Few electronic artists from the last decade have been pigeonholed like William Bevan. Since the London producer behind Burial gained widespread attention with 2007's epochal second album, Untrue, listeners and critics alike have spoken of "the Burial sound"—pitched-down vocal samples, rustling noise, blocky garage rhythms in perpetual decay—as if it were straight gospel. This is partially Bevan's fault: four years passed before any new solo material saw release, which allowed plenty of time for Untrue's singular aura to seep into the collective consciousness. As imitators big and small have lined up to pay respect, the phrase "sounds like Burial" escaped the connotation of wishful thinking and started sounding almost like, well, an insult.

Insulting because, as this decade so far has proven, one person who doesn't sound like Burial anymore is Burial himself. 2011's Street Halo EP, which followed a 12" collaboration with Four Tet, offered a few engaging structural tweaks to Untrue's formula, but it was the collab EP with Massive Attack that followed later in the year, "Four Walls" b/w "Paradise Circus", that hinted Bevan was ready to explore truly new territory. Essentially a pair of Burial edits of songs from Massive Attack's 2010 LP Heligoland, each cut pushed past the 11-minute mark and embraced a proggy, amorphous structure that was worlds away from the contained environments of previous Burial releases. If the Massive Attack edits suggested a shift away from the past, 2012's astounding pair of EPs, Kindred and Truant/Rough Sleeper, broke free of any previously set constraints, as Bevan wielded his newfound appreciation for side-long track lengths and added splashes of sonic color—arpeggiated synths, chunky house motifs, rickety windchimes, bursts of beatific melody—to his established palette of blues and grays.

Over the last few years, the only consistent aspect of Burial's music is the frequency of when it's been released—typically and almost too fittingly, in the dead of winter—so the excitement that arrives with the announcement a new Burial release in 2013 is no longer "It exists!," but "What is this going to sound like?" Rival Dealer arrives almost exactly a year after Truant/Rough Sleeper, but the stylistic leaps made on this new release are more jarring and revelatory than anything in Burial's catalog. It's unquestionably his strongest release since Kindred, and his most satisfying statement of purpose since Untrue.

The seismic stylistic shift that Bevan's made on these three tracks—two of which, true to recent form, run well over the 10-minute mark—is immediately apparent on the opening minutes of Rival Dealer's title track, when a distorted vocal sample of adult-contemporary cheeseball Gavin DeGraw's "More Than Anyone" (yes, really) gives way to a furious drum break, making for Burial's most straightforwardly uptempo move to date. The rhythm simultaneously sounds crisp and hissing, eventually disintegrating in a blare of police-scanner noise before everything goes truly pear-shaped with a monstrous, buzzing bassline, as a woodblock rhythm from the Untrue days clicks and clacks below the chaos. In the few interviews that Bevan has given throughout his career, he's outlined Burial's conceptual aims as a tribute to the rave music he didn't get a chance to grow up with but experienced second-hand; the unbridled intensity of "Rival Dealer" is arguably his most explicitly rave-y move yet.

"Rival Dealer"'s final, impressionistic third is the one section on Rival Dealer that dips into familiar Burial territory, with meditative synths and stray vocal samples briefly interrupted by a radiant saxophone line. It's a necessary comedown after all the preceding intensity, as well as a teaser for what follows: "Hiders" and "Come Down to Us", the EP's following two cuts, are the source of Rival Dealer's most mind-blowing moments, as well as being the closest that Bevan's come to total accessibility since Untrue's earwormy lead single "Archangel". The EP's other side-long epic, "Come Down to Us", takes cues from the crawling sense of pacing established on the Massive Attack edits, with a rhythm so slow it barely registers on the BPM scale stretched across 13 minutes, as a slinky sitar-like figure and piping synths give way to a sparkly, unnervingly sentimental soft-rock melody, the sounds of drizzling rain coating the whole thing.

If "Come Down to Us" is Bevan laying out conventional melodic forms across his template of psychedelic sprawl, "Hiders" is 2010s-Burial in miniature form, his only sub-five-minute solo cut of the decade thus far and one of the only true standalone tracks in his catalog (not an insult—he's a deep-listening artist at this point). It opens with an anthemic synth figure that starts and stops several times, returning each time with varying fidelity, before a splashy arena-rock drumbeat crashes through the ambience, stepping in time with the cascading synth figure and a vocal sample that seems to hover just slightly above everything else. The beatific, neon "Hiders" is Bevan's take on the more loved-up element of rave music—if "Rival Dealer" is a tip to the days of Kool FM, then this is more along the lines of the stuff spun by DJs like Scott Hardkiss and Danny Rampling—but even those without a lick of dance history know-how will be wowed by "Hiders"' magnificent aura, a down-to-the-buzzer entry as one of 2013's most surprising musical moments.

Rival Dealer has some of the most immediate music from the Burial project, but it's worth noting that this is also a noisy, dissonant work. Tape hiss and static smother large sections of the EP, and Bevan seriously tips the scales when it comes to one of the staples of Burial's style, as well as rave music at large—the vocal sample. He liberally applies voices all over the three tracks, both as a structural anchor and to create a pleasing cacophony; during "Rival Dealer"'s coruscating midsection, he throws in a sample of New York rapper Lord Finesse's "You Know What I'm About" in a showoff-y, very un-Burial fashion. Burial has often been praised for restraint; the wild-eyed, play-anything nature of Rival Dealer shatters that notion for the better.

Speaking of vocal samples: a theme that runs through Rival Dealer, upheld by the many voices that dot its landscape, is self-acceptance. Phrases concerning sexuality and personal reflection abound—"This is the moment when you see who you are," "It's about sexuality, it's about showing a person who you are—to me, this is who I'm about," "This is who I am," "Who are you?". "Come Down to Us", in particular, ends with an extended lift of a passage from transgender filmmaker Lana Wachowski's painfully moving speech while receiving the Human Rights Campaign Visibility Award last year.

Some have already speculated that Bevan's framing here is intentional, possibly speaking to his own personal experiences. Whatever the case, "Come Down to Us" is Rival Dealer's nucleus, as its titular vocal sample appears throughout the EP. The fact that such guesswork takes place to begin with is evidence of how, after nearly a decade of making music, William Bevan continues to fascinate and create intrigue. Here, he provides plenty of exciting material to pore over until he returns, further changing our perspective on an artist we're still just starting to understand.