There are few artists who can still make a release feel like an event, but Burial managed it in the bleakest week of 2020. On the Monday before Christmas, Hyperdub dropped a single twelve-minute track with no announcement, no rollout, no artwork reveal — just the sound, arriving in the world like a signal from the dark. Chemz is his first solo material since the Claustro / State Forest single of 2019, and it is a reminder that whilst the rest of electronic music chases brevity and radio edits, he operates on an entirely different clock.
The track opens in the familiar language of his dubstep roots: a half-time beat that seems to shadow-box with itself, distant padded kicks and snares that skitter and reset rather than resolve. The sub bass arrives in long, tectonic pulses, and above it float vocal fragments — the pitch-shifted, wordless sighs that have become his signature — chopped and sent drifting through cavernous reverb. For the opening minutes the drums circle one another like boxers, never quite committing to a knockout blow, and the restraint is exquisite.
It is in the second half that Chemz reveals its true shape. The percussion thins, the beat recedes, and the track drifts into open ambient territory — washes of chordal pads, rain-like textures, a mournful organ tone hanging in the air. The vocal fragments return, slower now and more exposed. It is a structural gambit only a twelve-minute track can pull off: a slow, deliberate fade from the dancefloor to somewhere far more private, the beat dissolving rather than ending.
In the context of his recent output, Chemz feels less like a departure than a deepening. He has long been inching toward longer, more abstract forms, and here the two sides of his sound — the rave memory and the loner’s comedown — are held in balance for the full twelve minutes. Releasing it unannounced in Christmas week feels deliberate: this is music built not for the hype cycle but for headphones and long walks in the cold.
Chemz is no reinvention — it doesn’t need to be. It is a single, patient statement from an artist who remains peerless at what he does, a dubstep shadow that lingers long after the beat has gone. For those who have followed his wanderings it is a welcome return; for everyone else, a perfect gateway into one of electronic music’s most singular bodies of work.
