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 Big Apple Records at its centre and the Forward>> night, started in 2001, as its home. 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.