20 obscure musical genres that are actually real

Music critics love genres. Whether praising or gutting an artist or scene, they’re handy identifiers for reviewing music. The only thing music journalists love more than dropping a genre is creating one. Occasionally, as is the case with the witch house subgenre, artists pull genres out of thin air for laughs, perhaps as a way of screwing with music critics.

At any rate, these games have led to a lot of absurd-sounding music subgenres. Some, like chillwave, are fairly descriptive. Others, such as hypnagogic pop, may raise a few eyebrows.

Below are are ten fairly obscure genres with listenability ranging across the spectrum.

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1. lowercase

Back in 2001, American sound and visual artist Steven Roden coined and inadvertently created a genre of extreme and minimal form ambient music that he called lowercase. On his album Forms of Paper, Roden handled various types of paper, recording the sounds before amplifying, stretching, looping, and otherwise affecting them that led to a type of ambient electronic music. While Roden claims he'd been making lowercase music since the mid-1980s, it wasn’t until 2002 that lowercase gained some attention from the press. This followed the release of the compilation album Lowercase-Sound, which introduced the genre’s other artists to listeners.

Created for the Resonanzen exhibition in Saarbrucken, Germany, Roden’s “Bell Is The Truth (Berlin)” is a fine example of how beautiful and mesmerizing lowercase can be. For this performance, Roden taped light bulbs together in total darkness, using their fragile glass surfaces and springs to create bell-like sounds.

2. Glitch hop

This subgenre of hip hop seems like it came straight from the pen of a music critic. Attributed to the work of Push Button Objects, it blends glitch aesthetics and technique—lo-fi sounds, chopping, screwing, bit crushing, beat repeats, and other effects—with hip-hop. While its DNA later mutated into the psychedelic combinations of hip-hop and IDM heard by artists as distinct as Prefuse 73 and Flying Lotus, in recent years glitch hop has gone EDM through acts like The Glitch Mob, GRiZ, and others.

3. Folktronica

As far as genres go, folktronica might be one of the lamest sounding, but it’s also pretty descriptive. UK artist Bibio, who often blends electronic and folk or acoustic music, is a great example of folktronica (see: the 2005 Fi). Bibio’s influence on Boards of Canada manifested in the Scottish duo’s 2005 album, The Campfire Headphase, which is easily one of the best blends of folk (on the psych end) with electronic.

Other artists might include Alt-J, Animal Collective, The Books, and Caribou, though of course these artists are also playing in other genres. And given that electronic music has existed in popular music since the late 1960s, it’s certainly possible that it merged with folk on many other releases over the last five or six decades.

4. Black MIDI

Not particularly well-known outside of its own community, Black MIDI is a musical genre wherein MIDI files are remixed and stuffed with thousands, millions, and even billions of notes. The black designation has to do with the fact that when so many notes are located near each other on a traditional two-stave piano score, they create a sort of black mess of characters.

Naturally, this YouTube scene leads to some insanely fast and maximalist compositions. Like many YouTube phenomenons, the black MIDI community is no small scene. On YouTube, these songs rack up millions of views, with people collaborating on each other’s compositions.

The originator of Black MIDI is said to be Shirasagi Yukki @ Kuro Yuki Gohan, who in 2009 created the first black MIDI, which was uploaded to Nico Nico Douga, a Japanese video site. The song is based on “U.N. Owen Was Her?,” the theme song for the Extra Stage Boss level stage in the Touhou Project, Shanghai Alice’s series of vertical-scrolling 2D shooting games. Nine years on, Yukki’s composition sounds almost primitive, with songs like “Necrofantasia 0.95 Billion (150 million) NO LAG” sounding like a video game score on speed.

5. Vaporwave

Easily one of the most divisive micro-genres ever created, Vaporwave has drawn equal plaudits and venom from critics and music fans alike. Vaporwave artists were often as interested in visuals as the music itself, with album sleeves and videos that reveled in early 1990s computer imagery (think Geocities websites), Japanese lettering, checkerboard floors (and other 3D animations or stills), garrish pastel and neon colors, and nods to the cyberpunk genres. These musicians also sought to mashup various audio elements via sampling and software instruments and DAWs, incorporating everything from muzak and new wave to YouTube samples and even other micro-genres, like Chillwave.

The two albums commonly credited with laying down the genre’s sonic and conceptual framework were Chuck Person's 2010 LP Eccojams Vol. 1 (a Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, side project) and Far Side Virtual (2011) by James Ferraro. While Lopatin sampled from 1980s pop songs and fused them with the 1992 video game Ecco the Dolphin, Ferraro aimed for “ringtone music” by sampling things like the Skype log-in sound and being inspired by Brian Eno-composed Windows 95 tone, though his music often could sound like Philip Glass or even the experimental electronic music of Laurie Anderson. While its day has come and gone, these two Vaporwave artists and others like Vektroid—whose album Flortal Shoppe under the Macintosh Plus moniker is perhaps the genre’s defining document—are still making and releasing new music.

