Burial at 20: Resurrecting The Album That Predicted Our Present

The mid-2000s were a highly transitional period for the UK’s electronic music. Dubstep was moving out of South London and into mainstream consciousness, showing it was more than a darker, more elaborate successor to UK garage. Production was also shifting from hardware studios to software-based digital audio workstations (DAWs), making experimentation more accessible. In the middle of this cultural metamorphosis, Burial, born William Emmanuel Bevan, released one of the most radical and influential electronic albums of the 21st Century.    

Credit: Georgina Cooke

While producers like Skream were making grime love letters (‘Midnight Request Line’), you could immediately imagine playing in a club, Burial’s music evoked the memory of a night out. “It’s like people after a club, and they’re sitting around or playing PlayStation and stuff, still listening to the echo of their night out in their heads,” he said to FACT Magazine. “Or when you walk down the stairs into a club, and you start hearing the music, but people are talking around you, and the music mixes itself in with real life. I like that sound. It’s like a memory of a tune.”

Armed with basic Sony Sound Forge software, Burial made music that didn’t conform to any rigid systems. This allowed him to tap into something more human and organic. He captured the uneasiness of living in London. Music, to him, had to have an environmental essence: “If I’m making a tune sitting in my room with a cup of tea, I’m not making a tune about sitting in my room with a cup of tea; it’s like I’m out there somewhere,” he told Blackdown.

Burial’s 2005 South London Boroughs EP provided an early glimpse of that hyperlocal soundscape that would define his later work. He would explore this further on Burial, using atmospheric production to convey the pains and groans of South London from his bedroom. Through vinyl crackles, static hiss, rainfall samples, and distorted vocals, Burial drops listeners into a familiar time or place they can’t go back to. ‘Wounder’ offers a particularly striking example. The static and beeping remind me of a submarine sending out a distress signal from beneath the water. It gives the track an unsettling sense of isolation, as though something is trying to communicate from somewhere the listener cannot reach.

Burial, in its essence, is hauntological (the idea that our present is haunted by a cultural past and futures that never happened). Burial mentions his love for ghost stories by M.R. James, one of hauntology's biggest pioneers. His London is similarly haunted by the memories of the 80s and 90s dance music scene, implanted by his brothers. Throughout the album, he mourns the London of old underground raves, pirate radio, and dark clubs, now replaced by commercialised spaces that feel more polished but less authentic. This idea is reinforced by the way he uses soundbites in songs like ‘Gutted’. He samples a clip from Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, where Ghost Dog, played by Forest Whitaker, mutters, “Me and him, we’re from different, ancient tribes… now we’re both almost extinct… sometimes you gotta stick with the ancient ways… old-school ways.”

In an interview with Mark Fisher for the Wire Magazine, Burial admits that he had “never been to a festival, a rave in a field, a big warehouse or an illegal party.” He inhabits a world he inherited through memory but can no longer experience for himself, a spectral London. This makes the world he creates on the album very spiritual. We can even sense this occult approach in the album’s cover, which shows an elevated view of the South London Borough of Wandsworth. It's as though an angel is hovering above the city, singing hymns to soothe tortured souls below.

Burial’s use of samples was pivotal to achieving the album’s haunting atmosphere. He grew up on garage and jungle music, and his older brothers introduced him to artists like DJ Hype, Foul Play, and DJ Krystl. These tunes came with vocals that enchanted Burial.

Credit: Georgina Cooke

He said he liked vocals that were “like a night cry, an angel animal.” “Old hardcore tunes would throw these sounds in, anything to create the rush, descent into another world, like Papua New Guinea by Future Sound of London,” he continued. Burial uses these vocals to create a frisson of excitement, which fades into the darkness as quickly as it came. No song shows this more than ‘U Hurt Me’, where Burial samples Ashanti’s vocals from the R&B song ‘Foolishness’ to give warmth to an otherwise cold production. On ‘Distant Lights', he uses repetitive percussion and fragmented vocals to create the feeling of a sonic revolving door that is impossible to escape. The repetition traps the listener in the present, creating a sense of blissful stagnation, while the hazy vocals leave them hoping for a ghostly future.

Burial’s fascination with the metaphysical can be tied to a love for dark and gritty films. He describes the feelings he got from the records his brothers played for him as the rush you got “when you first saw ‘Terminator’ or ‘Alien’ when you were only little.” It felt as though he was physically experiencing this “other world.” You can hear this “other worldliness” throughout Burial, with every song acting as a scene in a cyberpunk film. For example, ‘Night Bus’ has a gritty and cinematic feel reminiscent of Ridley Scott’s ‘Blade Runner’. Burial did say he's obsessed with the scene where Harrison Ford’s Deckard eats noodles while it rains. He uses rain and drawn-out synths to make ‘Night Bus’ feel less like a song about a city but more like a fleeting scene from one. 

Kode9’s Hyperdub label released Burial on 15 May 2006 to critical acclaim. The Wire named it the record of the year. In his review, Mark Fisher said it was the album he had “dreamt of for years” and called it “oneiric dance music”. Some critics also described it as a tearful tribute to a bygone era of London rave culture. Burial followed up his self-titled album with ‘Untrue’, an even bigger success. ‘Untrue’ was a more colourful version and was, in fact, conceived as a sort of “pop” move, with an emphasis on ecstatic vocal samples.

Burial’s decision to make dubstep feel like a memory rather than a moment in the club helped cement Burial in electronic music mythos. The producers who followed him took different parts of his approach and pushed them in new directions, especially his emphasis on creating an atmosphere that inspires emotional vulnerability. Producers like James Blake, Jamie Woon, and Darkstar, who made it their mission to trigger intense emotions from their listeners, began incorporating their own vocals and more traditional songwriting into post-dubstep. The shift was significant, as electronic music no longer had to choose between the physical energy of the dancefloor and the emotional intimacy of a song. Other producers pushed Burial’s darker qualities even further. Andy Stott and Raime explored the colder, more abrasive side of the post-dubstep landscape. At the same time, Raime’s Blackest Ever Black label connected the emerging sound with the occult atmosphere of post-punk, goth and industrial music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k_f2QK77ew

Burial’s influence also shaped how producers approached sound. Mount Kimbie, an electronic music duo of Dominic Maker and Kai Campos, who emerged from the same South London post-dubstep environment, used recordings made around London to create music their listeners could touch. Dominic Maker explained to Inverted Audio that sounds recorded at places including Southbank and Borough Market were “core to the sound that we have developed.” That influence later transcended production techniques to how London itself was represented. A collective realisation emerged that electronic and alternative music could make familiar London spaces feel strangely distant and intensely personal.

Perhaps Burial’s biggest contribution to electronic music was creating a sound that captured the cultural zeitgeist of the 21st Century. A Hyperdub press release described ‘Burial’ as a “near future South London underwater”. It's as though he foresaw the perils of our present. Like he could see us haunted by what we once were, what we could have been, and what we will unfortunately be.