When the Drop Actually Earns It

Summit arrived at the tail end of 2012 when Skrillex had already become a meme, which is the worst thing that can happen to music you might actually enjoy. The track features Ellie Goulding doing something quietly beautiful over production that keeps threatening to collapse into a standard brostep breakdown and then doesn’t quite—or doesn’t entirely. Her voice creates a strange atmospheric ceiling above all the mechanical architecture below it, and the result is one of the few Skrillex tracks I’ve returned to without embarrassment. I was skeptical of everything he made by that point. This one made me recalibrate slightly.