In the past 25 years, the number of subgenres that even a casual music fan may be acquainted with has exploded exponentially. Dubstep. Reggaetón. SoundCloud rap. Hyperpop. Amapiano. Where dominant listening platforms in the past—terrestrial radio—would filter out the differences, now streaming services help to codify them into neverending playlists and see-what-sticks genre tags. Data analyst Glenn McDonald keeps track of the proliferation with his project Every Noise at Once, which tabulates all the genres he can identify on Spotify; as of October 5, 2021, there are 5,602 of them, including such esoteric terms as goregrind, sky room, Russian drain, grungegaze, dungeon synth, filthstep, and, why not, deep filthstep.
Much of this factionalization is undoubtedly a function of how the internet facilitates like-minded individuals’ ability to seek each other out. A lot, too, probably has to do with the fact that in the era of forums, blogs, and finally social media, the discourse around music spun giddily out of control. Genre terms came to function almost like memes—totems passed along from mouth to mouth, keyboard to keyboard, text field to text field, both reflecting and shaping the cultural landscape they attempted to describe.
To commemorate Pitchfork’s 25th anniversary, we’ve gathered 25 such microgenres, great and small, that help illuminate music’s evolution over the past two and a half decades. You won’t find hyperpop or SoundCloud rap or even depressive black metal here—all of those things are more or less stable entities with fixed meanings, however much fans may argue about their nuances. These stylistic dividers, on the other hand, were often fanciful, capricious, even outlandish (though few were as silly as donk or skramz). Some were fleeting ideas that lasted for a season or two before they were replaced by other equally ephemeral notions (looking at you, seapunk). Others, like chillwave, rewired the collective psyche in their own small ways, tweaking how we think about popular music. Taken together, they tell a story about culture’s development in the new millennium, with each one inching us a little closer to the gloriously chaotic musical landscape of today.
For more of Pitchfork’s 25th anniversary coverage, head here. And read our Editor-in-Chief Puja Patel's note about our 25th anniversary project here.
Blog House
Date Range: 1999 to 2011
Origin Point: Paris’ Rex Club; Dell desktops in dorm rooms
Key Artists: Justice, Crookers, Digitalism, Mr. Oizo, Crystal Castles
Crucial Listening: Justice vs. Simian - “We Are Your Friends”; Uffie - “Pop the Glock”
Further Reading: Our Daft Punk Cover Story, “Machines for Life”
The exact stylistic midpoint between electroclash and EDM, blog house (aka “bloghaus”) is what happened when the first Extremely Online generation discovered nightclubbing. Imaginations sparked by Daft Punk’s Coachella 2006 show, adrenaline spurred by pills and powders, and dressed in American Apparel deep-Vs and semi-ironic shutter shades, they fed on RSS feeds and mainlined Limewire, reveling in a garish, all-neon-everything universe of indie-dance bootlegs and French electro. Though most of the hallmarks of that era are long gone—MySpace, Last Night’s Party, even blogging itself—the style periodically resurfaces in places like A-Trak’s “Bloghaus Revival Mix” series. Could an Emo Nite-style franchise be far off?
Brostep
Date Range: 2009 to 2014
Origin Point: The muddy, vomit-soaked expanse of Electric Daisy Carnival’s Basspod stage
Key Artists: Caspa, Flux Pavilion, Skrillex
Crucial Listening: Rusko - “Cockney Thug (Caspa Remix)”; Skrillex - “All Is Fair in Love and Brostep”
Further Reading: “Dance Dance Revolution: How EDM Conquered American in the 2010s”
If UK dubstep’s unofficial motto was “Meditate on bass weight,” then brostep’s slogan could have been “Rampage on roid rage.” Dubstep’s brash younger cousin, brostep was born when the music migrated from skunked-out South London basements to muddy American festival grounds, where testosterone and amphetamines sharpened the music’s midrange into a vicious serrated throb. The term was coined sarcastically by the American DJ Kozee on Dubstepforum in 2009 but was quickly embraced by the harder-faster-louder crowd as a badge of pride—although by 2010, even early proponent Rusko had his doubts. “Brostep is sort of my fault, but now I’m starting to hate it,” the UK DJ admitted in a BBC interview, likening it to “someone screaming in your face for an hour.” Yet even as some of dubstep’s biggest names have morphed into pop- and emo-influenced all-rounders, brostep’s sheer will-to-excess lives on in every concussive drop and asphyxiating sidechain.