6. Cloud rap

As the name implies, there is a sort of atmospheric quality to musicians who work in the Cloud Rap genre. The emergence of this spaced-out subgenre of rap is commonly attributed to Lil B, whose 2009 album, Rain In England, featured the emcee rapping over ambient, New Age-style synthesizers, and dropping some nonsensical versus that was very Internet aware.

“Just Dream” is a great example of Lil B’s conception of cloud rap at work—ambient synth pads and notes swirling in stereo as he raps atop it. Yung Lean’s “Oreomilkshake” takes this aesthetic and adds a trap beat to it, and the effect is pretty fantastic.

7. Simpsonwave

Simpsonwave. Ah… a genre, like Black MIDI and Vaporwave, that could only really come into existence because of the Internet. A micro-genre of a micro-genre, Simpsonwave, which emerged in 2016, combines sampled audio and video from The Simpsons with Vaporwave’s obsession with 1990s internet aesthetics (heavy doses of pastel Tumblr colors), elevator muzak, electronic and new wave sounds, checkerboard floors, ancient Greek statues, and other bits of cultural detritus that could be mashed together.

A then 19-year old named British kid named Lucien Hughes was behind most of the Simpsonwave videos. As he told Paper magazine, he was drawn to the nostalgia of both The Simpsons and Vaporwave, and decided to make his own after seeing several by YouTube user midge, who had posted them on the Facebook group “Simpsons Shitposting.” While Simpsonwave isn’t a serious genre by any stretch of the imagination, some of the tracks can have a sort of tranquilizing effect on listeners, like “Homer’s Website.”

8. Hypnagogic pop

First of all, a definition. Hypnagogic means the state one is in just before falling asleep. But the actual definition bares little resemblance to its application with the genre of Hypnagogic Pop. Coined by UK journalist David Keenan, in a near-academic essay for The Wire, Hypnagogic Pop describes bands who plumbed the 1980s for sounds that they slowed down, looped, and heavily affected to create a dream-like psychedelia that was also (on a conceptual level) sort of meditation on cultural nostalgia and outdated technology (according to Keenan).

The aforementioned James Ferraro got lumped in with the Hypnagogic Pop crowd, as did Ariel Pink and C V L T S. Pink, however, is an outlier, as many of his songs are still firmly rooted in the pop song format, while C V L T S explored a more drone-like psychedelic sound.

9. Witch house

There really isn’t anything house-like about the Witch House genre. Though coined as a joke by Travis Egedy (aka, Pictureplane), the artists who got pegged as being Witch House did have a somewhat identifiable sound—slow tempo, chopped and screwed songs that embrace goth, shoegaze, hip-hop, drone, noise, and even industrial. Outside of Pictureplane, artists like Clams Casino, Holy Other, and even Zola Jesus also got tagged with having elements of the Witch House sound.

Like many of the genres mentioned above, Witch House hasn’t endured. It took a few years, but eventually the genre flamed out, though this doesn’t make its sounds any less entrancing.

10. Cute metal (Kawai core)

Imagine heavy metal mixed with anime and horror tropes—that’s Cute Metal. A combination of metal and J-Pop (Japanese pop), Cute Metal emerged in the early 2010s, and mixes the latter’s melodies and idol personas with the darker imagery of the former. The band that is credited with pioneering Cute Metal is the Japanese trio Babymetal, who also display musical elements familiar to EDM, with electronic beats that skitter, build, and then of course drop.

11. Post-Brexit new wave

A term popularized by NPR in 2021, Post-Brexit New Wave is a style of music forged in the cauldron of, well, you guessed it…Brexit. 

Immediately before the pandemic – so, a thousand years ago – Britain departed the European Union. Its ever-anxious youth responded in song. The vibe of these songs is unique: nostalgic New Wave synths abound, made modern thanks to the quantized inevatibilities of a DAW-based production environment. At the same time, lengthy/unconventional song structures are the norm in this music, with talky singing generally preferred over tuneful melodies. 

Like most points of music criticism, the nomenclature is controversial. There are scenes within scenes, each with their own labels. Wunderground and Crankwave get mentioned often. Nevertheless, Post-Brexit New Wave emerges as a decent catch-all for this particular group of attributes, as it contextualizes both the place (Britain) and the time (after Brexit) of this music.

Here are some examples:

12. Murderfolk

Murderfolk is a macabre subgenre that blends elements of folk, country, Americana, and rockabilly with themes of crime, death, drugs, and darkness. So basically, Nick Cave for the 21st century. 

