figure

If your idea of a good time is bass music that sounds like it crawled out of a horror movie, you already know Figure. The Never Say Die Records mainstay, real name Josh Gard, has spent well over a decade turning dubstep and drumstep into full-on horror scores, and honestly nobody else in the scene does it quite like him.

Figure built his name on the Monsters series, a long-running run of releases that splices heavy, mutated bass with horror movie samples, screeching strings, and that unmistakable sense of dread. It’s not a gimmick either — the series has stretched across more than a dozen volumes since the early 2010s, all the way through Monsters Undead, and it’s become one of the most consistent horrorcore-meets-bass projects in the game. Since 2012, Universal Studios has actually tapped Figure to help soundtrack Halloween Horror Nights every year, which tells you just how legit his horror credentials are within the industry, not just the dance floor.

Beyond Monsters, Figure’s catalog runs deep. He dropped the Horns of the Apocalypse EP on Skrillex’s OWSLA back in 2013, and put out the full-length album Gravity through his own imprint DOOM Music in 2015. On top of Never Say Die and OWSLA, he’s put out music through Disciple Records, Rottun Recordings, SMOG Records, and Cyclops Recordings — basically a who’s-who of bass labels that shaped the sound over the 2010s. He’s also linked up in the studio with names like Kool Keith, Code:Pandorum, Contakt, 2FAC3D, ENiGMA Dubz, Terravita, and Dack Janiels, plus he’s had his tracks flipped by heavy hitters like Zardonic.

Figure’s reach has gone way past the club too. His track “Monster Mania” got featured on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, putting his horror-dubstep sound in front of an audience that’s never even set foot at a festival. Even with all that crossover attention, he’s stayed rooted in the underground bass community that made him, still dropping riddim-leaning cuts and continuing to build out the Monsters universe well into the 2020s, including marking the project’s 15th anniversary with a reissue.

At this point Figure isn’t just an artist with a horror aesthetic slapped on top — he basically built his own subgenre. If you want dubstep that sounds like it belongs in a slasher flick and hits just as hard on a system, Figure’s catalog is the place to start.