We Are Dust

This is the album that flipped melodic dubstep on its head. And it still has killer robots. Safe to say, we are never getting rid of this stereotype.

In fairness, it’s a stereotype that Xilent himself has helped build up. By the time We Are Dust (alternatively formatted we_are_dust) was released, he had built up an expansive catalogue of nearly a decade in production, pushing the needle at a foundational level. His Choose Me EP was an early breakthrough; Touch Sound came later, and it was becoming clear that the Polish producer was a templating force in melodic dubstep, electro, drumstep, and whatever glitchy amalgamation of sound occurred in the middle. We Are Virtual was his enthusiastic computerized debut; We Are Dust, then, is the far more sober followup.

In a way, this record still brings something new to robotic dubstep, in that We Are Dust feels like a rogue machine in itself. Xilent forgoes the cheesy (but well-meaning) alien-robot-war sounds of the mid 2010s in favour of a far more holistically complete sound, moulding the album to embody the very idea of an entity, a machine. We Are Dust is mechanical, destructive, entirely inhuman and unpalatable in sound, with its great sweeping atmospheres and relentlessly stabby drops. It paints a desolate world, devoid of life, where patrolling robots prowl abandoned post-dystopian landscapes - but it judders and it jolts, convulsing with electrical impulses as it advances on the mechanical feet of the machines it evokes.

The glitch-infused synths are not new ground for Xilent necessarily, but their context is. They go from, previously, merely appealing sound design, to, now, malfunctioning spasms and radio-static screens, whilst the stompy riddim-leaning sections are the grating, rhythmic clanks of steel upon hard ground. Consider the interplay of electro that defines the staggered “Blue Shadows”, or the choppy screening of “Code Blood”, and, sandwiched between them, magnificent euphoric supersaws permating “The Darkness” like a taste of beautiful violence.

The final touches Xilent appends to his worldbuilding are just as tasteful. Smooth transitions guide the ear between tracks, spattered with lore-ridden vocal samples - occasionally they can be rather on-the-nose, but such a risk is nearly impossible to sidestep in such a format and such a genre - typifying the robotic Terminator-esque character itself. Meanwhile, though the mixdowns can often be rather harsh and sometimes a little overbearing, Xilent’s experience in the bass scene shows as his songwriting thrives in the science-fiction environment.

While We Are Virtual was diverse and exploratory in genre, We Are Dust prefers to remain within dubstep. It is electro-twinged as always, as far as sound design goes, but the crushing beats of dubstep are what Xilent returns to again and again. It certainly helps the record to maintain a rhythmic identity, remaining grounded in the genre, but the record is far from uniform - all corners of dubstep are explored, from its most melodic to its heaviest and even to chillstep in the closer-by-name “To Dust”. This, then, is the final piece of the puzzle to consider We Are Dust as, perhaps, Xilent’s magnum opus - where We Are Virtual was enthusiastic in its sound and lively in its diversity, We Are Dust is a rigorous, diligent album - in theming and in sound - and it is all the more powerful for it.

Listen on Spotify here.