Chillwave
Date Range: 2008 to 2014
Origin Point: The malaise of the financial crisis
Key Artists: Neon Indian, Nite Jewel, Washed Out, Toro y Moi
Crucial Listening: Washed Out - “Feel It All Around”; Neon Indian - “Deadbeat Summer”
Further Reading: “How Chillwave’s Brief Moment in the Sun Cast a Long Shadow Over the 2010s”
Today, chill is everywhere—as an aesthetic descriptor, a vague lifestyle goal, an overall behavioral imperative. But back in the doldrums of the late ’00s, it was a novel proposition, not so much an aspiration as an escape. As America reeled from the collapse of entire sectors of the economy, young folks across the country burrowed into their bedrooms, fired up their laptops, and worked out their nostalgia with woozy new-wave synths, tape-warped samples, narcoleptic drum patterns, and hazy vocals hiding more than a smidgen of ennui beneath all that blissed-out reverb. Hipster Runoff popularized the term “chillwave” in posts doubling as parody, and a million mp3 blogs ran with it. Though few artists actively identified as chillwavers, and the scene’s pioneers quickly moved on, the sound proved one of the past decade’s most influential and enduring aesthetics, paving the way for everything from Tame Impala to lofi study beats.
Complextro
Date Range: 2010 to 2012
Origin Point: The collision of the Beatport Top 100 with a Saturday-morning cartoons soundtrack
Key Artists: Wolfgang Gartner, Porter Robinson, Skrillex, Zedd
Crucial Listening: Porter Robinson - “Spitfire”; Zedd - “Shave It”
Further Reading: The review of Porter Robinson’s Worlds
“What if electro, but… complex?” Thus went the thought experiment that brought the world this short-lived microgenre of festival-style EDM, in which the buzzing sounds of big-room “electro house”—not the sleek, futuristic genre invented by Black Detroiters in the 1980s, but saw-toothed stompers influenced by France’s Ed Banger label—collided with dubstep’s Transformers aesthetic. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that the term—which Porter Robinson has claimed coining—wasn’t likely to stick.
Crabcore
Date Range: 2008 to 2010
Origin Point: The parking lot of a Columbus, Ohio, Red Lobster
Key Artists: Attack Attack!, Asking Alexandria, Jamie’s Elsewhere
Crucial Listening: Attack Attack! - “Stick Sickly”; Asking Alexandria - “The Final Episode (Let’s Change the Channel)”
Chugging, drop-tuned metalcore mixing blast beats and Cookie Monster vocals with crunk and dance music was not especially novel in 2008, but Ohio’s Attack Attack! brought something new to the table: a squat, waddling stance—feet splayed, knees at right angles, bottoms practically bumping against the ground—that made them look like scuttling crustaceans holding aloft electric guitars. Their shtick went viral almost instantly, as other groups embraced Attack Attack!’s admixture of chugging guitars, demonic growls, Auto-Tuned choir-boy choruses, and Eurodance synths—not to mention, of course, their manspreading moves and insouciant scene hair. Incredibly, Attack Attack! are still running with crabcore, but should their fame ever wane, they can always get jobs as professional movers—after all, they already know how to lift with their legs.
Egg Punk / Chain Punk
Date Range: 2013 to the present
Origin Point: Northwest Indiana basement shows
Key Artists: The Coneheads, Lumpy and the Dumpers, Warm Bodies (egg punk) / Sick Thoughts, Warthog, Foster Care (chain punk)
Crucial Listening: Natural Man Band - “The Hammer”; C.C.T.V. - “Mind Control” (egg punk) / Golden Pelicans - “Pissin in a Puddle of Puke”; the Achtungs - “I Don’t Care About You” (chain punk)
Further Reading: “The 10 Best Punk and Garage Rock Albums of 2019”
Consider egg punk and chain punk the yin and yang of underground rock’n’roll. The two terms, which came into usage in forum threads, all-ages venues, and the backseats of cooking-oil-fueled Econolines sometime around 2013, are meant to map out an essential binary distinction in contemporary hardcore: brains vs. brawn. Where egg punks are experimental weirdos—their side of the bleachers is also sometimes known as “Devocore”—chain punks keep it old school, worshipping at the blood- and bile-smeared altar of Darby Crash. The distinction between the two camps is more meme than anything; both factions hew to a fast, cheap, and out-of-control sound. But where the chain-swingers prize knuckle-dragging riffs and larynx-shredding raw power, art-punk eggheads favor a sneakier, more subversive approach marked by wry lyrics and cheapo keyboards—proof, perhaps, that living weird is the best revenge.
