A Guide to 20 Years of Burial

Celebrating two decades of Will Bevan's hauntological hardcore (2005-2025)

Burial’s self-titled debut album will turn 20 on 15 May 2026.

Some of Will Bevan’s hauntological hardcore tracks move me more than the most heart-wrenching songs ever written. Keep your Dylans, Cohens and Springsteens – I’ll take some classic Bevan over any of them.

Burial is an electronic music producer that keeps diversifying his sound without ever abandoning his core ideas and values. His romantic explorations of rave memories might result in a collection of dark garage or experimental techno tunes, and his longform suites might move from kitschy trance to eerie ambient. It’s all part of the allure.

I doubt that I will ever tire from his music, like I tired of so many other producers that kept chasing a pretended success formula.

Here’s my personal guide to the first 20 years of Burial.

Burial – Untrue, new album cover (Hyperdub, 2007)

I. The albums era (2005-2010)

In one of the few interviews that Bevan ever gave, he spoke of his love for certain tunes that are just too beautiful to listen to them on a regular basis.

For me, much of his early catalog falls into that category. I adore it, but I rarely play it.

Burial (2006) was less a debut album than a label-curated collection of tunes laying around on Bevan’s harddrive – he’d been sending demo CD-Rs to Hyperdub’s Steve Goodman (Kode9) for years before getting signed.

These lo-fi garage beats on Burial still have that rolling 2-step swing borrowed from producers like El-B, Todd Edwards and Steve Gurley. There are manipulated film sounds and video game noises, there’s some distorted bass – an influence from drum’n’bass and early dubstep – and a lot of white noise that instantly became part of his signature style.

When these tracks came out, I felt this music should have always been there, though it wasn’t. Bevan had taken elements of UK garage, dubstep, deep house, jungle and techno, added ghostly pitched-up R&B vocal samples, shrouded it all in vinyl crackle, tape hiss and rain sounds – and created something much larger than the sum of its parts.

Untrue (2007) feels like the more concise and through-composed work of the two early albums. It was probably written in a shorter amount of time, due to the unexpected success of the debut. It has some of his biggest ‘hits’ (“Archangel”, “Ghost Hardware”, “Shell Of Light”, “Raver”), it got Bevan the infamous Mercury Prize nomination and remains the commercial peak of his career.

People did file Burial’s music under dubstep back then. He was culturally and sonically influenced by fellow London producers like El-B, Loefah and Digital Mystikz, and as an early interview with Martin ‘Blackdown’ Clark showed, he was immersing himself in that scene, so it’s not surprising his music was lumped in with the rest.

The genre tag never really fit the Burial sound too well though, not even in regards to the early works. His tunes are clearly steeped in the hardcore continuum of UK underground dance music, but you’d rarely hear them played out at formative club nights DMZ or FWD. Post-dubstep, maybe – but that term wasn’t even coined until 2009.

Let’s just say that Burial has long since turned into his own genre, and his two classic albums built the foundation of his sound.

Before, during and after making those albums, Burial released three EPs. From these, you’ll probably need South London Boroughs (2005) for the immaculate title cut. You don’t necessarily need Distant Lights (2006), but Ghost Hardware (2007) has two exclusive cuts on the flip which foreshadow the more experimental direction that Bevan would be heading into soon. “Shutta” is a dark horse in Burial’s early catalog.

Two gorgeous deep cuts from that era were released on compilations: The rolling garage tune “Unite” (Box Of Dub, Soul Jazz 2007) and the mourning slow jam “Fostercare” (5 Years of Hyperdub, 2009). Most of the unreleased tracks from the Untrue era that are floating around the internet stem from a Kode9 mix for Mary Anne Hobbs’ Experimental Show on BBC Radio 1 in 2007. They’re not absolutely essential (and, frankly, some of them sound a bit raw) but if you can’t get enough of that early Burial sound, you will find a few actual gems in there.

My favorite non-album track of the time was first featured on Benji B’s 1Xtra radio show. For many years, I listened to this radio rip of “Lambeth” with the short intro and radio tags on YouTube, until the full version was finally released on a Hyperdub compilation in 2014. I still like the radio rip better somehow.

Burial made a few remixes in those days, for artists such as dubstep producer Blackdown, R&B singer Jamie Woon, indie band Bloc Party, Thom Yorke of Radiohead fame and drum’n’bass producer Commix. They’re all fine, but none of them are mandatory. Same goes for his collaboration with producer Breakage, the album track “Vial” (2010).

But in 2009, Bevan released a brilliant collaboration with Four Tet alias Kieran Hebden, a former fellow from Elliott School in Putney, Southwest London, which both attended in the early 1990s. The outstanding 12-inch “Moth” / ”Wolf Cub” would be followed up with “Ego” / ”Mirror” (2011) featuring Thom Yorke on vocals. Another strong track with Hebden (“Nova”) would see the light of day in 2012. All of these appeared on Hebden’s own indie label Text Records.

