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Future Garage

2009 – todayUK, then online130–140 BPM

Atmospheric 2-step for headphones: shuffling garage drums, pitched vocal fragments, crackle and soft sub-bass, named online in 2009.

How to recognise it

  • Swung 2-step drums at about 130 to 140 BPM, with ghost notes and shuffling hats.
  • Short vocal samples, pitched and chopped until they sound like another instrument.
  • Wide reverb pads, vinyl crackle and rain or street noise in the background.
  • Soft, round sub-bass instead of the heavy drops of club dubstep.

Future garage took the 2-step rhythms of UK garage and the atmosphere of Burial’s records and turned them into music for headphones. Almost every description of the style starts with his album Untrue.

The name came from Whistla, a DJ on the internet station Sub.fm, who explained his choice on his blog in November 2009; the Future Garage Forum went online the same month. Whistla also started L2S Recordings, usually described as the first label dedicated to the style. In December 2010 the critic Simon Reynolds was already discussing the name in The Independent, and in 2011 The Guardian and the blog Earmilk ran pieces explaining what it meant.

The sound is easy to recognise: swung drums at about 130 to 140 BPM, chopped and pitched vocal samples, long reverb pads, crackle and a soft sub-bass. Producers such as Synkro, Submerse, Klimeks, Vacant and Phaeleh released it mostly on small digital labels and Bandcamp, and it spread through YouTube channels and blogs more than through clubs. FaltyDL and Koreless, often filed under the same name, came at it from the house and electronica side.

It overlapped with chillstep, which grew up on the same YouTube channels, and with the American online beat scene: XXYYXX, a teenager from Florida, reached a very large audience in 2012 with About You. Future garage never became a club sound, but the name is still used on Bandcamp tags and streaming playlists for new music in the same style.

Key records

  1. A1
    About YouXXYYXX

    2012 · Relief in Abstract

    A teenager from Florida; this track reached millions through YouTube uploads.

Titles open a YouTube search in a new tab.

Family tree

Dubstep family tree: which genre comes from whichUK DubstepDeep DubstepPurplePost-DubstepFuture GarageChillstepBrostepTearout / DeathstepDrumstepMelodic DubstepRiddimColour BassUK GarageDubDrum & BassHip HopR&BAmbientElectro HouseMetalTranceFuture Bass

Swipe sideways to see the whole tree. Solid boxes are dubstep genres, dashed ones are outside influences. Hover a genre to light up its family line, click it to open its page.

Sources and further reading