Post-Dubstep
2009 to 2011 · London, United Kingdom
Around 2010, London producers led by James Blake and Mount Kimbie took dubstep's bass weight and space and pointed it toward songcraft instead of the club, slowing things down and dropping the wobble (MusicRadar, Resident Advisor).
The sound
Dubstep's sub-bass and syncopated space, slowed to around 130 BPM and stripped of the wobble, filled back in with piano, live instrumentation, R&B vocal samples, and a real verse-chorus sense of song.
Listen for: How the low end still sits wide and heavy like dubstep while everything above it breathes: samples chop and stretch like a voice caught mid-thought, and the track resolves like a song instead of building to a drop.
Things to know
Post-dubstep took shape when the dubstep scene hit a crossroads: as the heavier, American-influenced brostep sound took over commercially, artists like James Blake and Mount Kimbie went the other way, quieter and more song-based.
Mount Kimbie's Kai Campos has said the duo's signature sound came from trying and failing to imitate dubstep: the failure to replicate it accurately became their style.
Key tracks
Would Know by Mount Kimbie · 2010
The Wilhelm Scream by James Blake · 2011
Family tree
- Future Garage: 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.
- Future Bass: Future bass is the melodic strand of post-dubstep grown into its own genre. Rustie and Hudson Mohawke's Glasgow records kept what Resident Advisor called serrated and plunging dubstep basslines and pointed them somewhere bright and maximal. The lineage held all the way to the commercial peak: DJ Mag still describes Illenium, one of the genre's biggest late-2010s names, as an epic and melodic version of the dubstep sound.
- Dubstep: Post-dubstep is what happened when dubstep's UK originators refused to follow the genre into festival-sized aggression. Producers kept the sub-bass weight and the empty space between hits, but slowed things down, dropped the wobble, and let in piano, live instruments, and chopped R&B vocals. Resident Advisor heard Mount Kimbie's Crooks & Lovers still owing "far more to trad dubstep" than its more abstract peers, even as it pointed the genre toward song.