In Murderfolk, it’s not out of place to hear lyrics about being strung out on ketamine sung atop pleasantly picked acoustic guitars. But the music isn’t always acoustic: sometimes it gets punky and sometimes it gets swampy like early ZZ Top. And, like other genres, there are subsets: folk punk, acoustic punk, “gypsy punk,” anti-folk, and country rap are often incorporated under the umbrella of Murderfolk.

The commonality seems to be the subject matter: Murderfolk taps into the darker aspects of human nature, offering the listener an unsettling experience.

Amigo the Devil, Highlonesome, and the aptly named Murder By Death are artists to check out in the Murderfolk scene.

13. Feralcore

Like many genres, Feralcore grows out of an overall aesthetic. This one is best explained as “a child’s idea of what chaotic and messy means.” To dress yourself in Feralcore regalia means embracing strategic stains on your clothing. To do your hair in a feralcore coif is to keep it exceedingly, almost meticulously messy. Your make-up must be smeared. A fascination with animals who feast on trash is a plus.

In musical terms, feralcore is just as chaotic as its visual aesthetic: It’s a bit all over the place, and like most subgenres in 2020s, artists dip in and out of its vibe. The key to identifying Feralcore is to gaze into its visual aesthetic while listening to a piece of music, and then to wonder “does this music fit the feel of the visuals?” If the answer is yes, you can call it Feralcore.

This is "Haunted" by 100 Gecs:

14. Goblincore

Goblincore arguably arose out of a group of people who identified, online, as goblins. The music they listened to has now been labeled Goblincore, and to some extent, this obscure music genre has outgrown its scrappy reddit roots.   

Goblincore can best be described as “a kind of folk music with an earthy appreciation for things that are beautiful precisely because they shouldn’t be.” Gobblincore takes the “beauty in decay” facets of Feralcore and runs wild with them. 

When investigating Goblincore music, the name Vashti Bunyan inevitably comes up in playlists. Even though her career began in the 1960s, she’s something of a patron saint of this and many folk-adjacent genres. Her music provides a good lens into the governing aesthetic: Goblincore is about imperfect beauty, unpolished gems. This feeling reaches down into the music itself, and the post-2000 songs of Vashti exemplify this quality in spades:

Like many genres, Goblincore is more likely a “vibe” that artists can dip in and out of depending on how they feel. Hozier is often mentioned as having a tinge of the Goblincore at times, as is Gregory and the Hawk.

15. Corecore

With so many genres suffixing themselves in the word “core,” one has to wonder, is there a “corecore?” Google says the answer is yes – and the music is kind of amazing. 

Corecore is arguably the newest and most fluid genre right now. Its aim, such as it can be defined, is to blend the entire internet and all its subcultures (“cores”) into a single cohesive experience. 

At present, Corecore is more represented in visual media, primarily on TikTok. A typical Corecore vid features images that have been chopped, screwed, and blended together to engender some sort of unified emotional state.

But here’s the thing: it’s the music cueing this emotional state for the viewer – so the music is starting to become its own definable thing. You can find Corecore music in playlists such as this:

Note the comment at the bottom of this video, highlighting a track that should in be in the playlist:

One cannot say the feeling this weird music genre elicits is wholly new – but it isn’t exactly familiar either. Its “defamiliarization” seems to be the point.

Who cares about heady philosophy, though? The point is simple: this music plays under tiktok videos. Make it, and maybe you’ll go viral.

16. Sh*tpost modernism

Sh*tpost Modernism, a term coined by the wonderful people at Pitchfork, is the musical equivalent of some annoying troll dunking on you so hard that even you, the object of their joke, have to give it up. This kind of music thrives on irony, absurdity, internet culture, offending everyone, and generally being so puerile that it taps into your middle-school brain and makes you laugh in a way no smart or sophisticated joke ever could. 

The musical underpinning of sh*tpost modernism is usually as offputting as its lyrics, blending lo-fi production, intentionally bad mixing choices, obviously stupid chord progressions, and an in your face DIY approach.

You could say 100 Gecs are somewhat representative of this aesthetic, though their productions are a hair too slick. Dumbest Girl Alive seems to get at the sentiment though, with lyrics such as:

I’m so happy I could die

Put emojis on my grave

I’m the dumbest girl alive

The Pitchfork article that gave the genre its name cites AgusFortnite2008 as emblematic of the scene. 

But if you really want to launch yourself beyond the boundaries of all good taste, do yourself the favor – or the torture – of listening to Ricky Bascom. I’m not linking his music here for reasons that’ll become quite obvious upon your Googling. Or don’t Google him, and be happy you’ve never actually heard his music. Imagine if Eminem were a character in Idiocracy and that’s about right. It’s literally the dumbest thing you’ve ever heard, and that’s exactly the point.

