Things we know Burial likes: video games and old-school rave; doleful R&B melodies twisted into strange new shapes; the warmly nostalgic sound of a needle plowing through a dusty groove. One thing he could take or leave, on the other hand: change.
That might sound counterintuitive. Since the ghostly UK garage of the Untrue era, Burial’s music has opened up to encompass trance chords, ’80s synth pop, anime soundtracks, Christian rock, and samples of British cultural touchstones like EastEnders and royal weddings. Following the beatless atmospheres of 2016’s “Nightmarket,” he has increasingly turned his hand to ambient music; his last two major releases, 2022’s Antidawn and Streetlands EPs, totaled 78 minutes of windswept atmospheres and eerie melancholy, abandoning dance music so completely that one wondered if he’d ever return. Yet no matter how he recalibrates his sound, Burial’s hallmarks—omnipresent vinyl crackle, melancholy synth pads, wistful spoken-word samples, and diegetic sound effects like crashing thunder and flicking lighters—remain so central that they make his stylistic shifts seem almost incidental.
After the minimalism of Antidawn and Streetlands, the new EP Dreamfear / Boy Sent From Above is maximalist in the extreme: a full-bore throwback to the early days of rave that folds together breakbeat hardcore, hip-house, techno, electro, and freestyle. The 26-minute two-tracker plays out like a pair of multipart suites—an epic night of raving distilled into two sides of vinyl. It’s not the first time he’s used that technique; many of his tracks, since at least 2013’s “Rival Dealer,” have carved a serpentine path through multiple tracks and fragments, with vinyl hiss and spectral samples holding it all together.
The time-stretched declaration that opens “Dreamfear”—“I am the high one/I am the lord of ecstasy,” lifted from Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla—mimics the double-entendre drug references of rave’s golden era. Yet the voice of this dark lord is terrifying, a world away from the warm fuzzies that ecstasy’s proponents believe it inspires. Simon Reynolds has written at length about the period when, after a few years of heavy MDMA use in the UK, the drug’s rosy effects on nascent rave culture began to wear off, ushering in the mind-melting sounds of “darkside” hardcore and the jungle that would follow. “Dreamfear” plunges into that haunted history, pocked with riffs that scuttle like silvery insects in the gloom. The sound quality is thick and hissy, like a YouTube rip that’s been subjected to some occult enhancement. Parallel breakbeat juggernauts compete for attention, and every sound feels like it’s trying to save itself from asphyxiation.
Periodically the beats drop out, making way for moments of crackling near-silence interrupted by a murmured voice or shaken can of spray paint, but even with these pauses, the track is exhausting. As muscular as the grooves may be—in the peak-time tradition of many classic hardcore records on XL, the veteran UK label behind this EP—it feels more like a record about clubbing than for clubbing. Burial’s narrative instincts eclipse any interest in dancefloor functionality; he’s a storyteller who spins yarns partly with walloping sonics and partly with carefully selected vocal samples: “This love, like a drug”; “Only if you knew the things I’ve done”; “This is who I am”; “Once it gets inside of you it takes over the bloodstream”; “There was something else in the drugs.” One of the last sounds we hear is a low voice, digitally abraded almost to the point of unintelligibility, wheezing simply, “Death.”
“Boy Sent From Above” is sleeker and more hopeful, swapping the A-side’s pummeling breaks for the sidewinding syncopations of techno and electro. Like “Dreamfear,” this one wends through multiple tracks, like a clubber slipping from room to crowded room, but the bulk of its 13-minute running time is given over to a wistful freestyle synth arpeggio—in which you might hear an echo of Harold Faltermeyer’s theme to Beverly Hills Cop—paired with major-key chords stabs that glint like icicles in the sun. The mood is summed up by a plaintive scrap of a cappella that’s heard several times when the music pauses, joined by spray can rattle and ruminative synths: “We were running through the city/In the dark.” One of Burial’s chief fixations has long been nostalgia for a halcyon era of renegade freedom, and here, the image of a graffiti writer pining for wild youth feels like the epitome of the artist’s worldview.
Or is it becoming a shtick? It can be hard to say. If you love Burial—particularly the maudlin turn of his work over the past decade—you’ll love the outsized pathos of “Boy Sent From Above” and the high drama of “Dreamfear.” If you feel like you’ve heard enough pasted-on vinyl crackle to last a lifetime, or aren’t particularly invested in the hagiography of rave music’s formative years, you probably won’t find anything new here.
But newness isn’t the point. Using not just the same tropes but even many of the same samples he’s used before, Burial seems to be pursuing his long-running project of world-building and self-mythology to increasingly hermetic ends, burrowing deeper into a state of déjà vu—as though if by recreating the memory from every possible angle, he could preserve it forever. Incidentally, it’s the more compelling track, “Dreamfear,” that pushes against the ease of nostalgia, even if it’s also harder to listen to. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Dreamfear / Boy Sent From Above is that Burial sounds almost as though he’s arguing with himself—lingering contentedly in a memory one moment, looking frantically for a way out in the next.
