Future Garage

late 2000s · South London, United Kingdom

A quieter, more atmospheric strand of UK bass from late 2000s London that revived 2-step garage's swung rhythms and pitched vocal chops under dubstep's sub-bass weight (Wikipedia).

The sound

2-step's swung, syncopated drum shuffle and UK garage's pitched vocal chops, slowed into dubstep's sub bass and dub space, with the aggression stripped out.

Listen for: Hats that swing off the grid instead of locking to it, and vocal chops that feel pitched and time stretched rather than sung straight.

Things to know

  1. Burial produced his 2007 album Untrue entirely in an old copy of Sony Sound Forge, a program with no proper sequencer, on what he described as a rubbish, dying computer, placing sounds on a waveform timeline instead of a beat grid.

  2. Producer Whistla coined the name future garage and explained his reasoning on his blog in November 2009: he wouldn't call the sound garage or 2step because those names carried negative associations after the mainstream backlash against acts like So Solid Crew.

  3. Mount Kimbie's Sketch on Glass EP and Joy Orbison's "Hyph Mngo" both came out on Hotflush Recordings in 2009, putting two of future garage's most cited early releases on the same small label within months of each other.

  4. Resident Advisor's 2018 short film "How did UK garage become dubstep?", narrated by Moxie, traces grime and dubstep as two branches that split from the same late 1990s dark garage sound future garage's scene later drew on.

Key tracks

Family tree

  • UK Garage: Future garage is UK garage's own rhythm looking backward. When 2-step's reputation curdled in the UK garage mainstream during the early 2000s, its swung, off-grid drum shuffle and pitched vocal chops didn't disappear, they resurfaced a few years later in a quieter, more atmospheric form. Producers kept the groove but dropped the MC-and-champagne club sound, slowing everything into something built for headphones and home listening rather than the dancefloor it came from.
  • Dubstep: Dubstep gave future garage its low end and its sense of space. Burial's Untrue, cut on an old copy of Sony Sound Forge with no proper sequencer, ran on the same cavernous sub bass and dub atmospherics that defined early dubstep, before the genre name existed and before dubstep itself hardened into the aggressive brostep sound. Future garage kept that weight and mood while stepping away from dubstep's harder wobble-bass direction entirely.
  • Grime: Grime's link to future garage runs through a shared ancestor rather than a direct handoff. Both genres descend from the same late-1990s dark garage scene that also produced dubstep, and grime's habit of stripping out rhythm to leave room for MCs helped normalize the sparser, more spacious feel that future garage producers leaned into. It's an indirect current more than a straight lineage line.
  • Post-Dubstep: Future garage and post-dubstep grew up in the same rooms, around the same artists, in the same few years, but they were never quite the same claim. Post-dubstep is a journalist's umbrella for anything that grew out of dubstep's sparser, more song-based edges, built around Mount Kimbie and James Blake. Future garage is narrower and more rhythm-specific: a return to 2-step's swung, off-grid drum feel. Whistla, who coined future garage, rejected post-dubstep outright as a name for his own movement.

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