An album is not just heard; it is seen. The Flume Skin album is inseparably linked to the digital surrealism of Australian artist Jonathan Zawada. The cover art features a bizarre, hyper-realistic 3D flower—puffy and alien—sitting in a sterile void.
This imagery defined the "Skin" era: organic life rendered through a digital, corrupted lens. The music videos for the album (many directed by Clemens Habicht) matched this aesthetic, utilizing glitch art, 3D scanning, and liquid simulations. It was a cohesive world-building effort rarely seen in electronic music.
Flume has since released Hi This Is Flume (2019, a mixtape of chaotic beats) and Palaces (2022, a nature-infused album). Both are excellent. However, neither captured the lightning-in-a-bottle balance of accessibility and insanity present in Skin. flume skin album
Skin sits alongside Discovery (Daft Punk) and In Colour (Jamie xx) as one of the essential electronic albums of the 2010s. It is the sound of a young producer realizing he can break every rule—because the rules were only temporary anyway.
Flume includes two brief, abstract pieces. "Innocence" (feat. AlunaGeorge) is a 90-second burst of vocal stabs and trap hi-hats. "Fantastic" is a lullaby played on detuned music boxes. They serve as palate cleansers. An album is not just heard; it is seen
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? Flume includes two brief, abstract pieces
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.
If Flume’s debut was a collection of pristine, beat-driven bangers, Skin was a messy, beautiful, and organic evolution. The title is literal: Flume wanted to strip back the cold, digital veneer of EDM and expose the flesh underneath. He traded purely digital synthesis for recording organic foley (the sound of a stapler on "Helix," his own breath on "Numb & Getting Colder") and invited a diverse roster of vocalists to provide the "skin" over his skeletal beats.