Brostep

late 2000s to 2010 · Leeds and London, United Kingdom, then Los Angeles and the US festival circuit

UK dubstep's mid-range mutation, pushed further by Rusko and detonated globally by Skrillex's 2010 EP, brostep became the sound of the US festival boom and later split into riddim and tearout (Dazed, Splice).

The sound

Dubstep's half-time drums and 140 BPM pulse, but the bass moves out of the sub and up into a screaming, distorted mid-range built to cut through a festival PA rather than fill a soundsystem's low end.

Listen for: Where the aggression lives. It isn't down in the sub-bass anymore, it's up in a mid-range growl that behaves more like a metal guitar riff than a dub bassline, punctuated by hard, mechanical drops.

Things to know

  1. The term brostep started as a joke: a UK producer coined it around 2009 to mock the mid-range-heavy sound Rusko and Caspa were pioneering, and Skrillex's 2010 breakout then turned it into a genuinely divisive genre label.

  2. Tearout absorbed elements of deathstep, riddim, and brostep between roughly 2016 and 2019, adding metallic textures, pan snares, and machine-gun basses, with Marauda and Svdden Death as its defining artists.

Key tracks

Family tree

  • Dubstep: Brostep is dubstep's mid-range mutation. Rusko and Caspa pushed the bass up out of the sub and into a chattering wobble in the late 2000s, and Skrillex's 2010 EP Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites finished the job. The half-time drums and the 140 pulse stayed, but the aggression moved up into a screaming mid-range that behaves more like a metal riff than a dub bassline.
  • EDM / Big Room: Skrillex's rise reshaped the vocabulary of mainstream festival dance music, far beyond bass music itself. Billboard credits Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites with helping kickstart the American EDM era, and Rolling Stone called the drop he popularized the guitar solo of the 21st century. Brostep's mid-range aggression and hard drops became standard vocabulary for EDM's 2012 boom and the festival mainstages that followed.
  • Riddim: Riddim split off from brostep in the early 2010s as a pushback against its chaos. Producers kept the 140 half-time frame and the mid-range bass but threw out the constant change, locking onto one hypnotic looping motif that evolves through modulation instead of new sections.
  • Tearout: Tearout is brostep pushed to its most abrasive extreme. The North American festival circuit traded early dubstep's minimalism for blown-out industrial maximalism, chasing violently modulated mid-range and machine-gun bass stabs built for maximum physical impact.

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