Electroclash
Origin Point: The bathroom stall of a Munich nightclub
Key Artists: DJ Hell, Miss Kittin, Fischerspooner, Chicks on Speed
Crucial Listening: Miss Kittin & the Hacker - “Frank Sinatra”; Fischerspooner - “Emerge”; Tiga - “Sunglasses at Night”; I-F - “Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass”
Further Reading: “DFA and the Defining of Electroclash”
“To be famous is so nice,” purrs Miss Kittin in “Frank Sinatra.” “Suck my dick/Kiss my ass/In limousines we have sex/Every night with my famous friends.” Wryly hedonistic, the song is a nihilistic manifesto streaked with traces of caviar and coke, a statement of no purpose at all—and as such, a perfect distillation of the electroclash era. The sound emerged toward the end of the ’90s, as DJs in Munich and Paris and London began cobbling together stylish new hybrids of old Italo-disco, new wave, acid house, and EBM. DJ Hell, of International Deejay Gigolos, gave the term its name; artists like Miss Kittin lent an air of seedy intrigue, while others, like Tiga—and his cover of Corey Hart’s terminally corny 1984 hit “Sunglasses at Night”—added a dose of unapologetic camp. It fell to New Yorkers like promoter Larry Tee and art-world hucksters Fischerspooner to blow up its branding to Times Square-billboard proportions. Like so many things with a heavy fashionista presence, electroclash was as brief as it was dazzling. But the scene’s stone-faced cool and record-collector obsessiveness helped set the stage for LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge,” in all its danceably self-lacerating glory.
Fidget House
Date Range: 2004 to 2008
Origin Point: A cracked copy of Ableton Live 3.0
Key Artists: Switch, Jesse Rose, Sinden, Hervé
Crucial Listening: Switch - “A Bit Patchy”; Kid Cudi vs. Crookers - “Day’n’Nite”; Jesse Rose - “You’re All Over My Head”
Not to be confused with this company that makes expensive toys for restless grownups, fidget house emerged in the mid ’00s as a short-lived fusion of house music, big beat, breakbeats, minimal, and whatever other styles producers felt like throwing into the pot. Whether fidget house could be classified as a proper musical subgenre is debatable; it was always more of an attitude, one defined by choppy drums, stuttering samples, and a judicious sense of swing, which combined to create an unmistakably wiggly sound. But no style based on short attention spans is bound to last forever, and it wasn’t long before fidget house’s signature tics were folded into genres like blog house and the infernally perky electro-swing. Today, fidget house’s greatest legacy might be the fact that key proponent Switch went on to co-found Major Lazer.
Freak Folk
Date Range: 2000 to 2010
Origin Point: The break room of an organic co-op in Williamsburg
Key Artists: Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, Animal Collective
Crucial Listening: Animal Collective ft. Vashti Bunyan - “Prospect Hummer”; Devendra Banhart - “Santa Maria de Feira”
Further Reading: “Way Past Pleasant: A Guide to Psychedelic Folk”
Back in the early ’00s, cult NYC record store Other Music was moving so many copies of John Fahey, Karen Dalton, and Bert Jansch reissues, it was only a matter of time before the eerie sounds of folk music’s fringes kicked off a 21st century revival. By 2004, an outsider-folk renaissance was in full swing, its arrival consecrated by the Devendra Banhart-curated compilation Golden Apples of the Sun, where acts like Joanna Newsom, Six Organs of Admittance, and CocoRosie picked up fiddles and 12-strings, by turns transcendent and twee. You could argue that this millennial dose of old-time religion was a reaction to the rampant internet-ification of everything back in those tech-besotted post-Y2K years; the album even appeared as a limited-edition accompaniment to Arthur Magazine, a scruffy, ’60s-inspired periodical favored by psychedelic noise fans and brainy back-to-the-landers. But freak folk’s iconoclastic status was not to last: By the early ’10s, sales of mustache wax were ascendant in gentrifying neighborhoods coast to coast, Jeff Tweedy was sending up retro Okie pretensions on Portlandia, and banjo-toting carpetbaggers like Mumford & Sons had wrung the freak right out of the folk.