In an alternative universe, Untrue’s success could have paved the way into a mainstream producer career. The only existing proof of a short foray into that side of the music industry are Burial’s co-production credits on three songs of Jamie Woon’s debut album Mirrorwriting. The lead single “Night Air”, first released in October 2010, remains a gorgeous slab of R&B- and electronica-influenced indie pop. You can hear Bevan’s subtle signature in the production, though he didn’t make this about himself in any way. He also never went back to producing singers after this.

II. The tunes era (2011-2019)

You’ll find most of Burial’s 2010s catalog, originally scattered across eight EPs and 12-inches, compiled on a two-disc set, Tunes 2011 to 2019. The collection covers five EPs released between 2011 and 2013, plus three 12-inches from his second release stretch of the decade between 2016 and 2019. There’s no discussion around this one – like the first two albums, it’s absolutely essential.

A 12-inch from 2011 that flies slightly below the radar because of its relative inaccessability is Bevan’s brilliant collaboration with Massive Attack, “Four Walls” / ”Paradise Circus”. Both tracks are Burial remixes of Heligoland era songs with vocals by Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star fame. With their longform structure and dark ambient sound, they foreshadowed his progression of the following years which is traced on Tunes.

The three-track EP Street Halo (2011) feels like a transitional release, still quite in tune with his early material but also pointing towards something else. With Kindred (2012), Burial made a formal switch, starting to make ten-to 13-minute suites as a default instead of the usual five- to eight-minute tracks that had become the norm in electronic music. Within that longer format’s multi-part structure, he’d often hide multiple full songs consisting of distinct beats, melodies, breakdowns and reprises, blended together by his trademark ambience (flicking lighters, the clacking metal ball in a spraycan etc.).

Some of these suites would get quite sound collage-y, while others doubled down on the early 1990s rave nostalgia with frantic breakbeats and trance synth stabs. In the second half of the 2010s, his tracks seemed to become more ambient, sometimes going even completely beatless, with some notable exceptions like the dancefloor-ready “Claustro” (2019).

Burial’s instrumental tracks carry an enormous emotional weight. Just by the atmosphere and the use of certain vocal samples they feel like he’s rooting for the outcasts – the lonely and the marginalized, the oppressed and the depressed. His most explicit political statement comes towards the end of “Come Down to Us” (2013), when he samples an excerpt of an award acceptance speech by Matrix co-director Lana Wachowski. In that snippet, the trans woman talks about the feeling of being seen as a “freak”, as “broken”, as “not lovable” before coming out. It’s a heartbreaking and powerful moment that Frank Ocean popularized widely by playing the song on his Blonded radio show.

While Tunes 2011 to 2019 contains most of the relevant material from that era, it doesn’t cover everything Burial released in that time. Aside from the aforementioned Massive Attack collab, the two singles “Temple Sleeper” (2015) and “Rodent” (2017) are not included, the latter being a rare example of a short return to his garage days. Two forgettable compilation tracks from 2019 were left out as well: “Old Tape” from the Hyperdub x Adult Swim collaboration HyperSwim, and “Starlore” from the Sega Genesis music cartridge Konsolation.

Towards the end of the decade, Bevan collaborated with Kevin Martin alias The Bug on two 12-inches (Flame 1, 2018, and Flame 2, 2019), exploring a harsh, noisy version of old school soundsystem dubstep. They’re both great – they feel more adjacent to Martin’s usual work than to Burial’s music though.

Bevan never produced many remixes. In the second half of the 2010s, he made one for a re-release of Goldie’s jungle classic “Inner City Life” (2017) and one for a re-release of Luke Slater’s seminal techno tune “Love” (2019). Both originals were old favorites of his that he’d mentioned in some of his interviews. His take on Mønic’s “Deep Summer” (2017) might remain his best remix work – a shimmering downtempo cut centered around lovely xylophone lines.

There’s one release that you’ll definitely have to get on top of Tunes: “Pre Dawn” / ”Indoors” (2017). The 12-inch came out on Boddika’s Nonplus label, which hasn’t released any of Burial’s music before or after, but those two experimental warehouse techno bangers are up there with some of his best material of that era. This might have been the only instance of Burial producing something that stood a small chance of being played out at Berghain (though it would be practically impossible to mix these lo-fi tracks with your standard main floor techno fare).

III. Post-tunes era (2020-2025)

Since the pandemic, Burial has more or less kept to a release schedule: One main EP or 12-inch per year, mostly on his first label home Hyperdub, while sometimes throwing in a split release or a one-off release on XL or fabric Originals.

In 2020, he released a gorgeous Charles Webster remix and co-produced a song on his album. He also got back into the studio with Kieran Hebden and Thom Yorke for another 12-inch on XL, “Her Revolution” / ”His Rope”.

The following year, a split with long-time associate Blackdown, the Shock Power Of Love EP, appeared on the latter’s Keysound label. It’s Burial’s “Dark Gethsemane” that blows this collab out the water – a massive old skool rave tune which completely changes course in the last third and becomes a political statement when it starts repeating this sampled phrase from Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II.’s speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention: “We must shock this nation with the power of love!”

