As it continues to refract and evolve, the dance-music style known as dubstep has wandered onto a number of intriguing byways. Some artists, like Actress, have stopped worrying over genre and engaged a newly mesmerizing array of timeless, boundless "bass music" sounds. Others, like Zomby, have switched on to the imagined transmissions of zoned-out video-game fiends. Still others, like James Blake and Mount Kimbie, have softened up and set out to make a supremely emotional kind of post-human soul.

Skream never seemed a likely candidate for the latter, but he wasn't exactly a sure thing for any of the others either. It makes a strange kind of sense, then, that he would basically go ahead and do all three — plus a little more on the sides. Not that Outside the Box makes a lot of sense: Indeed, as an album, it's a fractious, fragile and highly fraught mess. But what is dubstep circa 2010 if not a laboratory for various styles and sounds to go wrong — and sound all the more right for their failure?

Skream hails from Croydon, a district within dubstep's formative home city of London. From there, he's helped goose the genre along… read more »