Emerging from London’s club scene in the late 2000s, SBTRKT twisted dubstep’s signature elements into suggestive new forms, helping to spark a new era of shape-shifting bass music. Born in rural England, to a family of South Asian and Scottish roots, SBTRKT (a.k.a. Aaron Jerome) began playing behind a mask. “The minute I became anonymous, I was able to infiltrate spaces that wouldn’t have accepted me before,” he told Apple Music. On his first three albums, shielded by his facelessness, he developed his sound in often risky ways, swerving between styles and moods—and surrounding himself with collaborators as diverse as Sampha, A$AP Ferg, and Warpaint. In 2023, he finally shed the mask. The time was right, he said, to foreground his own identity, rather than “hiding away or creating a boundary between the listener and what those songs were about.”