Future Bass / Future House / Future Garage
Date Range: 2012 to 2017
Origin Point: Some Swedish EDM label’s marketing department, probably
Key Artists: Flume, Martin Garrix, Oliver Heldens, Tchami
Crucial Listening: Disclosure - “You & Me (Flume Remix)”; Oliver Heldens - “Gecko”; Martin Garrix and Bebe Rexha - “In the Name of Love”; the Chainsmokers ft. Halsey - “Closer”
At some point in the 2010s, fans of commercial EDM’s over-the-top bombast began turning to deeper styles like house, garage, and bass music. And yet, for reasons unclear, they couldn’t just call it “house” or “garage” or “bass music”; a prefix was deemed necessary to denote that this was a new and improved flavor of a tried-and-true formula. If there’s a defining characteristic to this stuff, it’s a certain svelte, four-dimensional quality aided by heavy filtering and compression, plus an attention to tropes, like the drop, that trigger an almost pavlovian response. But, like so many things in contemporary popular music, the term is ubiquitous enough to be functionally meaningless beyond its utility as a catch-all SEO tag for generic dance music. While this wave of “future” microgenres may have crested around the time of the Chainsmokers and Halsey’s joyride in an overleveraged Rover, it still pops up as a vague signifier in the mainstream—like on a recent DJ-themed episode of Barbie Dreamhouse Adventures, a literal children’s TV show.
Hypnagogic Pop
Date Range: 2005 to 2011
Origin Point: A clock radio with a broken snooze button
Key Artists: James Ferraro, Ariel Pink, Panda Bear, Ducktails
Crucial Listening: James Ferraro - Multitopia; Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti - “Witchhunt Suite for World War III”; Pocahaunted - “The Weight”
Further Reading: The review of Neon Indian’s Psychic Chasms
Coined in a 2009 issue of The Wire, hypnagogic pop, claimed writer David Keenan, “is pop music refracted through the memory of a memory.” As the uneasy first decade of the new century limped to a wobbly close, this hall-of-mirrors sensibility could be found anywhere that a nostalgic scrap of ’80s pop came sailing through a busted delay unit. In practice and personnel alike, hypnagogic pop tended to overlap with both chillwave and vaporwave; but where vaporwave channels the clear-eyed buzz of a programmer’s 5-Hour Energy shot and chillwave is cheerfully druggy, the more psychedelic hypnagogic pop evokes—as its name suggests—the narcoleptic state as the brain passes from wakefulness into sleep, when ideas turn corkscrewed and trains of thought run woozily off the rails. The vagueness of the term’s parameters may have contributed to its rapid disappearance from usage—perhaps for the best, given the allegations of abuse surrounding some of its defining figures.
Lo-Fi House
Date Range: 2015 to 2017
Origin Point: YouTube
Key Artists: Mall Grab, DJ Boring, DJ Seinfeld, Ross From Friends
Crucial Listening: DJ Boring - “Winona”; Ross From Friends - “Talk to Me You’ll Understand”; DJ Seinfeld - “U”
Further Reading: The review of DJ Seinfeld’s Ruff Hysteria
In retrospect, nothing about lo-fi house makes much sense. The only real defining characteristic of this scene-that-wasn’t was the ironic attitude toward pop-cultural nostalgia shared by DJ Seinfeld, Ross From Friends, and DJ Boring, whose “Winona” became the microgenre’s theme thanks to the YouTube algorithm. Ironically, as it were, there was nothing particularly ironic about the music itself, which layered melancholy chords over drowsy throwback house grooves. The lo-fi tag, presumably, came from their shared fondness for dusty, vaguely tape-warped sounds—never mind that underground labels like L.I.E.S. had been plying a scuzzy, line-noise-riddled sound for years, or that original Chicago house music, like Phuture’s “Acid Tracks” or Mr. Fingers’ “Mystery of Love,” was already as low-fidelity as it gets, the product of a few machines held together by frayed patch cords, duct tape, and chewing gum.
