Ones To Watch: BARELY ALIVE Is Rebuilding Brostep for a New Era

From bedroom studios to WATT, a renewed brostep movement, “100% NO AI,” and the launch of Killed It!, BARELY ALIVE’s latest chapter is bigger than the project itself.

Long before the helmet, the robot, and the massive bass stages, BARELY ALIVE started with two childhood friends and a shared obsession with electronic music. The pair originally met as teenagers through a carpool to rock band camp. After graduation, life briefly took them in different directions, but the explosion of dubstep around 2010 and 2011 unexpectedly brought them back together. Both had started uploading music to SoundCloud, and discovering that shared interest gave them a reason to start creating together.

In the earliest days, BARELY ALIVE was built far away from the scale of the stages the project occupies today. Day jobs paid the bills while free time was divided between producing dubstep in bedrooms and playing video games. The setup was simple, but the response online was immediate. SoundCloud comments began piling up, established artists started reaching out, and release opportunities quickly appeared, followed by touring. The project was beginning to snowball.

For several years, BARELY ALIVE existed in a more traditional format. The project initially toured as a duo before eventually shifting toward a single performer onstage. Then came the moment that would completely reshape its identity. During the opening night of Excision’s Paradox Tour in 2017, BARELY ALIVE introduced its now-signature helmet onstage for the first time. There was uncertainty around how the concept would translate live and whether audiences would connect with it, but by the end of the performance, that question had largely answered itself.

The helmet was not simply another piece of stage production. It opened the door to an entirely different version of BARELY ALIVE. Over the following years, that concept continued evolving until, in 2023, the project committed fully to the transformation. Old imagery was removed, the focus shifted away from the personalities behind the music, and WATT officially emerged as BARELY ALIVE’s robotic surrogate. Two creators had effectively become one character.

With WATT came an entire world. The signature jacket, robotic mannerisms, simple YES-or-NO responses, and strangely innocent personality gave fans something far more recognizable than a traditional masked DJ identity. The character began extending through social media, artwork, stage visuals, and live production, allowing BARELY ALIVE to build a universe around the music rather than simply another anonymous figure behind a helmet. In a bass scene filled with masked acts, WATT somehow became personal, to the point where the character no longer simply represented BARELY ALIVE. WATT became BARELY ALIVE.

While the project’s visual identity continued evolving, the genre that originally inspired BARELY ALIVE was undergoing changes of its own. Bass music had expanded dramatically since brostep’s explosive early-2010s era, with riddim, tearout, melodic dubstep, and countless hybrid styles increasingly occupying the space while the aggressive, exaggerated sound design associated with classic brostep became less dominant. By 2025, however, something was beginning to shift.

Major releases from artists including Zomboy and Skrillex suggested renewed interest in the sound, while a younger generation of producers began rediscovering the energy, structures, and sound design that defined an earlier era of dubstep. BARELY ALIVE saw an opportunity not to recreate the past exactly as it was, but to explore what brostep could sound like after more than a decade of evolution across bass music.

The OVERDRIVE tour became part of that mission, pairing new music with immersive 360-degree staging, heavy laser production, and a live environment designed to connect the chaos of brostep’s original era with the expectations of modern bass shows. Rather than relying purely on nostalgia, BARELY ALIVE began taking the genre’s 2010s DNA and rebuilding it for a new generation.

That philosophy became even clearer with “100% NO AI,” a seven-track EP whose statement extended beyond the music itself. Alongside a return to modernized brostep, the project deliberately placed human creativity at the center of its visual world. Multimedia artwork accompanying the release was created entirely by real artists, including friends, family members, and tattoo artists connected to the project, with the creators themselves made visible throughout the process.

The EP’s title also carries another layer for longtime bass fans. “100% NO AI” nods to Knife Party’s influential 100% No Modern Talking, connecting BARELY ALIVE’s current direction with one of the releases that helped define brostep’s earlier era. It captures the broader philosophy behind this chapter of the project: looking backward without becoming trapped by nostalgia, using the genre’s history as raw material for something new.

Now that mission is expanding beyond BARELY ALIVE itself. With Killed It!, the project is building a dedicated platform around brostep and the artists carrying the sound into its next phase. The label’s first compilation, ‘Killed It! Vol. 1,’ brings together 18 tracks from veterans, established names, rising artists, and underground producers, creating a snapshot of a genre that BARELY ALIVE believes still has much more territory to explore.

At the center of the compilation is BARELY ALIVE and Cyclops’ appropriately titled “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO DUBSTEP.” The track’s name works as both a question and a mission statement for the wider project. Killed It! Vol. 1 is not positioned as an attempt to preserve brostep exactly as it once existed. Instead, it connects artists shaped by the genre’s original golden era with producers currently reshaping its sound from a completely different generation and production landscape.

That approach also explains why Killed It! is intended to become more than a home for BARELY ALIVE’s own releases. Co-founded with Vishal Bhanderi, the platform is being built around developing new ideas, supporting emerging producers, and giving brostep a dedicated space where its history, present, and future can exist together.

For BARELY ALIVE, it marks another transformation in a career already defined by reinvention. What started as two friends making dubstep in bedrooms became a touring project, then a helmet, then WATT, and eventually an entire visual universe. Now BARELY ALIVE is stepping into another role: curating, supporting, and helping shape the next generation of the genre that started it all.

Brostep may have disappeared from the center of bass music for a while, but BARELY ALIVE appears determined to make sure its next era is impossible to ignore.