The Sound of the 2020s

by Devin Kalish
on 

Recently blogger and economist Noah Smith wrote a post about the stagnation of popular culture – specifically of movies and music. On music he says,

“A decent amount of good music is coming out, but a lot of the best stuff feels like refinement of what came before.”

Now I don’t know that I watch enough movies to contribute to that discussion much except to say that naively yes, it seems to me like the movie industry is creatively in trouble. The music point however bothered me. I’m a fan of 2020s music, I’m maybe in part defensive because this is the first time I have liked the era of music I’ve been around in. Some of this is due to changes in my taste – I didn’t like aughts music in the aughts, but I like lots of it now, but some of it is changes in the music itself – I didn’t much like 2010s music in the 2010s and I still don’t (though compiling this list and seeing how much of 2020s music was anticipated in the 2010s has somewhat improved my opinion of it). Smith does say that much of the new music is good, but when I think of my favorites from today, and it doesn’t sound much less distinct from what came before than any other era’s music. Smith gives himself plenty of leeway with phrases like “a lot of the best stuff” and “refinement of”, so mostly I can just throw vibes back at him, but come on, was shoegaze sooo original in the 90s? I don’t want to just turn this into a reply piece in part because he talks about lots of specific things I don’t have much to say about like music theory (feel free to read the whole thing, the conclusion he reaches is interesting enough to be worth engaging with even if you feel it’s exaggerated), but I think part of the issue is retrospective categorization. New genres catch on when they have been identified as movements - when copycats are found who are judged not to just be plagiarists, and the movements evolve to exaggerate their sounds’ most distinctive qualities. It is hard to spot innovation over the recent past because everything is either fairly original but scattered and not exaggerated enough for this to be obvious, or an exaggeration of this older material. This makes me want to write out candidate “scenes” or “genres” that characterize the sound of the 2020s as I know it, including movements that are still smaller or wear obvious older influences on their sleeves, and ones (alright most, indeed I use several example songs from the 2010s) that substantially started sometime in the 2010s, in the hope of showing that there are some distinctive movements cooking.

Crank-Wave

I did not coin this name, and I have no idea where it came from, but this is what I’ve seen Spotify call it, so sure, crank-wave it is. I’ve seen it used almost interchangeably with “post-punk revival” but I think this is too vague. What I’m talking about is sort of the circle of artists like Geordie Greep, Squid, and Black Country, New Road that has materialized around the sound or scene of math rock band Black Midi. Much of it is British and in direct interaction/association with Black Midi, but there are some American groups like Oxbow and Daughters that converged on a similar sound around this time, and Swans has had at least as much influence, if less direct social connection to this scene. As this suggests there’s often some mathiness and progginess behind it, but also a sort of post-rock droney/chambery element. Jazz and big band instrumentation is common, sometimes used in bursts with an almost percussive quality, and often with vocals that are crooning and/or somewhere between singing and speaking.

Example songs:

HeXD

This is one I don’t feel prepared to write much about, so I’ve commissioned Nick/Heather to write it: “Basically TLDR there were emo and goth and especially scene kids in the early 2000s. Many of us trans people online grew up in that time period, and a common trans experience (or, with how the world’s going, a common general experience o_0) is wanting to somehow relive childhood or aspects thereof. (In the trans case especially, it’s like “I didn’t get the gendered parts of childhood that I maybe wanted”). Lots of stuff is/was used as cellphone ringtones, and lots of soundcloud cloud rap is poorly-mixed. Smash all these together, in a vaporwave-y pseudo-nostalgia, and you get genres like HeXD (full of bitcrushing).”

Example songs:

Hyperpop

This is maybe the most obvious and prominent genre on the list, especially after the success of last year’s “Brat” by Charli XCX. It started more in the mid 2010s, but got popular and developed more recently, especially starting around 2019, and with the guidance of influential producers like SOPHIE and A. G. Cook. The sound tends to be playful and over the top – famously it embraces autotune, something I’ve seen credited to the large number of trans frontwomen addressing their dysphoria with a certain amount of playful cyborgism – but it also just fits with the style of almost annoying electronic overproduction. It sometimes sounds a little like original songs in the style of amateur remixes. There are certain electronic sounds, like a very bouncy and a very grindy synth, that it tends to like, the background music style is generally pop-punkish, especially emo or ska punk, and there is an attitude to the whole thing that is, well, bratty.

