Dubstep
The 9 Best Dubstep
Tracks of All Time
UK garage stripped of its vocals, its swing and its optimism, rebuilt around a half-time beat and a sub-bass you feel before you hear. Made in South London from around 2002 for rooms with the right sound system.
- Origin
- Croydon, South London, 2002
- Tempo
- 138–142 BPM
- Also known as
- dubstep music, bass music, croydon sound
- Tracks
- 9
- Updated
- 2026-08-29
Listen to the whole list
Play it through here →One record after another, with the verdicts
Take this list to YouTube → (opens in a new tab)
Opens the list on YouTube as a playlist you can save to your own account. We never see your account, and nothing is stored here.
Curators on Dubstep
This ranking is the whole scene arguing. These are individuals who gave us their own Dubstep list, and a reason for every record on it.
Number 1: Skream / Midnight Request Line
2005 · Tempa
The crossover record, made by a teenager in his bedroom. A synth riff simple enough to hum and a bassline that only fully exists on a large rig, which is exactly why it converted so many people at once.
Also on Bass Weight, The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred, The Waxonia Desk — The Night It Went National
Number 2: Digital Mystikz / Anti-War Dub
2006 · DMZ
Mala's meditative half of the genre. Almost nothing happens for long stretches, and the record is entirely dependent on the room — heard properly, the restraint is the payload.
Number 3: Burial / Archangel
2007 · Hyperdub
Rain, vinyl crackle and a pitched-up R&B vocal grieving over garage percussion that never quite lands on the grid. The record that made this music legible to people who would never enter the club.
Also on The Waxonia Desk — Ghosts, The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred, The Waxonia Desk — The Night It Went National
Number 4: Kode9 & The Spaceape / Sine of the Dub
2004 · Hyperdub
A Prince cover reduced to a sine wave and a monotone recitation. The founding statement of a label, and the clearest demonstration that this music was a set of ideas before it was a sound.
Number 5: Benga & Coki / Night
2008 · Tempa
The other pole from Mala: a bassline that lurches sideways with a physical violence nobody had got out of a synthesiser before. The record that gave the American mutation its permission slip.
Number 6: Horsepower Productions / Forgive
2002 · Tempa
Before the genre had a name or a tempo convention, Horsepower were making garage records soaked in dub and Middle Eastern strings. Proto-dubstep, and still the eeriest thing in the catalogue.
Number 7: The Bug featuring Killa P & Flowdan / Skeng
2007 · Ninja Tune
Kevin Martin welds dancehall toasting to a bassline that sounds actively corroded. The point where dubstep stops being polite about its Jamaican inheritance and states it outright.
Number 8: Joy Orbison / Hyph Mngo
2009 · Hotflush
Euphoric, vocal, and unmistakably not dubstep any more. The record that ended the genre as a coherent thing by showing everyone what came after it.
Number 9: Skrillex / Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites
2010 · Big Beat
Included because pretending otherwise is dishonest: this is what the word came to mean for most of the planet. The London original and the American mutation share a tempo and almost nothing else.