Building in the open — the brutalist website

Dub is brutalist music.

Not a metaphor. A direct parallel. When King Tubby stripped a reggae track at the mixing desk — dropping the vocals, pulling the guitar, leaving only the kick and the bass and the reverb tail of something that used to be there — he was doing exactly what brutalist architects do with concrete. Exposing the structure. Removing the finish. Letting the construction be the design.

The Neuradub website follows the same principle. Raw HTML structure. System monospace fonts — Courier New for body text, Times New Roman for headings. No custom fonts loaded. No Google Fonts. The browser's default rendering IS the aesthetic. Every border is a structural element, not a decorative one. 2px solid black for the formwork. 1px for the internal dividers. Zero border-radius anywhere. No rounded corners. The content sits tight against the borders with minimal padding.

The psychedelic layer is purple. Just purple. One accent colour bleeding through the cracks in the concrete. "DUB" in the logo. The marquee bar. The stats numbers. The tag pills. The link arrows. In dark mode, the concrete becomes void — deep purple-black — and the accent shifts brighter. The structure doesn't change. Only the light does.

There's a marquee scrolling at the top because brutalist sites don't worry about what's fashionable. Section headers are prefixed with // like source code comments. The sidebar has ASCII art. The footer says "no cookies / no tracking / no comfort." The catalogue is a raw HTML table because that's what it is — tabular data.

The theme toggle says "dark" and "light" in plain text. No sun and moon icons. No smooth transitions on hover — hover states invert instantly because brutalist interactions don't ease in. You're either hovering or you're not. Binary. Like a kick drum. It's there or it's not.

We built it in Next.js because that's the tool we know. TypeScript, Tailwind, MDX for the blog. Deployed on Cloudflare Pages. The tech stack is modern. The aesthetic is 1972.

The site serves one purpose: to be findable. Open Graph tags so Facebook and WhatsApp show the album art when someone shares a link. JSON-LD structured data so search engines and AI crawlers understand this is a music label with a catalogue. A sitemap so Google indexes every page. RSS for the journal.

The bass is the foundation. The psychedelic is the light through the cracks. The website is the concrete.