The Future of Dubstep?

In the wake of LA, Skrillex’s collaboration with Korn I ask the question: can dubstep and rock work together?

The result of Skrillex’s collaboration with Korn was ‘Get Up’, a skittering bombardment of heavy electro beats and rocking guitars.

Jonathan Davies, lead vocalist for Korn, said of the collaboration, “I heard a few of Skrillex’s re-mixes and really felt there would be a good chance that he would have the right sensibility to connect us to a new hard sound and direction, but still keeping Korn guitars and our vibe. We were just thinking of trying something new, to be honest, so I had my manager reach out to the Skrillex camp. When we got into the studio the connection was instant!”

‘Get Up’ maintains Korn’s catchy choruses and guitar sound, but the influence of Skrillex takes their music in an entirely new direction. The song shakes with a rampant urgency; industrial screeches drop into forbidding guitars faster than Universal Studios’ Tower of Terror.

The lyrics are what you expect; however, there’s no doubt that this fusion of dubstep and rock creates a new, wild, heavy sound that brings a new twist to the dubstep movement.

Imitators have already begun to emerge. Modestep, a band that mixes dubstep with heavy rock, is just one example.

Modestep describe their sound as a “combination of Soul/Dance/Rock and Dubstep, with the intensity of a baseball bat to the face.” The band weaves dubstep’s contemporary sounds into their exhilarating, genre hopping songs and so far this year have put on some killer gigs at Download, LED, Isle of Wight and Glastonbury.

‘Get Up’ and the music created by Modestep is taking dubstep in a new direction. The combination of dubstep and rock has already produced some pretty interesting sounds, and it will be exciting to hear what kind of music the likes of Modestep and other crossover artists will produce in the future.