(Art by Tyler Farmer)

A fried haze permeates almost all of my favorite tunes of 2024. I’ve been gripped by vocals whizzing out into wicked vibrato and aggro sounds that are surely breaking my eardrums in real time. Some of it captures the feeling of what life is like now, all the sense-numbing chaos, but also the small everyday delights. I’ve been having an in-between time in life—post-layoff ambling, traveling, chaotic bouts of activity followed by stretches of nothingness—with music to match. Here’s a mid-year recap.

Microwaved Bass

I can’t get enough of this new wave of brutally blown-out rap, especially Osamason and LAZER DIM 700. The latter’s “Laced max” and “Treacherous” electrify like defibrillators, a surge of raw FAWK mayhem. LAZER DIM has jumped on a wacko range of production, from demonic KRXXK to 100-play digicore weirdness to “luh twan,” whose ultra-convulsive hyper-gabber beat sounds like it’s trying to get noticed by an A&R. In just a few months his influence has already gone global: meet LAZER CHEN 700.

anarchy and DJ Ess’ “superbowl” goes beyond microwave—this is straight-up cremation.

Movie Magic

Challengers was pretty good. It wasn’t gay enough, and no one got fucked with a tennis racket, but the music went hard.

I Saw The TV Glow also has a killer soundtrack, especially yeule’s cutesy Broken Social Scene cover “Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl” and Caroline Polachek’s lethargically glittery “Starburned and Unkissed.” More artists need to make up compound words (she’s already somewhat prolific with this, see hopedrunk), they lend the music a whimsical air. She’s said “starburned” is a reference to moving to LA and feeling like the city’s hostile atmosphere was scalding her with an “ultraviolet cancer.” The collision of floaty synths and grinding sounds somehow captures that tension.

Jump!

There’s a new torrent of terminally online jumpstyle music, the sibling genre of hardstyle that’s like a mix of gabber and trance with an emphasis on maddeningly bouncy kicks (and an associated dance where people wildly hop around). I recently saw a viral tweet trashing this new wave, accusing it of sounding rote or too TikTok-ified. I get it but also—who gives a damn? These demented beats have me bopping gleefully. I can’t resist the shuddering siren thump of tracks like lagoyo’s “300” and ilyhiryu's "stylerz04.” These cooked producers have discovered the exact biochemical combo of slippery kicks, pixelated effects, and chopped chipmunk cries to tingle my dopamine releasers. Guarantee you it’s way more exciting than whichever highbrow techno is making the Nowadays rounds or Fred Again song is topping Spotify’s electronic playlist.

You can find so many flavors of this cursed electronica, which is infesting TikTok channels across the world—everyone from Bella Poarch to pro dancers are using it for clip soundtracks. What really got me into it is this hyper-manic megahit by vyrval. Its gibberish title is impossible to type, yet it somehow became a low-key Russian anthem after the Crocus City Hall massacre in March.

At the Chanel store

In May, I went to Ridgewood’s TV Eye for a Chanel Beads show. It was jammed with other journalists, synth nerds, and scenesters. The walls felt like they were made of some sort of haunted gauze, wrapping us in the dark inner sanctum of a Victorian mansion. The NYC trio’s freak-rock fit the atmosphere perfectly: sunburnt guitar, bass, and violin intertwined with vocals so watercolor-drippy they ripple across the soundscape. I was amazed to see Chanel Beads’ most fervent fans moshing to these fragile tracks as if they were rap ragers, hurling back every word and staring up at Shane Lavers like he was the chosen one.

Part of what makes their recent LP Your Day Will Come so fun is that it’s hard to identify exactly what keeps me coming back to it. It seems to mimic the charred unreality of life in 2024 like little else: Tracks feel like half-remembered remakes or AI ringtones injected with a tender human warmth. Onstage, the band flitted between diffidence and drama, from silently fiddling with instruments in between songs to Lavers bursting out onto the floor and howling with full force.

Throwback To

Digicore, one of the most exciting new scenes of the 2020s, has slowly dissolved over the last couple of years as major collectives dissolved and main players turned to rock and sellout pop. Yet we might be due for a comeback. Multiple new releases smack like peak pandemic Discord collabs. d0llywood1 has a new mixtape themed after digicore. kuru and twikipedia’s hyperkinetic “make-no-sense” sounds like two internet friends meeting and throwing down, with silly allusions to online musicians and things like Ito En; funeral and glaive’s “bodybags” feels like it’s purposely throwing back to early scene music (think wido’s “come on stacy”) with voices that spin out into crumpled fuzz and a beat that tweaks out like a Pokemon cry. glaive’s recent solo music has also been intriguingly outré—some hyperventilating rage and giga-distorted ballads. There’s randomly a digicore tribute scene popping off in Russia right now. It’s not quite as riveting as other international variations—these beats hew very close to the classic glitchcore bounce—but there are some bizarrely pretty gems, like nosebleed44’s Minecraft-sampling “nox.”

