22:48 // August 1st, 2025 // Hyperdub
Cards on the table, I’ve felt for a while now that everything about the current arc of Burial's career has been doing its utmost best to fend off a full post-mortem. Each of his successive releases seems to be appraised somewhat apologetically for its merits, while whichsoever journo/internet rando alternately establishes and swiftly brushes off that he, the man, Will Bevan, the maker of Untrue (2008) has undoubtedly seen better days. How on earth did we get there? How on earth does one transition backwards from being electronic music's main-event kid to a purveyor of underground curios in what seems like the blink of an eye? Where did all that time go between Burial landing a modern classic, nailing a mutual career highlight with Four Tet, and cementing his title as the enigmatic ambassador of a universally relatable brand of urban grottiness with hissing, crackling future garage behemoths on keynote EPs?
A swift recap is in order. In my books, Burial's purple patch came to an end the moment he plunged headlong into uplifting kitsch on 2013's Rival Dealer, and before anyone knew it, he had swerved off into years-long ambient nadir that nothing, not even a swanky 2xCD restructured compilation, would manage to convincingly retcon. His 2020s material thus far has tried repeatedly to turn the page, (mostly) without mishap, but even at its best it has yet to do much more than gesture tentatively in the direction of a fresh chapter. For a quick roundup, this era has comprised the following:
Chemz / Dolphinz (2021), a sample-fucking headache of a release that pushed for Burial's most pumped-up banger to date, only to land as an abrasive slog, its blow somewhat cushioned by a forgettable ambient B-side,
Antidawn (2022), an acceptable retread of the same lock-your-door ambience that sounded a lot more compelling when we heard it amidst the kinetic push-and-pull of Untrue,
Streetlands (2022), a respectable but non-essential advancement on the nothingscapes that saw his 2016-2019 output languish in creative exile,
Dreamfear / Boy Sent From Above (2024), acceptable rave nostalgia in the form of two adrenalised breakbeat slammers, both of which hammered on well beyond their natural margins.
I've been glad to see these releases sustain a modest following (by the standards of the Untrue thru Rival Dealer years, at least — many deserving underground producers can only dream of their platform), but their stylistic scattiness and modest quality ceiling has type-cast Burial as a veteran well past his prime and increasingly starved of a consistent direction. To that end, I've found myself acquiring something of a Pavlovian shrug to fend off the choruses of best since Rival Dealer that greet practically all his contemporary output for the first week or so post-release, and then promptly give way to deafening silence. Has it ever been harder to treat new Burial music as a genuine cause for excitement?
Don't call me — but do call up the URL for his latest single Comafields / Imaginary Festival, which by my reckoning is comfortably the most engaging music the man has made in over a decade, and his most beautiful in perhaps ever? It's the first of his recent output that truly warrants the welcome-home effect that all those favourable comparisons with Rival Dealer spent so long pining after, and I simply cannot stop listening to it! Cards once more on the table, this is chiefly a reflection of pièce de résistance A-side "Comafields", an ambient trance behemoth that jettisons warehouse chic entirely, bending time, patience, and traditional expectations of dopamine release into a delirious new form that approximates slow-motion ecstasy like nothing else in his discography.
It's a whole new realm for Burial stylistically, and yet his classic aesthetics are perfectly at home here: we hear his trademark shuffle on the house beat that works its way into the mix after the halfway point, and there's a wonderful familiarity in the swoon of a climax that subsequently emerges from the track's rising bass, vinyl crackle and stuttering vocal samples. Likewise, its euphoric leanings and unabashed sentimentalism are distant echoes of the empowerment bangers Burial pushed so hard for back on Rival Dealer, though "Comafields"' shimmering palette and patient release evoke far more than that EP's overbearing spoken word snippets ever did. There's no didactic scope here, only a perfect, impossible high that Burial sustains precisely long enough to defy the natural lifespan of such things, before smartly reinventing the track with an enigmatic coda that recalls his glory days on "Kindred" or "Truant". There's nothing quite like it in his discography, and I would love him to pursue this sound further.
The B-side "Imaginary Festival" is admittedly less essential, a hazy collage that flits between the margins of distant highs and half-remembered dancefloors with a scatterbrained abandon that seems to emerge as a natural consequence of "Comafields"' out-of-body rapture. It's less a comedown than a deconstructed complement, and although it performs this role perfectly adequately on the record, I'm sceptical that it will enjoy much life of its own.
Should it have to? Is it not enough to appreciate it as an interesting foray in an oddball direction and leave it there? Perhaps the same can be said for present-decade Burial's wider patchwork — as with with Dreamfear / Boy Sent From Above and (begrudgingly) Chemz / Dolphinz, Comafields / Imaginary Festival is equal parts a minor departure and a suggestion of a fresh direction for the man, underscoring that he is far from creatively exhausted, however temperamental his output has become. This is healthier and more encouraging than the prospect of him thanklessly shooting for another genre classic, but in "Comafields" is the first time in years that he's vindicated this approach with a new home run. Welcome back, boss.
"Comafields" 9/10
"Imaginary Festival" 6/10
Further listening:
more ambient trance blissout -> Traumprinz - Blue Turtle
old-school trance spaceout -> Virtual Symmetry - Loro and Nostro
limbo vocals trance headrush -> Iphi - Sentiment Scrapyard
scatty collage post-club ambient -> Ishome - Carpet Watcher
hyper dub of a review
Feeling called out by the post-mortem a bit lmao. Comafields is indeed awesome. That transition at about 7:50 is *chef's kiss* and suggests he's still got it. Still wrapping my mind around Imaginary Festival but my sense is that there's something there (I say as a defender of most of the post-Untrue stuff so make of that what you will).