They help you see where songs can be better, in situations where those of us working on the songs can’t see. “Everybody was shocked at how greatly improved the song felt,” Einziger said. Rather than getting protective over their material and throwing Skrillex out of the studio like DJ Jazzy Jeff in a Fresh Prince episode, they asked him to provide similar post-production on the entire album.

It still sounded like the five members of Incubus playing together in a room, but the song they’d written had been broken down and drastically restructured according to Skrillex’s intuition. There were no dancey drum machines or dubstep breakdowns. But Skrillex’s take on “Familiar Faces” didn’t sound like a remix in the commonly understood sense. Rather than make use of the expensive equipment, Skrillex quickly began plugging away at his personal computer, hacking apart and reassembling an album track called “ Familiar Faces.” When he finished, verses and choruses were rearranged, and one section the band believed to be crucial to the song was gone entirely. “And that multi-million dollar console was just Sonny’s desk for his laptop.” “We were in this trillion dollar studio in Hollywood, and there’s a multi-multi-million-dollar Neve console, with all the fancy buttons, and people who know what those buttons do,” singer Brandon Boyd told SPIN recently, about a month after the record was finished. The dubstep producer and pop auteur is a close friend of Incubus guitarist Mike Einziger, and the band had expressed interest in having him contribute a remix to the record. Incubus’s new album 8 was nearly finished when Skrillex paid the band a visit at Paramount Recording Studio in Los Angeles.

Early incubus band