Lofi Study Beats
Date Range: 2018 to present
Origin Point: YouTube
Key Artists: They’re all either anonymous or AI
Crucial Listening: lofi hip hop radio - beats to study/relax to; Lofi Girl
Further Reading: “10 Pitchfork Staffers On The Music That Helps Them Get Shit Done”
Sometimes known as lofi beats to study to, or lofi hip-hop, lofi study beats (not to be confused with lo-fi house) is what happens when a generation raised on mood-based playlists definitively stops caring about what it listens to. Marked by poky tempos, cloying piano or guitar melodies, ersatz vinyl hiss, and other signifiers of inoffensive chill, and typically accompanied on YouTube by twee, anime-inspired illustrations of domestic solitude, lofi study beats is the musical equivalent of a white-noise coloring book. In the new millennium, even background music—like selling out before it—lost all negative connotations.
Moombahton
Date Range: 2009 to 2012
Origin Point: A high-school rager in the DMV
Key Artists: Nadastrom, Munchi, DJ Sabo
Crucial Listening: Dave Nada - Blow Your Head Vol. 2: Moombahton Minimix; Munchi - “Sandungueo”; Yeah Yeah Yeahs - “Heads Will Roll (A-Mac Moombahton Edit)”
Further Reading: The review of Blow Your Head Vol. 2: Dave Nada Presents Moombahton
Playing records at the wrong speed can yield far-reaching results. Back in the 1970s, the Belgian genre known as “popcorn” was born when antsy DJs began pitching up soul 45s for pilled-up dancefloors; decades later, Caribbean DJs in the Netherlands accidentally played dancehall tracks at 45 instead of 33, resulting in the effervescent genre known as “bubbling.” Moombahton is essentially the same idea, but in reverse. Per the genre’s now-classic origin story, the style was born when D.C. DJ Dave Nada found himself playing a daytime “skipping party” for his younger cousin’s high-school friends. Realizing that his house and techno selections were likely to bomb after an opening set of bachata and reggaeton, he slowed DJ Chuckie and Silvio Ecomo’s “Moombah (Afrojack Remix” from 128 beats per minute to a sluggish 108 and struck gold. Dancers went wild for the bass-heavy blend of big-room synths and dembow lurch; they went wild all over again when he pulled the same trick on yet another punchy Dutch electro-house tune. Back home, he began making edits in the same style, and the gospel spread, inspiring DJs on both sides of the Atlantic to explore moombahton’s woozy, moon-stomping cadences. Though the style had its heyday around the turn of the last decade, it’s still bubbling along in DJ sets and even dedicated club nights.
Night Bus
Date Range: 2006 to 2018
Origin Point: The London night bus, duh
Key Artists: Burial, CFCF
Crucial Listening: Burial - “Night Bus”; CFCF - Do U Like Night Bus?
Further Reading: “Why Burial’s Untrue Is the Most Important Electronic Album of the Century So Far”
The night bus isn’t so much a route as a state of mind: solitary, contemplative, floating in a liminal space beneath fluorescent lights. In UK rave culture, the night bus takes on an almost mystical significance; its mere mention evokes wee-hour treks back home after a night of dancing—ears ringing, nerves jangling, fog draped over the slumbering city like a blanket. It’s an image of freedom intermingled with deep melancholy, which is precisely what Burial tapped into with his 2006 song “Night Bus.” The idea of night bus as a full musical mood gained traction with Montreal producer CFCF’s 2010 Fader mix Do U Like Night Bus?, where he slowed down synth-heavy songs by Aaliyah and The-Dream into a woozy dreamscape with Lynchian overtones. A few years later, night bus hit the street in Seattle, first as a club night, Hush Hush, and then a record label of the same name. From there, more tracks and compilations proliferated under the night bus umbrella, and CFCF eventually spun his initial mix into a whole series (including merch and everything). With his fourth and final installment in late 2018, CFCF declared the genre dead, likening the mix to a “MELODRAMATIC NIGHTMARE… AT BEST, A FORGED OSSUARY; AT WORST, BAD TAXIDERMY.” But I don’t believe it. As long as there are bleary-eyed ravers, there will be night bus.