Tinashe’s “Nasty”: I miss the “2 On” era. I have fond memories of riding around LA with it rising out of the car speakers, soundtracking the rolling hills and revving engines daring each other to pass. “Nasty” is so subdued in comparison; it’s like an aural “come hither” gaze, less a radio pop song than a slinky DJ edit. I can’t decide whether I like the original or Jane Remover’s tweaked-out remix more—she flips Tinashe’s sly taunts into a barrage of bass thuds and vocal fragments so chaotic it could soundtrack a 100mph car chase.

Wicked Shrieks and Whimpery Whispers

I’m obsessed with Addison Rae’s scream on Charli XCX’s “Von dutch” remix. It slashes like a blindingly bright laser of sound—just aaaaaaaa, a pure note, a perfect happy shriek. The entire BRAT hits like a jolt of midnight adrenaline, brimming with giddy hooks and tone-switches. “Girl, so confusing” might be the most blissful diss track I’ve ever heard; its quivering 8-bit background rumble sounds like an Undertale effect.

wokeups’ “fragged aht” pushes Lil Yachty’s “Poland” vibrato to a mind-shattering peak. Imagine a pluggnb singer madly expanding and deflating like a faulty helium balloon. He’s full of canny tricks—on the symelz-produced ”corners,” he’s shadowed by a chorus of tinny vocal layers.

Gomi, sayako, and prostiiitutiiion’s “Stare” is even more otherworldly, a squeak-squeezed transmission from the cartoon dimension. Breathless chirrups weave between bass thuds like fairies drunkenly dancing around the sky. Call it sigilkawaii (or don’t, please).

I love how Chappell Roan vaults her tone up for the hook on “Good Luck, Babe!” and the way the words spill out in a tumbling flow. I kept mishearing the chorus when I first heard it—instead of, “You can kiss a hundred boys in bars,” I thought studio trickery was chopping up her voice and repeating “ki-ki-kiss” in a delicious flurry. That made it feel even more urgent, like she’s flying back through time to confront a woman and wake her out of stunted paralysis. 

IDK Where to Put These

Smerz’ “Really Really”: A shard of a song, delicate and carefree, like frolicking barefoot in the grass in Hampstead Heath.  

Edward Skeletrix: This is real creepypasta-core—beats that conjure up a million tiny spiders crawling out of someone’s face, vocals as robo and groaning as a conveyor belt. Even the last name, Skeletrix, sounds mythical, like a skeleton-professor with a PhD in poisoning. His aesthetic vision includes manic videos that distort and flash and twitch nonstop, and lore about something called “Skeletrix Island,” which has sparked a surge of TikTok memes. 

Julia Robyn’s “Bama”: Julia is one of my younger brother’s friends, and I first heard this in a draft of a short film he sent me. I remember instantly loving the lightly churning dreaminess. It feels like a tiny moment of serene sweetness—the way the sun glints on the sidewalk, the feeling of someone’s hair brushing on your cheeks—blown up into three minutes of slow-mo joy. 

Astrid Sonne’s Great Doubt: A gently askew horizon. It’s a perfect album for bridgewalking, that most liminal of saunters, while pondering life-changing questions: Am I gonna have a baby? Do they love me? Should I move across the world? Sometimes it’s nicer to receive no answers, to just carry on floating along in a void of doubt and dissociation. It’s a knowledge-deprivation chamber free from pain.

Tropa do Bruxo and DJ Arana’s “VUCA VUCA”: Most of Baile do Bruxo bumps, but I was pleasantly startled by the last song. It’s a Brazilian funk flip of Flume’s glittering remix of Disclosure”s “You & Me.” That was one of my favorite songs as an EDM-trap-loving high schooler; it was in all the mixes. Hearing this instantly took me back to school bus rides home from cross country meets, where I put my earbuds in and let the glassy synths wash over my exhausted body. The juddering funk revamp makes the track somehow sound fresh. I’m hooked all over again.