Untrue dropped in 2007 and people are still trying to make records that sound like it. They can’t. That’s not me being a fanboy — it’s nearly two decades of producers running their drums through vinyl crackle plugins and standing in the rubble where Burial built a city. Burial is William Bevan, a South London producer who’s never DJ’d or played live, and Untrue (2007) is the most influential UK electronic record of its decade.
Who is Burial?
For years nobody knew his name. That was the entire point. When Hyperdub put out the self-titled debut in 2006, “Burial” was a question mark. No photos. No interviews. No shows — he’s famously never DJ’d or played live, which in dance music is roughly like being a chef who refuses to let anyone eat the food. The anonymity wasn’t a marketing stunt cooked up by a label intern. Bevan just didn’t want it to be about him. He made the records on SoundForge, an audio editor not even meant for music production, by eye — lining up waveforms visually instead of to a grid, which is why nothing he does sits cleanly on the beat. It wobbles. It lurches. It sounds like a person, not a sequencer.
By 2008 the Mercury nomination had the press circling, and The Sun — yes, that Sun, the tabloid — was working up an “unmask Burial” hunt, even offering a reward for his real identity. So he got ahead of it himself. He posted a photo and a blog on Myspace: “I’m a lowkey person and I just want to make some tunes.” William Bevan. South London. The least rockstar reveal imaginable, and somehow it made the myth bigger.
What does Burial sound like?
If you’ve never heard it, here’s the closest I can get in words: imagine the last train home at 2am, the city emptied out, rain on the window, and somewhere underneath the hiss you can hear a rave that ended hours ago still echoing in your skull. That’s a Burial track. The vinyl crackle isn’t nostalgia cosplay — it’s texture, it’s the grime under the fingernails. He pitches vocals up and down until they’re androgynous ghosts, snips them out of garage tracks and R&B acapellas and lets them haunt the mix instead of leading it. The drums are 2-step UK garage skeletons, but hollowed out, draped in reverb, surrounded by sounds you can’t place: lighters sparking, rain, vinyl pops, the click of a PlayStation, distant sirens. It’s club music for people who got home from the club and couldn’t sleep.
Is Burial dubstep?
People file it under dubstep and that’s not wrong, exactly, but it always undersold it. When everyone else heard “dubstep” and chased the drop — the brostep wobble-bass arms race that gave us Skrillex and a thousand worse imitators — Burial went the opposite direction. Inward. Quieter. Sadder. He took the same UK garage and 2-step DNA and made something that felt less like a night out and more like the comedown after. “Archangel,” “Ghost Hardware,” “Near Dark,” “Raver” — these aren’t bangers, they’re elegies. Untrue got nominated for the 2008 Mercury Prize, lost to Elbow, and frankly the committee not handing it over remains one of those decisions that ages worse every year.
The influence is everywhere, and most of it goes uncredited because that’s how influence works once it becomes the water everyone swims in. The whole “post-dubstep” wave is downstream of what Bevan figured out about space, decay, and what a chopped-up human voice can do to you. James Blake has called Burial a massive inspiration and built an early career on the question “what if Burial, but I sang.” Mount Kimbie came up in the same draft. Four Tet and Burial have collaborated, traded white-label 12-inches, vanished and reappeared. You can hear the Burial ghost in trap’s vocal chops and in every ambient-techno producer who realized hiss could carry more feeling than another kick drum.
He never cashed in, either. No big festival pivot, no Vegas residency, no “Burial presents.” After Untrue he could’ve done anything and instead went weirder and longer — the Rival Dealer EP, the “Kindred” and “Truant” singles, sprawling pieces that ditch song structure entirely — drifting, crackling, erupting into a beat for ninety seconds, then dissolving again. Most of his best recent work isn’t even on albums. It’s EPs and one-off singles dropped on Hyperdub with no warning and no rollout, the way a normal person texts you at 3am. Kode9’s label gave him total freedom and Burial repaid it by quietly becoming arguably one of the most important British producers of the century, full stop.
What makes Burial matter isn’t the mystery, even though the mystery is great. It’s that he proved electronic music could gut you without a single bar of someone telling you how they feel. He builds the feeling out of debris — out of the literal noise other producers spend their lives scrubbing out. He hears poetry in the parts everyone throws away: the surface noise, the room tone, the off-grid stumble, the ghost of a voice that used to be a whole song.
Nearly two decades on, “Burial” still isn’t a genre you can teach or a formula you can reverse-engineer, no matter how many crackle plugins you stack. It’s a feeling — specifically the feeling of a city after everyone’s gone home, lonely and beautiful and humming with everything that already happened. Nobody’s matched it because nobody else hears the world quite like William Bevan, alone in a South London flat, lining up waveforms by eye, making the saddest dance music ever recorded.
Where to start with Burial
- Untrue (2007) — start here, full stop
- “Archangel” — the one everyone gets hooked on
- “Near Dark”
- “Ghost Hardware”
- Rival Dealer (2013) — for the longer, weirder later direction
Start with Untrue. Play it at night.