Nightcore
Date Range: 2002 to current
Origin Point: An epic DDR session in a Norwegian video arcade
Key Artists: Nightcore, NightcoreReality
Crucial Listening: Nightcore - “Dam Dadi Doo”; Zedd - “Clarity (Nightcore Remix)”; SVRCINA - “Battlefield (Nightcore Remix)”
Further Reading: “A Year in Music on TikTok”
Where night bus is murky and mopey, nightcore is the opposite—the musical equivalent of cutting up lines of speed on the cracked screen of a Playstation PSP. The genre originated in the early ’00s around a Norwegian duo, also named Nightcore, with a penchant for speeding up trance and Eurodance songs to giddy extremes. Funny things happen at those tempos: Bouncy basslines begin hammering like the pistons of a haywire machine; once-earnest vocal refrains sound steeped in helium. The gimmick struck a chord, hit P2Ps, and soon fans all over the world were nightcoring (yes, it’s a verb, too) their own remixes, covers, and original songs in the same style. On YouTube, nightcore tends to be accompanied by anime visuals, but the sound has also taken on a new life on TikTok, disconnected from its original context. Despite its roots in user-generated content, nightcore has long since gone overground: Porter Robinson and PC Music’s Danny L Harle and A. G. Cook have drawn inspiration from the music, and in 2019, Grimes even released a “Nightcore Remix” of her song “We Appreciate Power.”
PBR&B
Date Range: 2011 to 2013
Origin Point: Twitter
Key Artists: Frank Ocean, the Weeknd, How to Dress Well
Crucial Listening: Frank Ocean - “Novacane”; the Weeknd - “House of Balloons / Glass Table Girls”; How to Dress Well - “Ready for the World”
Further Reading: “I Started a Joke: ‘PBR&B’ and What Genres Mean Now”
Pitchfork contributor Eric Harvey coined the term “PBR&B” in 2011, in a tossed-off tweet about the Weeknd, How to Dress Well, and Frank Ocean. He promptly forgot about it, but within two years, PBR&B had its own Wikipedia page. A portmanteau combining the names of a popular downmarket beer brand and a storied genre of Black American musical expression, the problematic abbreviation sneaks some deep-seated assumptions about music and race into its five rounded characters. It’s as much a provocation as a description: What happens when Black music gets adopted by a white audience? Making the concept all the more contentious is the fact that R&B is known and loved for its sincerity, while (white) hipsters usually drank PBR ironically, whereas the phenomenon it attempted to describe—the early-’10s intersection of R&B with indie aesthetics—raised important questions about ownership, authenticity, and gentrification. In 2013, Harvey wrote a thoughtful essay in which he considered the implications of his Frankenstein’s monster of a subgenre, which had by then taken on a life of its own. “If nothing else,” he reasoned, “genres make music easier to fight about.”
Purple / Wonky / Aquacrunk
Date Range: 2008 to 2010
Origin Point: Bristol / Glasgow
Key Artists: Joker, Zomby, Rustie
Crucial Listening: Joker & Rustie - “Play Doe”; Joker - “Purple City”; Gemmy - “Bk 2 the Future”
Further Reading: “The Month in Dubstep - Wonky”
There was a minute there when naming unfamiliar strains of UK dance music felt like an incredibly pressing issue, not just to journalists or fans but to the musicians themselves. Wiley’s 2004 “Wot Do U Call It?” was an explicit response to the taxonomical uncertainty around early grime as it evolved out of UK garage:
A few years later, similar uncertainty gathered around dubstep, a cousin to grime, as it morphed beyond its initial, bass-heavy outline. Following Joker’s Purple Wow Sound mix in late 2008, the name “purple”—simultaneously evocative of both Prince and particularly photogenic strains of cannabis—attached itself to a wide swath of leftfield dubstep trafficking in pitch-bent G-funk synths and stoned, skunky qualities. The name “wonky”—British for “off-kilter” or “unsteady”—arose in parallel, referring to a broader array of dubstep-adjacent characters (Rustie, Zomby, Hudson Mohawke), along with the mercifully short-lived “aquacrunk.” Eventually, “bass music” supplanted all those terms, and then trap came along and gave everyone something else to argue about.
