Skrillex Hard Drives

In early 2011, Skrillex had just come off a run of major U.S. dates. He had just finished played SXSW a couple days before, and about a week or two before his Ultra set at the end of the U.S. leg of the Mothership tour he flew to Italy and checked into a hotel in Milan to begin the European leg.

On March 24, 2011, his hotel room in Milan was robbed: two laptops (including his MacBook), and external backup hard drives (believed to be 4) were stolen. Those drives contained a large amount of (but not the entirety of) in-progress Skrillex material which included full project files, sounds, samples, and unfinished tracks. The theft wiped out what he had been working on at the time, including a work‑in‑progress album/collection that later had to be remade and/or abandoned. “Needed Change” had been intended for that release but ended up coming out as a free download shortly beforehand. With so much gone and no usable backups, he effectively had to start over with rebuilding sessions, recreating sound design, and in at least one case remaking “Dimbow/Kyoto” almost entirely from scratch, while other unfinished ideas (including “Amplifire,” “Died This Way,” and others) were effectively abandoned and were never completed.

Nearly a month later, in late April 2011, he publicly addressed it on Facebook, saying that both laptops and his hard drives had been stolen and that “all the project files of Skrillex” were gone, along with “a new album.” That status and the scale of the loss led many fans and blogs (including an article by Rolling Stone) to spread the idea that an album called “Voltage” had been stolen.

 However, the most accurate accounts indicate the album was never actually titled Voltage. Complicating the myth further, “Voltage” was not an album at all but a single track, and it wasn’t even created until July 2011. Around that later period, the larger project he was developing was the Bangarang EP, which was possibly envisioned as longer-form at some point. In this record, some tracks reportedly were dropped because they were unfinished.

In the months following the robbery, releases like More Monsters and Sprites arrived, and listeners noticed changes in Skrillex’s production and sound design. Some people have long attributed that shift directly to the theft—arguing he lost patches/samples he couldn’t recreate—though how much it actually changed his sound remains uncertain and is hard to prove and largely based on conjecture.

As for what happened to the stolen gear: there were rumours that the devices were recovered but wiped (likely to resell). Skrillex and his team never definitively confirmed recovery, and no credible leaks from the stolen drives ever emerged, which supports the idea it was a random robbery rather than an intentional sort of burglary. Confusingly, Italian police had noted uploads on YouTube originating from a Milan-based IP address which appeared to possibly be leaks from the stolen hardware, but it was eventually confirmed to be unrelated.
One additional wrinkle is that, years later, certain older material surfaced in official form. Some examples of this are “San Diego VIP and DnB Ting” appearing on FUS with what sounds like a different master than earlier leaked renders. This of course, suggesting that some data may have been recovered eventually, possibly via a data recovery specialist or some other means. This of course, all that remains speculative.

Finally, 14 years later (2025), “Voltage” was officially released—but notably using the very first drop/version from July 2011, not the more widely known later revision that leaked and circulated in 2012. Overall, the Milan theft was a major setback that cost him a huge amount of work, but it’s often misremembered: it didn’t “steal the Voltage album,” because there wasn’t one, and the track “Voltage” itself came later.