Skrillex's scene-defining Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites turns 10 today

There's no denying that Skrillex played an important part in defining modern-day dance music, being someone who heavily influenced the entire dubstep sub-genre in the years before its commercial break-out. A big part of that came from his Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites EP, which really captured an entire new generation of dance music lovers and helped transform a niche pocket of dance music into a commercial success; exploding dubstep into the forefront of the dance music canon and booming it out from the underground from which it was prior to that point.

Today, the EP turns ten years old, and it's worth celebrating exactly how the EP's impact still underlays a lot of modern-day dance music niches. It really commercialised the dubstep sound and ushered it into its most mainstream-esque point (at that point), which in turn, influenced a new generation of producers whose imprint remains in dance music today; everyone from Porter Robinson through to the current-day heavy-hitters of dance music's heavier sounds listing Skrillex - and his Scary Monsters EP - as major influences in their production.

At the time, there was really nothing else like it in the commercial dance music space, but now - ten years later - dubstep remains one of dance music's most important and blossoming sounds, itself influencing offshoots - such as riddim, for example - that remain at their club-centric peak all this time later. There was also the guest collaborators and remixes the EP emphasised - throwing Foreign Beggars and Zedd into the mainstream alongside Skrillex, for example - and also the acts that would later enlist Skrillex to bring his dub-aligned touch to other genres, particularly in hip-hop and pop production.

Today, however, we're celebrating Skrillex - and there's no denying that his career wouldn't have had the same trajectory if it wasn't for Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites. Take another dive into it below, as we celebrate its ten year anniversary:

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