Seapunk
Date Range: 2011 to 2012
Origin Point: Tumblr
Key Artists: Lil Internet, Zombelle, Ultrademon, Unicorn Kid
Crucial Listening: Unicorn Kid - “Chrome Lion (Ultrademon’s Dub)”; Zombelle - “Beach Blanket”
Nothing evokes the aesthetic free-for-all of early-’10s Tumblr quite like seapunk. It began, as so many things, do, as half joke, half mood board, a free-floating mix of oceanic signifiers—dolphin clip art, Poseidon sculptures, underwater pyramids, glistening orbs, all aquamarine everything—rendered via the primitive digital graphics of ’90s chill-out compilations. A trend birthed on the once-popular blogging site soon had all sorts of folks fighting over bragging rights, from creative director Lil Internet claiming the idea came to him in a dream about a barnacle-studded leather jacket, to M.I.A. crediting a Tamil refugee wedding photographer with the campy, Photoshop 1.0 vibes. Then seapunk fully jumped the shark—if not a consequence of climate change’s rising sea levels, then at least a sure sign of the Tumblr-to-celebrity-stylist pipeline. Lady Gaga and Katy Perry both dyed their hair turquoise; Rihanna opened the floodgates of the genre’s aesthetic on SNL; just hours after that, Azealia Banks released a video for “Atlantis” that was steeped in the very same signifiers of Geocities kitsch. First-wave seapunks like Zombelle and Ultrademon cried foul. That the trend dried up so quickly is probably due in part to the fact that there was never an actual musical style to accompany it; most of what was trafficked under the “#seapunk” tag on Bandcamp was largely indistinguishable from vaporwave. And yet seapunk survives on TikTok, and elsewhere: The “Venice Beach Acid Rave 1995” vibe that Lil Internet described in 2012 is very much with us today.
Shitgaze
Date Range: 2007 to 2011
Origin Point: A house show down the block from that Columbus, Ohio, Red Lobster
Key Artists: Psychedelic Horseshit, Times New Viking, Vivian Girls
Crucial Listening: Psychedelic Horseshit - “We’re Pink Floyd, Bitch”; Sic Alps - “Sing Song Waitress”
Further Reading: “Quiz: Is This a Real Genre”
In a 2015 quiz mixing established microgenres with fake ones, Pitchfork proffered “shit gaze” as a made-up style. In fact, “shitgaze” (one word, please) was already in use to describe the scuzzy, lo-fi guitar pop of Columbus bands like Psychedelic Horseshit and Times New Viking, as well as Brooklyn mainstays Vivian Girls and other likeminded acts. (“Shitgaze” had even turned up in Pitchfork reviews as early as 2009.) We regret the error.
Skweee
Date Range: 2006 to 2013
Origin Point: Scandinavian G-funk obsessives
Key Artists: Randy Barracuda, Mesak, Eero Johannes
Crucial Listening: Randy Barracuda - “Duck Butter”; Mesak - “Moto Gucci”
The short-lived microgenre known as skweee (sic) raises an important question: Why don’t more musical genres sound like their names? “Skweee” isn’t strictly an onomatopoeia: Stockholm DJ Pavan coined the term to describe the giddy funk he released on his Flogsta Danshall label in the mid-’00s; the name came from his determination to “squeeze” every last drop of potential from his Juno synthesizer. Nevertheless, the sound of the word itself goes a long way toward describing the squelchy, squeaky, altogether freaky strain of electro-funk that the scene would eventually encompass, with its bleepy analog synths, chiptune sound design, and offbeat syncopations. Even that extraneous “e” seemed indicative of the music’s playfully lopsided grooves. Despite the self-aware branding and occasional international release, skweee never traveled much further than a small circle of DIY producers. But while the sugar rush faded, it did give way to the squirrelly pop productions of Norwegian producers Marius and Cashmere Cat.
Slowed + Reverb
Date Range: 2017 to present
Origin Point: Houston, Texas—distantly, anyway
Key Artists: Slater, Iyad Djellali
Crucial Listening: Lil Uzi Vert - “20 Min (Slowed + Reverb)”; Frank Ocean - “In My Room (Slowed + Reverb)”; Halsey ft. Juice Wrld - “Without Me (Slowed + Reverb)”
Further Reading: “How Slowed + Reverb Remixes Became the Melancholy Heart of Music YouTube”
The internet genre known simply as “slowed + reverb” encapsulates many things about pop culture in the late ’10s and early ’20s: appropriation as an art form; the appeal of depressive affect; the spread of historical amnesia. The slowed + reverb phenomenon kicked off in 2017 when a 20-year-old remixer uploaded a version of Lil Uzi Vert’s “20 Min” that he had digitally slowed to a woozy, narcotic crawl. Before long, YouTube was awash in similarly paced remixes, sticky as molasses and steeped in hazy melancholy, often accompanied by stylishly emotive anime graphics similar to those of the lofi study beats phenomenon. Just about anything could be grist for the mill: Travis Scott, Tame Impala, even ’50s crooner Paul Anka.
