What is dubstep?

Dubstep is a bass-first UK sound built around 140 BPM, a half-time swing, and deep sub-bass you feel more than hear. Sparse drums, huge low end, and space where a drum & bass track would fill in.

It came out of South London in the early 2000s, with the Croydon record shop and label Big Apple Records at its centre. The Forward>> night, also written FWD>>, gave it a home from 2001, started by Sarah Lockhart at the Velvet Rooms in Soho and later resident at Plastic People in Shoreditch. Hatcha, Skream, Benga, Loefah, and Digital Mystikz (Mala and Coki) built it, and in 2005 the DMZ night in Brixton gave it a room of its own.

Dubstep isn’t drum & bass, but it shares the UK bass bloodline Proper’s sound comes out of.