Burial — Untrue

You know what it's like, a city night. especially pre-2020. The sound of sparse traffic, people walking around each other, earphones on. Tubelit corner shops, tubelit buses, tubelit trains. A steady night rain experienced from within a quite porous jacket. Lonely, cold, empty. But you know what city nights could be, especially pre-2020. A bar with a close friend, holding hands about parents living elsewhere, brothers and sisters whose lives have led them to other cities with other nights. By a parapet wall, overseeing other friends in other houses, husbands wives kids, dinners drinks dates. Warm, full, lush. 

You know what it's like, mostly, 1:15 am on a Saturday morning, walking through one of the few places in the world where life is hammering on at what would a hundred kilometres away be an ungodly hour. An invitation to a new scene, a new DJ, an after party, a lonely cab ride back to an empty apartment, a hard-earned weekend of nothing-doing.

You know that ache in your soul as the witching hour approaches and you find yourself stationary at a red light, a light drizzle tapping away at your cab, caught in the space between night and day, being asleep and being awake, just floating. Big Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney. Life In A Metro. The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock.

Burial’s Untrue

If you, like me, see the city night as a human emotion, no work of art better encapsulates it than Burial's Untrue. Musically, it's easy to name its constituent parts: part UK garage, part broken beats, part glitchy atmosphere, part time-stretched vocal samples, part reverb-drenched masters. But there's something magical that makes it a lot greater than the sum of its parts. Something that makes it among the greatest albums ever made.

Cities are a tribute to two parts of our monkey brains: the first that seeks to climb, the other that seeks to congregate. And as with most things about the human condition, these two fundamental instincts run counter to one another. The first alienates, the second makes us ache. The first gets us on the guest list, the second wishes our real friends were there. The first gets us back home on time, the second wishes there was someone else there. At the end of the day, a city night is a moment of stillness at the end of one hustle and before another. A liminal state captured beautifully by Untrue, a modern-day classic.

Check it out on Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music.