It took the span of about a year for Burial to ascend from the release of one of Hyperdub’s first few releases, 2005’s South London Boroughs EP, to one of the most astonishing debut albums of the decade. All it took was a perfectly-timed sense of where the UK garage/2-step continuum was headed: somewhere spacious and vast yet rhythmically close-quarters, and soaked in a time-displacing, landscape-distorting reverb that emphasized the dub in dubstep. In the abstract, Burial feels like the soundtrack of trying to find a home everywhere but home, in looking for warmth and solace in the concrete and asphalt and streetlights of a city in decline. That holds in part because it’s an ideal exemplar of a dance record that also clicks as an ambient record: its sense of textural, environmental noise and the uneasy disquiet that comes with it became a constant in Burial’s career long after the grooves shifted, but it feels especially moving when there’s the once-lively skitter-beat of garage’s fading optimism pushing it along. But Burial’s sense of alienated anxiety would linger, and the album that gave that sound its breakthrough has yet to feel dated — familiar, maybe, and old enough to be nostalgic, but not entirely of the past.