to Skrillex's long reinvention, the years in which the dubstep figurehead quietly became a producer's producer and pop architect. It's built for movement without violence — headphones on a night walk, the last hour of a set as the room softens, or a drive home when you're still thinking about someone.