Untrue is the sound of London at its most melancholic — the rattle of night buses, the glow of kebab shops, the echo of garage anthems leaking from a distant club. William Bevan, the reclusive South Londoner behind Burial, constructed this album from the ghosts of UK dance music — pitchshifted R&B vocals, two-step garage rhythms, dub bass weight — and reassembled them into something that captures the emotional reality of a city after dark with almost documentary precision.
The production technique is deceptively simple. Bevan famously works in Sound Forge, a basic audio editor, rather than a proper DAW, and this limitation shapes the music in profound ways. Sounds are layered manually, often with visible seams — vocal samples cut abruptly, beats stutter and skip, rain and static drift through the mix like weather. These imperfections are not flaws; they are the album's soul. They give the music a handmade quality that feels personal in a way that the slick productions of mainstream electronic music rarely achieve.
The vocal samples are extraordinary. Bevan takes fragments of R&B singing — often just a syllable or two — and pitch-shifts them into androgynous, ghostly textures that carry enormous emotional weight despite being stripped of their original context. On "Archangel," a chopped and screwed vocal line repeats a phrase that sounds like "tell me I belong" with a desperate, yearning quality that makes it one of the most affecting moments in electronic music. "Near Dark" layers multiple processed voices into a choir of spectres, each one reaching toward something just out of frame.
The rhythmic approach draws from garage and two-step but strips those genres of their dancefloor energy. The shuffling, syncopated patterns retain the skeleton of a club beat, but the tempo is slowed, the bass is deepened, and the overall effect is contemplative rather than kinetic. You could dance to this music, but you are more likely to walk through rain-slicked streets with your headphones on, feeling something you cannot quite articulate.
Untrue is city music in its purest form — an album that transforms the mundane textures of urban life into something transcendent. It is as much a work of sonic architecture as it is a collection of songs.