The concept isn’t all that different from another brief craze for slowed-down remixes around the turn of the decade, such as an “800% Slower” mix of Justin Bieber’s “U Smile” that made the viral rounds in 2010. And slowed + reverb is even more directly in debt to the late Houston producer DJ Screw’s chopped-and-screwed technique—though many slowed + reverb fans apparently have no idea of the trend’s roots. But even that ignorance feels part and parcel of the microgenre essence: Imbued with the downcast energy that has typified so much pop music over the past decade, slowed + reverb is a testament to the senses-dulled feeling of life on internet time—which is to say, life in the perpetual now, where history and future alike collapse.
Tropical House
Date Range: 2012 to present
Origin Point: A German DJ’s winter vacation in Bali
Key Artists: Kygo, Felix Jaehn, Lost Frequencies
Crucial Listening: Kygo - “ID (Ultra Music Festival Anthem)”; Lost Frequencies - “Are You With Me”
Further Reading: “Popping the Drop: A Timeline of How EDM’s Bubble Burst”
Musical taxonomies are rife with misnomers—there’s no actual house music in witch house, after all—but tropical house might take the cake for the most inappropriately named microgenre ever. Not only do few of its proponents live anywhere near the tropics, the style contains few elements that are even recognizable as “tropical” in the first place, unless you count listless syncopation, appropriated dancehall accents, and wan pastel colors. Emerging in the early ’10s as a salve to soothe the blisters caused by big-room EDM’s nonstop over-the-top wallop, the style quickly congealed around the saccharine guitar riffs and insipid flute synths of artists like Klangkarussell, Kygo, and Lost Frequencies. By the time Skrillex and Diplo tapped trop-house tropes for the Bieber vehicle “Where Are Ü Now,” the sound was ubiquitous in Top 40, as inescapable as time-share condominiums.
Vaporwave
Date Range: 2010 to 2016
Origin Point: A theoretical e-waste dump
Key Artists: Ramona Xavier, James Ferraro, Oneohtrix Point Never
Crucial Listening: James Ferraro - Far Side Virtual; Chuck Person (aka Oneohtrix Point Never) - Eccojams Vol. 1
Further Reading: The Sunday Review of Macintosh Plus’ Floral Shoppe
If, back in 1994, you’d told me that someday people would model an entire aesthetic around AOL CD-ROMs and the Windows start-up chime, I… might have held onto more of those CD-ROMs, in hopes of eventually selling them on eBay. Named in tribute to vaporware—nonexistent software or hardware that’s announced, and even advertised, while still in the design stage—vaporwave mixed new-age optimism, digital synthesis, MacinTalk voiceovers, Sims-inspired computer graphics, call-center hold music, and other post-ironic signifiers into a dizzying manifestation of the late-capitalist sublime. While some artists, like James Ferraro, leaned into Silicon Valley genuflections that were barely recognizable as parody, others, like Oneohtrix Point Never’s Daniel Lopatin, emphasized the collision of pop and the avant-garde in disorientingly looped reworks of ’80s easy listening. At its best, vaporwave expressed a genuine ambivalence about technology, mediated memories, and nostalgia; in its emotional blankness, the subgenre arguably helped pave the way for the late-’10s’ revival of interest in classic Japanese ambient music and so-called city pop, as the YouTube algorithm introduced listeners to a past they never knew they longed for.
Witch House
Date Range: 2009 to 2010
Origin Point: The malaise of the 2008 financial crisis
Key Artists: Balam Acab, Forest Swords, oOoOO, Demdike Stare, Salem
Crucial Listening: Salem - “King Night”; Balam Acab - “See Birds”
Further Reading: “Ghosts in the Machine”
It’s funny to look back now and realize how gloomy underground music could be around the turn of the last decade. Had witch house’s denizens of doom managed to accurately prophesy the future with their Ouija boards, they might have taken the opportunity to make more chipper music while they still could. The term “witch house” arose around the eldritch sounds of London/New York label Tri Angle Records, which developed a spooky, sepulchral aesthetic with occult-inspired artists like Balam Acab and oOoOO, and likeminded acts like Demdike Stare, who took their name for an actual witch. The style reached its natural apotheosis with trap-goth pranksters Salem, whose infamously abject stage presence rendered the term a mark of parody overnight—effectively, well, sinking it. Monty Python would approve.
