Flume walks us through his 'weird' new album, 'Skin'

Flume has one goal: "I wanna make weird stuff."

Well, that's not his only goal, but a fascination by the strange and infatuation with the unfamiliar are at the core of Harvey Streten's sound, and there's plenty of it to go around on Skin, his 16-track sophomore album that packed with big-name collaborators and warbled sounds galore. 

In an album darts frantically between experimental and made-for-radio pop, between the introverted and extroverted, between EDM for fans who listen proudly, fists pumping and those who don't tell anyone they listen to EDM, that weirdness is the thing that ties Skin together, the thread that binds its sometimes dizzying extremes.

"Lose It," for example, begins with a whale-like sound, maybe if that whale were trapped in an underwater funhouse. When Vic Mensa delivers the track's titular hook, he doesn't sing it as much as ejects, in a high-pitched release that sounds a little bit like a sneeze.

The start of "Numb & Getting Colder" seems to be caught that staticky place in between two radio stations -- here, between R&B and dance -- before Kučka's voice appears, manipulated to an almost alien-like octave.

The voiceless "Wall Fuck," meanwhile, is not an easy listen, but an agitated one, beginning with menacing drums and growing more and more anxious throughout. The most introspective track on Skin, Streten explained he wanted to sound like "the fabric of the universe tearing."

Barring standouts like "Never Be Like You" featuring Kai -- which succeeds as the album's most radio-friendly song -- Skin is altogether weirder than Streten's self-titled debut album, which was released in the wake of his career-launching "Sleepless" in 2012 to widespread critical acclaim. 

Streten tells Mashable that the pressure to live up to Flume weighed heavily on him recording Skin, and motivated him to find sounds that challenged him. 

"Every kid has a laptop, everyone can make music, so in order to stand out I think it's important to find that sonic identity, I think my sonic identity, and mine is finding these weird sounds that may not necessarily sound that musical, and make them sound musical," he said. "In the right context you can make ugly sounds, different sounds feel right at home."

Even its most beautiful, most appetizing songs have a certain discordance to them, like the shimmering instrumental "Pika" and "3," one of the few tracks that Streten sings on. 

The album juggles a group of vocalists from a wide range of genres -- Raekwon, Tove Lo, Beck, Vince Staples, Vic Mensa, and AlunaGeorge all appear, among others. But Skin never feels overpowered by them, even if that does mean that they aren't always used to the best of their abilities -- Vic Mensa on "Lose It" and AlunaGeorge on "Innocence," for example.

And then there are moments, like on "Numb & Getting Colder" where the vocals sound completely foreign, which was sort of Streten's goal using vocal manipulatin.  

"It's quite fun to mess with the human voice, it's quite special in the sense that the voice is the #1 instrument that we can connect with, it doesn't sound too alien," he said. "I think that's the key is to find the line between sounding human and sounding robotic. That's an area that I like to explore a lot." 

That meeting of the strange and familiar, the ugly and be beautiful is what made him choose the title Skin, he says. 

"To me, skin just feel and looks kind of weird, but it's also really intimate and personal," he said. "I want the music to come off a little alien and a little uncomfortable and strange, but at the same time really personal."

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