Example songs:

Dirtbag Scene

This is the first musical movement that I’m making up a name for, because I’m not aware of a pre-existing one that quite fits. In and surrounding the aughts there were a number of popular genres that didn’t just lose popularity afterwards, but became actively unpopular, in particular nu metal, emo, and brostep. All of these have gotten some popular redemption in the 2020s, sometimes through outright genre revivals, but I also think through this distillation of what made them intense and cathartic to people, used as the basis of a new sort of genre full of decadent bassey catharsis. Lots of this has been anticipated through the music and styles “scene kids” supported in the 2010s like metalcore and crunkcore, and you can hear lots of this music as a development of scene music. There is a good deal of connection to hyperpop in attitude and influences, but with the nu metal injecting more hip-hop and metal culture into it. There’s often a certain performative edginess and immaturity, machismo to twist the stereotypical femininity of scene and hyperpop. One reason I was initially inspired to consider this as its own genre was realizing that “hyperpop” doesn’t capture everything I find distinctive and interesting about 100 Gecs’s music – there is nothing more Dirtbag Scene than Laura Les strutting around a parking lot calling you a “little piss baby” and celebrating the “big boys coming with the big trucks”.

Example songs:

Electro-Emo

This is another name I’m coining myself, though unfortunately the name kinda stinks. For one thing I’m sure critics have used it before, either for roughly what I’m talking about or something else like the style of “A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out”. For another thing it’s very vague – it could easily describe a big chunk of material from both of the last two genres I mentioned, but I’m trying to refer to something much more specific, a sound represented by artists like Glass Beach, Weatherday, and WillyRodriguezWasTaken, generally influenced by indie artists like the Brave Little Abacus and Car Seat Headrest. This stuff is often melodic and sentimental – with an upbeat almost tropical sound, lo-fi production, Midwest emo vocals, and nostalgic, especially video-game-influenced synths. Even the album covers are similar, often featuring doodley cartoon figures. At its best (cough cough Glass Beach) it is gorgeous and transporting music.

Example songs:

Will Wood Family

Like hyperpop, this is more a genre that started in the 2010s, but reached peak refinement and popularity in the 2020s. I’ve named this one after the scene “Cardiacs Family”, which is basically a small circle of underground British bands affiliated with the band Cardiacs via shared members, collaborations, and influence. What I’m calling Will Wood Family is not nearly as obscure or as centered around a particular artist as Cardiacs Family, but the easiest way for me to identify artists in this style has tended be through their collaboration/touring/influence connection to my favorite artist of this kind, Will Wood. The songs tend to be very lyrics-focused, and in particular written in the sentence-singing and wordplay of showtunes with the humor of comedy rock, the two closest genres to it. Aside from these genres the artists play a lot with older styles of music like folk, jazz, doo-wop, swing, and cabaret. There’s often also influence from some punk or avant-garde artists – Wood especially can sound a bit like Mr. Bungle or Frank Zappa at times. The lyrics tend to be self-deprecating and a bit curmudgeonly, and to talk about mental health, with suspicion of the mentalities created by therapy and social media. It all sounds like a bunch of theater kids disaffected with the things that promised to fix them, and unsure who to blame. This might be my favorite of the genres I’m identifying today, just in terms of how much attention is given to the lyrics and the consistent quality of the songs.

Example songs:

Other

These are just some examples of newer developments in music, but what does the rest of current music sound like? Well my favorite music genre, prog rock, seems to kind of be doing about what it has been for the last 40 years or so. Like most prog fans I think the golden age by a mile was the 70s, but on reflection, I also think prog fandom since the 80s has been kinda cooked. The most popular genres are neo-prog and prog metal, neither of which I love that much, and even within these genres they’ve gone in directions I find blander. As always since the 80s, my favorite prog material is generally coming from slightly outside mainstream prog fandom, and most of my favorite prog from the 2020s in some way fits inside one of the aforementioned genres. “The Normal Album” and “Mahashmashana” are Will Wood family, “Monarch of Monsters” is arguably dirtbag scene, “Plastic Death” is electro-emo, “Ants from up There” is crank-wave. In more popular music I’ve just heard less. My impression is that pop is still into gentle sorta echoey singer-songwriters, something I think Lorde and Adele lead the way on in the 2010s and Billie Eilish and Lana Del Rey have been leading recently. Even here there are clear connections to these other genres – Billie Eilish has collaborated with Charli XCX, Lana Del Rey has collaborated with Father John Misty. There’s more energetic pop (including some from these artists, especially Eilish), but I don’t think much of it changes my overview. “Brat” was a huge hit, but fits into hyperpop already, “Sour” is another one, but I’m hardly the first person to notice the similarity to Paramore’s style of pop punk from the aughts. Hip hop was one of the few genres I think was having something of a golden age in the 2010s (which is a shame because I don’t like hip hop much). Some of it was just artsier and more eclectic like Kendrick Lamar, Tyler, the Creator, and Brockhampton, anticipated by the sound of Kid Cudi and Kanye West in the aughts. Maybe the most notable development of the 2010s was the rise of industrial hip hop, but that certainly didn’t start in the 2010s let alone the 2020s. I think both styles of hip hop march on, and haven’t clearly developed in a much different direction in the 2020s. But again, I just don’t listen to much hip hop.

