Burial

Burial

Since 2005 · United Kingdom

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Untrue (2007)

Untrue takes the vinyl crackle, pitched-up vocal samples, and skeletal 2-step rhythms of Burial's debut and turns them into something closer to pop songwriting, without sacrificing any of the fog the earlier record was built from. "Archangel" is the clearest case — a chopped, helium-pitched vocal sample looped over a slow, melancholic beat that somehow reads as genuinely emotional rather than as a production trick. "Ghost Hardware" and the title track extend the same palette into more skeletal, unresolved territory. It's a record that made isolation and bad weather sound like a legitimate genre unto itself, and a good deal of the UK bass and ambient-adjacent music that followed still carries its influence.

Sleeve notes

Untrue · 2007

Burial is William Bevan, a producer from South London who released his self-titled debut in 2006 on Hyperdub, the label run by Kode9, without any promotional apparatus or public identity attached to the name. The music itself — heavily processed garage and 2-step rhythms, pitched vocal samples, vinyl crackle standing in for the ambience of a London night bus — sounded like it was arriving from somewhere just adjacent to the dance music scenes it drew from rather than squarely inside them.

Untrue (2007) refined that approach into something more melodic and considerably more widely heard, its hazy, rain-soaked atmosphere and lonely, processed vocal fragments becoming one of the defining textures of that period's UK bass music. Bevan's identity became public against his own preference not long after, but he has continued to give only occasional, mostly written interviews and has rarely performed live. He has kept releasing music steadily in the years since, extending the same melancholic, ambient-leaning sound across a series of singles and EPs.