Bleep

When musing on what he liked about dubstep producers, Burial said, “They’re in the ditch – there’s no highway to attract the rubbish producers.” The ditch is exactly where his eponymous debut album as Burial takes place: first marking the airwaves in 2006, its shadowy presence resides in the corners, alleys, and trenches where daylight doesn’t reach. It was the first album to land on Hyperdub after years of swapping tunes with label head Kode9, and it was an instant classic.

Soaking up the distant lights of the South London boroughs from which this LP emerged, Burial took the street sounds and sub bass atmospheres of the dubstep scene and turned them inward, those wobbling subs always lurking underneath a smoked out haze. Misty voices calling from afar, a heavy rolling EL-B/Locked On influence haunting the drums, and the out-of-step-with-their-own-time synths lay bare the foundations. The album’s sound palette would define much of Burial’s foggy submersions since, falling somewhere in between the more dusty Basic Channel, Tricky's Maxinquaye, and the UKG indebted dubstep of Kode9's finest work.

Burial opens with the roiling bass and butterfly knife rhythms of ‘Distant Lights’, introducing the album’s gloomy undercurrent with snatches of muffled vocal samples, pirate radio dialogue shrouded in vinyl crackle, and puffs of wispy synths. Tracks like ‘Night Bus’ and ‘Forgive’ provide moments of calm and solemnitude, like light peeking through the overcast skies that have embraced London since the dawn of time, before ‘Southern Comfort’ cuts after the former with the cityscape’s synth sirens threaded into ironclad beats, and ‘Prayer’ later scuttles into action, heavily populated with quaking lower frequencies.

The one-two punch that Untrue followed up with a year later would cement Burial as one of the greatest electronic artists of the 21st century, but his self-titled debut is the otherworldly underground classic where it all began.