As dubstep’s mainstream moment crested at the dawn of the 2010s, DJs, producers, MCs and ravers all looked towards the next big thing in bass music. For many Londoners, that meant funky house’s recalibration of garage’s swung rhythms to slower tempos and a steadier pulse. Further afield, producers either embraced dubstep’s midrange-heavy intensification or rejected the genre entirely, gradually pivoting towards house and techno’s larger international circuit.

Then there was the new generation of MCs completely eschewing club music, looking towards road rap and early Chicago drill, styles which placed vocalists front and centre. However, few music industry trainspotters would have predicted that grime—a genre left for dead by the media a few years earlier—would once again bum-rush the airwaves, led by both a cohort of veterans like Skepta, Jme and Wiley, as well as a generation of new talent including Novelist and AJ Tracey.

As grime’s second coming recedes into history, it’s important to remember that this mainstream success was built on the back of a generation of club and radio DJs that saw the potential of the genre’s untapped instrumental roots, building the foundation that led to a wider breakthrough for vocalists. Grime in the late 2010s was in a rough space. Hyped to the moon and back circa 2003-2005, thanks to classics like Boy In Da Corner and Treddin’ On Thin Ice, the scene experienced almost every growth pain imaginable. Road-raised artists inevitably clashed with label executives and the media, independent revenue from record sales plummeted as illegal downloads cut into vinyl sales, crossover attempts missed the mark, and racist policing stifled both club nights and live performances.

When scene trendsetters like Ghetts pivoted towards American-style rap mixtapes, inspired by acts like Dipset and D-Block, dubstep rushed in and filled the void, becoming an international sensation, to the disbelief of those who erroneously saw this other UKG offshoot as too slow and heady to break through. But while the mainstream media was quick to declare grime as yesterday’s news, an entire generation of producers and DJs saw things differently. For them, grime was still the future.

Elijah & Skilliam were among the first to make an impact. Meeting in university and armed with both turntable skills and marketing know-how, the duo doubled down on grime’s instrumental side, launching a blog to share tunes, DJing back-to-back sets on radio, and eventually launching their Butterz label as a means to put out the instrumental music they were receiving, both from experienced producers like Terror Danjah and then-newcomers like the funk-inflected Swindle and rave-ready Royal-T.

Focusing on instrumentals had several benefits: first, it sidestepped spitters for a few years at a time when even supportive ecosystems like Rinse FM were tired of their drama; second, it highlighted grime’s compatibility with dubstep. By 2010, more adventurous bass music DJs like Oneman and Ben UFO were already bristling against that scene’s orthodoxy, preferring to mix anything they liked that fit a 130-140BPM tempo.

Tunes like “Air Bubble (Swindle Remix)”, “Orangeade” and “OO AA EE” were definitively, defiantly grime… but they were also the musical equivalent of neon lighting: bright, appealing, exciting pieces of music that immediately stood out amidst the staid reserve of minimal dubstep, tear-out D&B or house-leaning bass music. By the middle of the decade, the Butterz crew were throwing parties across the UK and beyond, inviting barrers like P Money and D Double E back into the mix, and even developing UKG supergroup TQD into one of the UK’s hottest live acts. Retiring as a label at the top of their game, their impact is still felt across UK music, echoed in movements like Conducta’s Kiwi Rekords in the early 2020s, as well as in Elijah’s Yellow branding in his subsequent ventures.

As Butterz reconnected grime to its garage roots, a parallel and intersecting movement was forming that focused on grime’s more abstract, experimental side. While grime’s initial media hype focused on how the genre finally gave the UK a homegrown retort to American hip-hop, and Butterz emphasised its dancefloor side, Slackk, Mr. Mitch, Oil Gang and Logos formed Boxed as a club night for producers and fans who geeked out over sub-microgenre concepts like sinogrime, Devil mixes, Eskibeat and R&G. This was a space where grime’s unabashed futurism and weirdness wouldn’t just exist—it would be celebrated.

Crucially, all four DJs played wildly different styles from one another, with Oil Gang focusing on grime at its hardest and most melodic while Mitch zeroed in on a hidden vulnerability, slowing the tempo down and softening the melodies on records like his excellent debut LP, Parallel Memories. Logos, meanwhile, hybridised Wiley’s drumless Devil mixes to experimental ambient on his masterful Cold Mission, and Slackk’s Palm Tree Fire practically reimagined grime as the soundtrack to an East Asian art film.

Essentially, every sound that grime’s first generation of MCs/producers had speed-ran through on their way towards mainstream acceptance was game for reappraisal, an open-minded policy that earned the crew a devoted following of die-hard fans and a rolodex of up-and-coming producers, eager to hear their dubs played for a hardcore community.

For my money, Boxed Vol. 1—a free MP3 compilation promoting their club night, released 10 years ago this year—stands as the wider Boxed movement’s crowning achievement, a stunning variety pack of styles from a dozen and a half producers. The first two tracks alone highlight the breadth of music on offer: Logos’ laidback pentatonic stomper, “Cloudbursting”, couldn’t be any more different than Dullah Beatz’s Rick Ross-sampling “Mayfair”, which had just as much in common with trap and early drill as grime. Elsewhere, future Northern House savant Finn flips a classic R&B sample on “My My”, scene veteran JT The Goon revisits the classic sino sound on “Listen”, and Inkee, Shriekin and Strict Face widened grime’s scope beyond England, repping for Scotland, Ireland and Australia respectively, each with jams at the intersection of grime’s frosty synths and uptempo drums.

At times, the experimentation breaks beyond grime’s structure completely: Mr. Mitch remixes The Beach Boys (!!!), Murlo hints at the freeform dance music he’d master a few years later, and Mumdance and Rabbit marry the genre to techno’s 909 fetish. By the time the compilation ends with Slackk’s emotive, strings-led “West Of Rome”, it seems as if grime wasn’t just the world’s most thrilling music—it was ALL of the world’s music bundled into one genre.

In many ways, Butterz and Boxed felt like the successors to OG dubstep nights like FWD>> and DMZ, but by the mid-2010s, the factors that had led to dubstep’s mainstream success had shifted, completely changing the goalposts. Music was slowly pivoting away from MP3s towards the streaming economy, creating barriers for entry for sample-based producers; house and techno on one end and hip-hop on the other gained a renewed momentum often at the expense of bass music genres, like the once-mainstream dubstep tapered off. Finally, everyone involved was weary of grime being appropriated by outsiders (much like how dubstep was), awaiting a Drake grime dub that never came, only for grime’s original pioneers to be the ones to benefit most from the genre’s underground, instrumental revival.

Skepta’s “That’s Not Me” may have been the tune that changed everything, but it’s hard to imagine it delivering the same massive impact without the 2010s underground as a foundation. You could even argue that Butterz and Boxed were the last big club moments for millennials, with a younger cohort putting their own spin on dance music shortly thereafter. Nevertheless, ravers young and old would do well to remember grime’s instrumental moment, as it’s proof that good, forward-thinking music—if promoted with the right enthusiasm—can shock the world.