Truant

Opening the Rival Dealer EP, "Truant" is among Burial's most kinetically engaged later pieces — a seventeen-minute composition that builds and releases through several distinct emotional phases without ever feeling forced through its transitions. The percussion is more active than his Antidawn-era work, anchoring the track in a physical present rather than pure atmospheric memory. Vocal samples accumulate over the composition's length, building a kind of layered testimony — fragments of experience accreted until they become a chorus of unnamed human presences suggesting that individual experience is structurally shared even when felt in isolation. The bass lines are unusually melodic for Burial, carrying emotional content rather than serving as mere rhythmic foundation. There is a sense of genuine movement here — traversal of emotional terrain rather than suspension in a single state. The track references the experience of youth specifically: the freedom and directionlessness of days spent outside obligation, the particular emotional openness of adolescence before time becomes structured and purposeful and you understand that being truant is already ending. At full length, on proper headphones, "Truant" is one of Burial's most complete artistic statements.