Just a few weeks later, Burial released another solo two-tracker, “Chemz” / ”Dolphinz”. Should there ever be a Tunes sequel, the breakbeat hardcore anthem “Chemz” needs to be opening that one. That pitched-up R&B vocal over those trance chords gives me the chills every time, sounding as if ripped directly from a golden age pirate radio recording or some 1993 jungle pack. “Dolphinz” is more of a psychedelic ambient excursion that feels like it was pulled from a chillout room set from roughly the same era. Both tunes are brilliantly executed.

2022 saw the release of the ANTIDAWN EP, a 43-minute mini-album consisting of five long-ish tracks. Zeroing in on Burial’s ambient sound collage style, it featured a lot of droning organs, echoing vocals, synth clouds, rain sounds and flicking lighters – but no drums at all, except briefly when overheard in the far distance.

Clubs and warehouses were merely afterthoughts at this point. Two years deep into the pandemic those environments remained vague ideas vaporized through memory but deeply embedded in the music’s DNA. Like a sound painting, ANTIDAWN tries to visualize some of Burial’s classic London lore – the night buses, the foggy backalleys, the empty churches. It challenged many fans’ listening habits and probably remains his most controversial release.

Burial has been making ‘ambient stuff’ since the very beginning. Remember “In McDonald’s” or “Night Bus”? Those were some of the most haunting and captivating moments of his beloved albums – beatless, textural and atmospheric. I feel that ANTIDAWN was an attempt at making a whole release in this style. I loved it.

Later that same year, Streetlands came out, another ambient-leaning EP. Put both 2022 releases together and you have 75 minutes worth of new original material – the closest we ever came to a “fourth” album (after Burial, Untrue and Tunes). My favorite here is the closer “Exokind”, a track centered around Berlin school type synths, recalling the days when Mixmaster Morris might have spun Tangerine Dream records next to early The Orb tunes at some afterhour squat party.

2023 saw just one new Burial track, “Unknown Summer”, on a split 12-inch with Kode9. Many were happy to hear that his contribution, a peaceful but uncanny dub techno tune, quietly reintroduced a muted 4/4 beat in the background. Again it’s in the last third where the track makes a sudden left turn and the infamous “Distant Lights” snare an improbable reprise.

The XL 12-inch “Dreamfear” / ”Boy Sent From Above” (2024) marks a full-on comeback of the starry-eyed rave memories. 40 seconds in, a distorted voice announces the arrival of “the high one”, “the lord of ecstasy”, then relentless Jilted Generation-era breakbeats start pounding forward for 13 minutes, while my 17-year old self jubilates. The flip feels similarly nostalgic but less confrontational, with organ and synth chords over an electrofunk-style beat reminiscent of early Autechre.

Burial’s track from another split 12-inch with Kode9 released that same year, “Phoneglow”, is at least as good – a sped-up R&B vocal sample and colourful, plasticky organ synth pads float above a rolling garage beat that could have been lifted from some lost El-B white label. This one makes me want to call my mates and drive out to some half-legal rave in a field in Brandenburg, even though I’m approaching 50, and my mates have kids and work marketing jobs. Doesn’t matter. Glowsticks in the air!

In August 2025, Burial released his latest on Hyperdub, the 12-inch “Comafields” / “Imaginary Festival”. I wasn’t too into it when it came out, but as often with his music, it needed some time to sink in and the right moment for me to listen again. “Comafields” starts like another psychedelic ambient/dub techno excursion, not spectacular but certainly a vibe. In the final third, a shimmering synth and ethereal vocal snippets appear over a muted dembow riddim to breathtaking effect. The flip is even more subtle, with glitchy synths over a dubby beat that eventually gives way to a reduced version of that good old post-garage swing.

Burial, Bandcamp profile image

IV. Recommended Reading

Two decades into his career, Burial must be seen as one of the greatest to ever do it. What I find fascinating is that after all those years, we still have no idea what he’s like as a person, and what his life actually looks like. Will Bevan hasn’t spoken to a journalist on record for the last 18 years. Just for the first two years of his career he gave a couple of interviews – these are crucial to the understanding of his music though, as they include all that hauntological London rave lore.

I’ve spent countless hours with these sources, making playlists of all mentioned tracks and picturing young Will waiting for his brother to come home from warehouse raves, red-eyed and buzzing from the breakbeats, or young Will making mixtapes of new jungle and techno tunes for his brother’s mates, who’d soon move on to start families and become car mechanics or insurance salesmen, while Will kept compiling and making tunes, keeping the memories of their raving days alive...

My sympathy goes out to all recluses and hermits, luddites and deniers, retreaters and refuseniks. Burial will forever be our hero, an uncompromising artist keeping the spirit and the memories of early rave culture alive, morphing through the years but never betraying his original vision.

Burial’s published interviews

• Blackdown interviews Burial, 2005

• Blackdown interviews Burial again, 2006

• Kode9 interviews Burial for Hyperdub, 2007

• Mark Fisher interviews Burial for The Wire, 2007

• Emmy Hennings interviews Burial for Cyclic Defrost, 2007

• Kek-w interviews Burial for Fact Mag, 2007

• Adam Park interviews Burial for Clash Magazine, 2007

• Dan Hancox interviews Burial for The Guardian, 2007

Burial's last interview