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Flume Skin Album 2021

’s sophomore album Skin (2016) is a landmark in modern electronic music, bridging the gap between underground "wonky" beats and mainstream pop-EDM. It won the Grammy Award for Best Dance/Electronic Album, solidifying Harley Streten’s position as a visionary producer who uses technology to create "organic" sounds. 🧬 The Core Philosophy: "The Alien Organic"

Flume chose the title Skin to represent something that is simultaneously unsettling and intimate.

Organic vs. Synthetic: The album explores the contrast between digital distortion and human vulnerability.

Fabric of the Universe: Streten famously described his goal for the track "Wall Fuck" as wanting to create a sound like "the fabric of the universe tearing".

Vocal Manipulation: He treats the human voice as an instrument, pushing it to sound robotic yet deeply personal. 🎨 Visual Identity: Jonathan Zawada flume skin album

The album’s iconic cover art was created by multimedia artist Jonathan Zawada .

6. Wall Fuck (The Weird One)

No discussion of the Flume Skin album is complete without addressing "Wall Fuck." The track is a sonic Dadaist poem. It samples the sound of Harley scratching a CD with his fingernail to simulate a skipping player. There is no conventional structure. It is the sound of a producer completely unshackled from commercial expectation.

The Weight of Expectation

Before discussing Skin, one must understand the pressure Flume was under. His 2012 debut launched a thousand imitators. The "Flume sound"—characterized by pitch-shifted vocal chops, syncopated percussion, and lush synth pads—dominated the early 2010s.

Fans and critics wondered: Could he do it again? Would he simply rehash the formula? ’s sophomore album Skin (2016) is a landmark

Flume answered these questions not with volume, but with texture. The Flume Skin album took two and a half years to craft. He reportedly scrapped an entire album’s worth of material halfway through, realizing he was "just making the same record." The result is an album that feels restless, anxious, beautiful, and jarring—sometimes within the same song.

Critical Reception and Awards

Upon release, the Flume Skin album debuted at No. 1 on the Australian ARIA Charts and No. 8 on the US Billboard 200 (a massive feat for an instrumental-leaning electronic act).

At the ARIA Music Awards of 2017, Skin swept the board, winning:

It also won the Grammy for Best Dance/Electronic Album in 2017, beating out heavyweights like Jean-Michel Jarre and Tycho. This validation from the mainstream industry proved that experimental pop had a place at the table. Critical Reception and Awards Upon release, the Flume

The "Flume Sound": Production Techniques

Skin became a textbook for producers. Key techniques that defined the album include:

  1. Sinistro (The "Flume Chord"): He popularized the use of minor ninth and minor eleventh chords played on detuned, reverb-drenched synths. These chords sound simultaneously euphoric and heartbreaking.
  2. Granular Synthesis: He used plugins like The Mangle to tear samples into tiny grains of sound, creating the "glittering" or "watery" textures heard on tracks like "Wall Fuck."
  3. Pitch-Shifted Vocals: Moving vocals up or down 2-4 semitones to create an eerie, "genderless" emotional quality (heavily used on "Tiny Cities" and "3").
  4. Foley as Percussion: The clatter of a train, the click of a lighter, the snap of a twig—all used as rhythmic elements.

The Visual World of Skin

An album is never just audio. The Flume Skin album era was defined by its striking visual identity. Artist Jonathan Zawada created the artwork: a twisted, 3D-rendered Orchid that appears to be melting, inflating, or sprouting teeth.

This uncanny valley aesthetic—organic yet synthetic—perfectly mirrors the music. The music videos (directed by Clemens Habicht, among others) utilized deep-fakes, liquid geometry, and surrealist body horror. To experience Skin is to enter a world where nothing is stable.