The life and death of dubstep

One of my earliest and most formative clubbing experiences was spent in a church basement in Brixton around 2010. Age 16 and blinded by dry ice, it wasn’t the thrill of gaining entry to a club underage that made the night memorable but rather its overwhelming sound. The bass pumping through the speaker stacks was so intense it became a physical presence: the fact of frequencies passing through my body to make organs quiver and the fillings in my teeth rattle. I had never heard music with this much emphasis on the low-end before. There were no vocals and few melodies, just the insistence of bass pressure creating tension, overwhelm and then meditative release. I was perturbed and compelled in equal measure.

That night was the fifth birthday bash for seminal south London collective DMZ, a group of self-taught producers who at the turn of the 21st Century helped invent the new sound of dubstep. It is also the end-point of music writer Lauren Martin’s encyclopaedic and engaging oral history of the dubstep movement, Aftershock.

Read the review in the Observer.

[This piece was published on 05/08/26]