Ranked list
The 10 Best Dubstep Albums
Dubstep as the South London lineage and what grew out of it: the DMZ and Tempa years, the darker Croydon strain, the meditative Digital Mystikz end, and the post-dubstep spread that followed once the tempo stopped being the point. Grime, UK garage and the later bass-music generation appear where a record genuinely belongs to this story rather than merely sharing a BPM. From 2004 to now.
Dubstep was a room and a record shop before it was a sound. Big Apple in Croydon, then FWD at Plastic People, where the sub-bass was physical enough that people talked about it the way they talk about weather. The music was made for that room specifically. Producers cut dubplates, tested them at 140, and worked out the rest later.
Which makes the album canon strange. The best dubstep is often a twelve-inch and a soundsystem, and the records below mostly succeed by refusing the club rather than serving it. Burial made his at home, alone, about the journey back from a night out rather than the night itself. Kode9 and The Spaceape made theirs into science fiction. Skream made the one that sounds like the scene actually sounded, and it stands slightly apart from the others for exactly that reason.
The genre then split and kept splitting. By 2010 half the people here had stopped calling it dubstep, the American festival version had taken the name somewhere unrecognisable, and the interesting records were arriving from Bristol, Rotterdam and Manchester. This list follows the lineage rather than the label.
The ten
- Number 1 on The 10 Best Dubstep Albums
Burial — Untrue2007
№ 1 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
Garage and dubstep remembered rather than played, made alone and anonymously. The record that turned a London-specific sound into a mood the entire world adopted, and it has been imitated so widely that the original now sounds like a genre rather than a person.
Why it is number one
Rain on a window, a phone camera at four in the morning, and vocal fragments pitched until they sound like they are remembering the song rather than singing it. Untrue is the best-known record in this canon and it deserves the position: it tops the site's whole 21st-century list. What still surprises is how little of it is dubstep in the technical sense. The tempo drifts, the drums swing where the genre wanted weight, and there is almost no sub-bass doing what sub-bass was supposed to do. It works because it turned a scene's texture into a feeling that people who had never heard of FWD understood immediately. Almost nothing melancholy made since 2007 has escaped it.
- Number 2 on The 10 Best Dubstep Albums
Burial — Burial2006
№ 6 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
The debut, colder and emptier and in some ways braver. More rain, less melody, and a sense of a city photographed at the hour when nobody sensible is out. The template Untrue then filled in.
- Number 3 on The 10 Best Dubstep Albums
Kode9 & The Spaceape — Memories of the Future2006
№ 25 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
Hyperdub's founding statement: Goodman's dread science under Stephen Samuel Gordon's basso poetry, opening with a Prince cover that tells you exactly what the project intends. Gordon died in 2014 and the genre never found another voice remotely like it.
- Number 4 on The 10 Best Dubstep Albums
Skream — Skream!2006
№ 72 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
The one that sounds like the scene actually sounded. Oliver Jones was a teenager cutting plates at Big Apple with Midnight Request Line already behind him, and this is dubstep's first great album because it is not trying to be anything except itself.
- Number 5 on The 10 Best Dubstep Albums
Benga — Diary of an Afro Warrior2008
№ 77 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
Croydon's other prodigy, arriving with Night already in every set in the country. Harder and more melodic than the Burial wing, and the record that showed the sound could reach daytime radio without being watered down.
- Number 6 on The 10 Best Dubstep Albums
Vex'd — Degenerate2005
№ 82 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
Before the genre had a formula to break, Teasdale and Porter brought industrial violence to it. Closer to noise than to garage, and a reminder that early dubstep was considerably nastier than the reverent version people remember.
- Number 7 on The 10 Best Dubstep Albums
Shackleton — Music For The Quiet Hour2012
№ 182 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
Skull Disco's polyrhythms grown into a single hour-long work with narration and no interest in your dancefloor. It belongs to dubstep by lineage and to almost nothing else by sound, which is what makes it essential.
- Number 8 on The 10 Best Dubstep Albums
Martyn — Great Lengths2009
№ 74 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
Dubstep heard from the Netherlands through a Detroit filter. Deykers came from drum and bass and built the bridge record where house, techno and 140 finally shared a room. Post-dubstep effectively starts here.
- Number 9 on The 10 Best Dubstep Albums
Mala — Mala in Cuba2012
№ 130 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
DMZ's spiritual centre taken to Havana by Gilles Peterson, recording with Cuban musicians and keeping both traditions completely intact. Meditative where the genre had gone aggressive, and the most generous record in this list.