My favorite prog (and emo and post-rock) song of the 2020s:

Some examples of pop I like from the 2020s:

Some examples of hip-hop I like from the 2020s:

And, as a peace offering to Smith, my favorite shoegaze song from the 2020s:

Looking at the sound of the 2020s I think there have been some notable winners:

Emo: Of the various revivals of the decade, I think emo has been the most successful, as my list of genres evidences. Beyond influencing these genres, there has also been some great stuff that just sounds continuous with older emo like “Smoke Break//”, “An Invitation”, and “Smoking Rooms”, and new emo music from old legends like “The Foundations of Decay”, “Love From the Other Side”, and “Will U Still U”. On the subject of the last of these, I think that Jeff Rosenstock is finally getting his due as well, and is one of the biggest common influences of fifth wave emo.

Electronic: Again this one seems clear from reading the previous genre descriptions. I can also say a less about it as I am not a big fan of electronic music myself. I know from Nick/Heather’s taste that the genre breakcore is having a big revival as well, through artists like Sewerslvt/Cynthoni, Femtanyl, and Machine Girl. Even old Skrillex is making new music, which even some of his haters seem to like (though between hyperpop and dirtbag scene, his older stuff is influential again too).

Trans Artists: I think in the 2020s we can finally see what the influence trans culture has to offer music, and a big part of the answer is: electronic ADHD superstimulus. Obviously this is an oversimplification and many trans artists are doing different things, but especially in hyperpop, hexd, and breakcore revival, trans artists rule the coop.

Video Game Soundtracks: Another big influence on the sound of lots of these artists is video game soundtracks – especially electro-emo and hexd. Some of this may come from the nostalgic element it can give to music like this that often wants to play with nostalgia – especially when chiptune/8-bit sounds are used, calling back to video games as physical artifacts that have changed over time. I also think that it has become more mainstream for music lovers to take video game music seriously on a critical level. There has also just been lots of great video game music in the 2010s, Toby Fox in particular comes to mind as a talented composer who uses lots of distinctly old “video gamey” sounds in his game soundtracks Footnote: 1 I think it’s easy to compare what has happened to today’s music to the influence of movie scores on the sound of post-rock.

Tik Tok: This is maybe obvious, and just a subset of Tik Tok being a winner of the 2020s in general, not just in music. Usually I think this has been a bad thing, but for music I think it has actually been pretty great – I have regularly had the experience of running into a new artist I really like only to find out that they first got popular due to trending on Tik Tok. I also think the advent of Tik Tok as a huge force in culture corresponds pretty well to the rise of some of these genres in timing, whereas other obvious possible cultural events like Trump’s first election or the pandemic, while I’m sure they were influential, came either before or after most of the real action.

I think Smith does raise some good points about contemporary music, but he has it almost backwards. He talks about how music from past decades is popular again 2, and this is perfectly true, but he seems to think that this is because modern music isn’t good enough to dominate youth taste in the way it has in the past. I disagree. I think that it is just more cool to like any kind of music (or better yet multiple kinds of music). At most points in the past the cutting edge of music has been what’s cool to listen to, and it has been in part defined by reacting against what’s “uncool” about older music. Starting at some point in the 2010s, I think this just stopped being the case a little at a time, and the music of the 2020s reflects this 3.

Most of these genres not only wear multiple influences on their sleeves, but also shamelessly flaunt the most polarizing aspects of earlier music. Maximalism is in. I don’t like all of it, I’m not a huge fan of hexd and I’m very particular about hyperpop and dirtbag scene, and none of this is very new conceptually, people have been doing the whole “meta-modernism” thing for decades and I don’t want to claim the 2020s invented this sort of attitude. I do think however that the 2020s doesn’t have to be reacting against much of anything to have its own unique sounds, and personally I think music is really exciting right now.

  1. Nick/Heather informs me that the whole “Homestuck” family-tree has been highly influential on trans music. ↩︎

  2. He cites this survey. The 60s-90s clean the floor with other decades before or since in the totals, but people under 45 and especially under 30 are more well mixed and tend to like recent decades. I will treat it, from here, as though the younger generation likes the last several decades a pretty similar amount. ↩︎

  3. I remember being a “hipster” in high school around this time and we all listened to classic rock. Our affinity for flannel, coffee, and irony has been accurately reported on, but our snobbish hatred of the popular has been exaggerated. ↩︎

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