I think the sense of pace we’ve built up to as a human race is really damaging for our sense of self, and our self-awareness.

There’s a sense of pace in the world that I think is super unhealthy, especially for me. It sounds like quarantine has been good for you in that way. I was like, “This is a Flux Pavilion album.” It still felt the same, it just sounded completely different. And all of the new music I was working on had the same feeling as “I Can’t Stop” and “Gold Dust” and all my early tracks. I wanted it to be everything Flux Pavilion couldn’t be.Īs I was writing, I realized Flux Pavilion isn’t actually defined by the sound of the music, it’s defined by the feeling. I started writing this music to try and start a new project - basically. I’ve grown into a different person, and Flux Pavilion didn’t really grow with me for quite some time. That was exactly what I wanted to do at that age. I started Flux when I was 19 and loved jumping around getting really drunk and playing parties. How have you evolved from that former version of yourself? As long as people listen to it, it’s not for me to say what it should be defined as. I just rode along with it - because I felt that it was too much energy to fight how people classified my music. The dubstep label with Flux Pavilion became this thing that was synonymous with my DJ sets and not actually with my music. I kind of carried on playing in a dubstep world, but all of my tracks never really felt like anyone else’s. Back in the early days, people were quick to say that my music wasn’t dubstep, because it didn’t really fit into what dubstep was. I think it will only be a shocking change for people who don’t know what Flux Pavilion is all about.” What did you mean by that?įlux Pavilion has been, for all intents and purposes, a dubstep act without really any dubstep. In November you tweeted, “This new album is the most honest to myself thing I’ve ever written. Here, Steele talks with Billboard about his new music, his evolution and how acknowledging his depression helped him to transcend it. “That has never been so untrue as this album now.”

“Ten years on, if you say ‘Flux Pavilion’ to a regular person, they’re like “Oh, a dubstep guy,” says Steele. He still spends time reading fantasy books and playing Dungeons & Dragons, but the guy who loved getting drunk and raging around the stage in 2010 has transformed into a wise, whip-smart father-to-be (Steele and his wife are expecting their first child) who’s removed the constraints from his creative process. Therapy and antidepressants helped him make music that he feels like is an accurate representation of the person he’s evolved into after a decade in the scene.

wav that Steele - whose anxiety often led to pre-show panic attacks in festival bathrooms - realized he’d actually been struggling with depression for much of his life. That feeling, he says, is a sort of childlike boundlessness, laced with a melancholy that’s long been familiar to him. He then had an epiphany: while his new music sounds very different than his era-defining hits like “I Can’t Stop,” the feeling this new music gave him was the same as he got from his heavier, earlier stuff. Having delved deeper into playing guitar and keyboards and singing live, Steele was ready to quit Flux Pavilion and launch a new project.

I still cant stop flux pavilion