- Digging deep into the psyche and psychosis of early '90s UK hardcore, the Londoner's latest EP grapples with XL's most classic sounds.
- Beyond the usual fanfare that greets a new Burial release, Dreamfear / Boy Sent From Above is extra intriguing because it lands on an unusual label: UK juggernaut XL Recordings. (That said, the London producer has strayed from his Hyperdub home before—including a splashy Four Tet and Thom Yorke collaboration on XL in 2020.) His first solo release on the label is surprisingly raw and rough around the edges, its production directly calling back to XL's breakbeat hardcore heritage, down to the creepy "there's something in the drugs" sample that emerges towards the end of the A-side, channeling the jittery rush of early 4hero and Doc Scott.
That aside, Dreamfear / Boy Sent From Above is still a lot like other recent Burial 12-inches on any label: two 12-minute-plus tracks split into several disparate sections. Burial has such a signature style that, to the casual listener, it might seem like he's been flogging a dead horse for the better part of the decade. The combination of crackling vinyl, quivering, pitched-up vocals and forlorn synths (or samples) is more than familiar. But zoom out and take a look at records like the ambient Antidawn, the alternate-universe Christmas number one "Come Down To Us" or the blitzing UK hardcore of "Chemz" and you'll see he actually covers plenty of sonic ground—without ever abandoning his trusty set of tools. That feeling lingers here, but the EP runs on the energy conjured up by last year's "Unknown Summer," diving headfirst into a nostalgia for a genuinely new take on one of electronic music's most imitated sounds. It's grittier, heavier and more operatic than ever before.
The lo-fi "Dreamfear" is structured like a night out gone sideways. Breakbeats and samples about ecstasy rub shoulders with samples such as "your love is a drug," before an honestly kind of disturbing (and delightfully cheesy) nu-metal sample: "Back from the dead / Fucked up in the head" repeats over a groaning synth melody, like a nightmarish inversion of the angel-in-the-back-alleys reveries of early Burial. Everything sounds dirtier and fuzzier, and decades-old samples of The Prodigy and Richie Hawtin only add to the eerie feeling that you've been here before.
If "Dreamfear" is the bad trip, "Boy Sent From Above" is when the substances start to wear off and you can see and hear clearly again. Untrue-style R&B samples (Monica's "Angel Of Mine") float over a peppy breakbeat sample, eventually climaxing into a bleary-eyed synth horn refrain that hints at both '80s freestyle and early prog house—a swelling of conflicted emotion that feels like the work of a more mature Burial, a grizzled old raver rather than the misty-eyed bedroom poet of the old days. Both this one (and its crunchy ending) and "Dreamfear" have a narrative flow and easy cohesion that Burial has been aiming at for the last ten years but sometimes missing for the sake of pure ambition. They're like hardcore continuum versions of Brian Wilson's pocket symphonies spread out across lengthy slabs of amphetamine-frazzled beats that swoop in and out like fractured flashbacks.
So much of Burial's music deals in the darkly tinted shades of '00s video games, noir thrillers or Disney-fied levels of naive feeling. Dreamfear / Boy Sent From Above jumps out from the canvas like something completely unprecedented from a producer who was coming close to pigeonholing himself. It may be ironic that Burial's freshest release in some time is also his most overtly retro, but that's always how this sort of music has worked. Burial and Untrue transformed dark UK garage and Y2K R&B into music that became the collective consciousness of the London dubstep scene (and later, the wider world). On this 12-inch, he takes the collective consciousness of a previous era—one he likely only knows from the memories of others—and makes it into something brand new. He's already mastered the urban melancholy of 3 AM streets and the rush of euphoria that accompanies falling in love with dance music for the first time. Almost 20 years later, he's deep in its dark underbelly, finding even more complex, concerning sensations that call everything before into question. In other words, the kind of uneasy realisations that come with real, honest growth—inner-city lullabies for a world that looks a whole lot different now.
Tracklist01. Dreamfear
02. Boy Sent From Above