Burial - Tunes 2011 to 2019

The Guardian 100

(Hyperdub)

It’s strange to remember how much of the excitement around Burial’s emergence focused on the act’s anonymity. Like any serious underground scene, dubstep was hardly about fame-chasing faces in 2005. But Burial became its Banksy, a feted street artist who told poetic truths about the prosaic to the public. Evocative yet blunt song titles (In McDonalds, Night Bus, Homeless) introduced music that was easy to digest yet restless and difficult to define. Burial was the city after dark, sometimes comforting, often unsettling, studded with scraps of songs from passing cars or phones, industrial static mixed into ghostly, gorgeous melodies.

Then, after a Mercury prize nomination in 2008 for Untrue and the unmasking of Will Bevan as Burial, there were no more Burial albums, just some remixes and singles, the latter collected here over a languorous two-and-a-half hours. Bevan has jettisoned the sleep paralysis pop of his early work for something even more dissociated and peripatetic. You might head for the vicious rave of Rival Dealer or Nightmarket’s sumptuous, pealing melody first, to swerve some long, austere, beatless passages, but this is a compilation of rare bravery and beauty.

Pitchfork 90

A 149-minute anthology maps the UK producer’s expanding multiverse, gathering nearly every solo tune he released on Hyperdub in a fertile, eight-year run of EPs full of surprises (and vinyl hiss).