Released by Hyperdub on November 5, 2007, Untrue was showered with critical praise. Named Album of the Year in major publications, it would go on to be nominated for the UK’s Mercury Prize in 2008. In the meanwhile, Untrue’s impact on the UK dance scene had started to come through in the form of a self-conscious turn towards emotionality: not the primary-color, explosive emotions of old skool rave, but subtle shades of introspective melancholy. Producers like James Blake, Jamie Woon, and Darkstar went even further than Burial, incorporating their own vocals into the music and writing actual songs. Some callous wag dubbed this mixed-blessing of a trend “blubstep” (OK, it was me) as producer after producer announced that their greatest ambition was to make people cry on the dancefloor.

Burial’s influence was also evident in the work of UK dance producers like Andy Stott and Raime. The latter’s label, Blackest Ever Black, deepened the occult links between post-punk and post-dubstep that Burial had hinted at, exploring the unlikely dancefloor potential of ’80s goth and industrial sounds. The xx offered another version of this connection, their music fusing Burial’s doleful moodiness with the spare intimacy of post punks Young Marble Giants. On his solo track “Gosh,” that band’s Jamie xx participated in another persistent trend that owes something to Burial: A strain of retro-rave in which bygone styles like hardcore and jungle are created as faded facsimiles, at once precise in every period detail yet hazy like the memories in an aged raver’s brain. You could detect faint far-flung traces of the Burial aesthetic in the ambient amorphousness of cloud rap, while a quasi-genre of cinematically melancholy, inwardly-focused music sourced from diverse points in the modern music landscape was dubbed “Night Bus” in clear homage to the maker of the track of the same name.

In another sense, you could say that Burial certainly was early to tap into—if not invent—an emotional tenor that characterizes our era and which Mark Fisher dubbed “the secret sadness of the 21st century.” The peg for this coinage was James Blake’s 2013 album Overgrown, but the listless mood of vague gloom was something you could track all across the spectrum, a hollow-souled emptiness lurking within the seemingly triumphant hedonism of Drake, Kanye West, Future, the Weeknd, and Travi$ Scott.

Burial himself has not attempted to follow up Untrue. Instead he’s broken out with a sporadic scatter of smaller statements. Some of his EPs have been almost as long as an old fashioned vinyl LP but consisted of just three tracks: Extended pieces, full of shifts, switches, and subsections that, as Pitchfork’s Mark Richardson wrote, “feel like miniature albums” in their own right.

No real direction has been discernible in his post-Untrue music. Some of the tracks are an extension and consummation of Untrue: “Stolen Dog,” for instance, is a widescreen ache of anguish woven from piteous moans and strangled mewls, gorgeously evoking the misery of the dog wrenched from home and family, the grief of the original owner, perhaps even the desperation of the thief. Elsewhere there were unexpected flavors of trance-pop, as on “Ashtray Wasp” and “Come Down to Us”—a disconcerting proximity to the world of Calvin Harris. Other tracks seemed deliberately, almost perversely, unpolished, or vandalized on a whim by their creator after completion. “Rough Sleeper” and “Truant” resembled radios drifting between stations.

A gathering formlessness makes itself felt in Burial’s music as we approach the present: Tracks that crumble away suddenly, like a sandcastle reclaimed by the surf, or halt as if suddenly vacated by the will to continue. This year’s “Beachfires” and “Subtemple” are rhythmless chasms of droning ambience and found sounds that have more in common with experimental industrial outfits like Zoviet France than anything in the UK rave tradition.

These featureless expanses of sound parallel the steadfast erasure of Burial’s public profile since Untrue. To my knowledge, since the spate of interviews around that album, he has not spoken to the press. Most likely his withdrawal is a reaction to the forced exposure of his real-world identity in 2008. He went public with his name and face that year, but only as a preemptive measure to undercut mainstream newspaper journalists bent on sleuthing out the truth.

Burial’s initial intent was always to stay true to the radical anonymity and facelessness of rave culture and underground techno. Like some of us, he grew up fascinated by the enigmatic and outlandish artist names—LTJ Bukem, Rufige Kru, Foul Play, 2 Bad Mice, Dr S Gachet—that offered no clues to the color or class of these shadowy operators, no hint of where they came from, or even how many people were involved. (Omni Trio, for instance, turned out to be just one bloke.)

“I want to be unknown,” Burial declared in the 2007 Wire interview. “Most of the tunes I like, I never knew what the people who made them looked like, anyway. It draws you in. You could believe in it more... I just want to be in a symbol... the name of a tune.” After a brief dalliance with attention circa Untrue, Burial has done his best to go back to being an anonymous enigma. Not an actual human mired in the mundane, but a spirit observing London from on high.