- Number 10 on The 10 Best Dubstep Albums
Peverelist — Jarvik Mindstate2009
№ 65 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
Bristol's answer, rolling dubstep, techno and dub into a single rhythm rather than layering them. Tom Ford was working behind a record shop counter while his city's scene assembled around him, and this is its definitive statement.
Eleven to twenty
Ranked, and held to the same rules as the ten.
- Number 11 on The 10 Best Dubstep Albums
Pinch — Underwater Dancehall2007
Bristol's other founder, with vocals and songs where his peers had tools. Ambitious and slightly uneven.
- Number 12 on The 10 Best Dubstep Albums
2562 — Aerial2008
№ 194 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
Detroit inside dubstep, from The Hague, built with a techno producer's discipline. The tempo stops being a London dialect here.
- Number 13 on The 10 Best Dubstep Albums
Kode9 — Nothing2015
№ 103 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
Made after Gordon's death and carrying that absence in its silences. Sparse, conceptual, and his best work as an artist alone.
- Number 14 on The 10 Best Dubstep Albums
Digital Mystikz — Return II Space2010Collected works
FORMAT NOTE: closer to a collected set of sides than a written album. DMZ at its most spacious regardless.
- Number 15 on The 10 Best Dubstep Albums
Roly Porter — Third Law2016
№ 56 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
Vex'd's other half gone orchestral and cosmic. Scores gravity, and works without needing a beat to hide behind.
- Number 16 on The 10 Best Dubstep Albums
Distance — My Demons2007
The metal end of Croydon. Guitar-tuned aggression, and the sound most of the American festival wave later misheard.
- Number 17 on The 10 Best Dubstep Albums
Untold — Black Light Spiral2014
He spent years making some of the most admired club tracks in post-dubstep Britain, then made a record with almost none of that pleasure left in it: distorted, industrial, and closer to noise than to anything Hemlock had released. Restless to the point of self-sabotage, and better for it.
- Number 18 on The 10 Best Dubstep Albums
Vessel — Order of Noise2012
№ 187 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
Bristol's Young Echo generation, moving from bass abstraction toward industrial chamber music.
- Number 19 on The 10 Best Dubstep Albums
Scuba — Triangulation2010
Hotflush's founder taking 140 into Berlin techno's rooms. The record that made the crossover respectable.
- Number 20 on The 10 Best Dubstep Albums
Zomby — Where Were U in 922008
№ 139 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
Hardcore nostalgia constructed single-handed, and adjacent to this scene rather than inside it. Belongs in the conversation.
Near misses
Records considered and not ranked, with the reason each fell short.
The Bug — London Zoo
Dancehall and industrial dub rather than dubstep, though it shared every bill. Ranks high on the 21st-century canon and heads a different lineage.
Mount Kimbie — Crooks & Lovers
Post-dubstep's blurred edges and indoor voice. Sits just outside because the record is more about texture than about this genre's argument.
Caspa & Rusko — Fabriclive 37Not eligible
A DJ mix, so ineligible. It is also the single most consequential object in dubstep's commercial turn, which is worth saying out loud.
Various — Box of DubNot eligible
Various-artists compilation, ineligible. The scene documented better here than on most artist albums of the period.
Loefah — no album existsNot eligible
One of the three or four most important producers the genre has, and nothing eligible to rank. The two records people name are an eighteen-minute EP and a split, and everything else is a twelve-inch. That is not a gap in the search; it is what this canon looks like from the inside.
Zomby — Dedication
Hyperdub-era melancholy from the scene's most erratic figure, and the record that proved the mask hid a real one. Loses to the ten on consistency rather than on peaks.
How this list was built
Ten from 130 assessed. Drawn from both raver.me canons, the 21st-century contender file and a targeted gathering pass, including everything tagged post-dubstep, UK bass, future garage, grime and deconstructed club, because this lineage kept renaming itself and a list should follow the music rather than the tag.
Three of the most important objects in dubstep are ineligible here and are named in the near misses rather than quietly omitted: Fabriclive 37 is a DJ mix, Box of Dub is a various-artists compilation, and Loefah never made an album at all. That is not a gap in the research. It is the shape of a genre whose canon lived on dubplates and in a room, and a top ten that pretended otherwise would be less useful than one that says so.
Every dubstep record on this site, ranked within its own canon rather than against each other, is on the dubstep genre page.