The bassline on “2003” moves like it has somewhere to be and all night to get there, which is exactly the point of this deep, rolling end of dubstep. Klinical named the track after the year and it sounds like one: a memory of when the genre was skeletal and patient instead of loud for its own sake. A two-note sub carries the entire back half, dropping in and out with a gap between each note wide enough to lose your footing in, and that empty space is where the pressure actually lives. Nothing rushes. The hats tick along feeling slower than they measure, the mids stay dark and sparse, and every time the bass swings back it lands a fraction heavier than your body braced for. I had it going through real speakers and felt the low notes behind my knees a beat before I clocked them as sound. Through earbuds you’ll catch maybe half, which is the tax on production built this far down. Klinical trusts you to feel the weight of what he leaves out, and that trust is the difference between deep dubstep that hypnotises and the kind that just plods. This one hypnotises.
Klinical is no stranger to this blog. Last time: Klinical - It Pours