17. Digital fusion

To understand what Digital Fusion is, you have to start with Chiptune, a genre that would get its own section here if it hadn’t been around for a while. Traditionally made with the sound generators found in vintage arcade machines and early gaming consoles, Chiptune takes the 8-bit sound and extends it into personalized musical constructions. I had the pleasure of doing sound for a chiptune concert in the late aughts, and it was very strange to behold: a lone musician wiling out on nothing more than a Gameboy stuffed with cartridges he had programmed himself. 

Digital Fusion takes the groundwork of Chiptune and blends it with harmonically adventurous material, such as Jazz Fusion, Cinematic Classical, Progressive Rock, and other genres. Oftentimes, live instrumentation blends in with the “8-bit” sounds, and you’ll frequently find long stretches of music meant to resemble live improvisation – though they are, in fact, programmed.

I happen to have an example of music one could call Digital Fusion here, made on the Dirtywave M8 Tracker, by the artist P4NTL3R:

18. Drift phonk

Drift phonk boasts an unclear origin and a proliferation only possible thanks to the Internet. Here’s what people agree on: Drift phonk marries the sound of Memphis rap with the characteristics of phonk music, pushing both genres into crunchy distortion wherever possible. If you’re listening to something trap-like, and the music features a cowbell so heavily distorted that it almost sounds like an 8-bit video game, there’s a non-zero chance you’re listening to drift phonk. 

Near as anyone can tell, the music has its genesis in the American South, but probably gets its name thanks to its international bonafides: somehow car YouTubers in Russia got ahold of this music back when it was simply a facet of phonk. They found it perfect for underscoring their “drifting” videos, and drift phonk became a worldwide phenomenon. 

Artists like Freddie Dredd and Nissan Playa are considered names in the drift phonk scene.

19. Queer country

Though not a new genre, it’s still relatively unknown. It’s also very near and dear to my heart: I did live sound at a Queer country bar for a few years, met a bunch of wonderful bands in the process, made some life-changing connections, and still work with quite a few artists in the scene.

It would be facile to say that Queer Country is just country music made by people in the LGBTQ+ community. That’s not really speaking to the heart of the music. Musically, 

There’s so much going on in the scene beyond the juxtaposition of the “Queer” and “Country.” You’ve got punk, cowpunk, Americana, and a scrappy DIY ethic, all simmering to make the most honest music you’ve ever heard. Two bands I’d definitely check out if you’re looking to explore the genre are Karen and The Sorrows, and Olivia and the Lovers:

20. Downtown scratch

Okay, I’m just making these up now, right? Surely Downtown Scratch is not a thing that actually exists. Well, yes, it didn’t have a name until now – but the name is rightfully earned. Here’s how:

Free improvised music has been around forever. Pulling tunes out of a formless void dates back to the advent of music. In the jazz scene, however, “free improvised music” constitutes its own category. It’s distinct from the “free jazz” of Ornette Coleman in its near-complete rejection of all jazz idioms: you don’t hear 2-5-1 licks in free improvised music; You rarely feel a pulse, let alone a swung ride cymbal.

And yet, the idiom of free improvised music has become its own solidified aesthetic over time. Many people can identify its conventions. Many more hate them with a fiery passion. I myself have sat back a concert or two and wondered, how is there not a parody of this stuff? A Spinal Tap with porkpie hats? 

So what do younger musicians in the scene do? They generate their own music in response to it. It’s in this context that I’d like to introduce you to Devin Gray:

Devin is a world-class drummer, bandleader, and composer. His curriculum vitae is unimpeachable: Michael Formanek, Dave Ballou, Andrew D’Angelo, Ellery Eskelin, Chris Speed, and numerous other free-music luminaries grace his records as side-musicians. But Devin and his generation of free-improvised fanatics don’t make the usual din that comprises typical free-fare. They’re making something new and exceedingly hard to describe. 

Here’s my best shot at it: a Devin Gray concert is the only place where you’ll see a person play a drum set with a chainsaw and feel like they’ve earned the right to do so within the context of everything that came before. 

Well, that’s not quite right: other musicians in Devin’s orbit are making something similarly new and niche out of the free-improvised music scene. Jon Crompton and Patrick Breiner are two saxophonists/composers who make fantastic music of a similar aesthetic. But I happen to know Devin quite well; he’s someone I can easily text to talk about it.

So, in preparation for this blog, I asked him if there was a new name for the kind of music he and his peers make. He demurred at first, defaulting to “free improvised music.” I said that wasn’t good enough, laying out the argument that this current crop of free music doesn’t sound like the stuff of twenty years ago. So he said, “call it Downtown Scratch.”

And here we are. 

https://devingraymusic.bandcamp.com/album/most-definitely-2

This is downtown scratch, straight from the person who coined the term. Make of it what you will.

Remember, it’s vibes over genres these days

Folks, I’m nearing the end of my thirties. And everyone I talk to in their teens and twenties (mostly relatives, to be honest) are always going on and on about the vibes. “Vibes” seems to be an interjection as much as a noun – something to be said when describing a phenomenon no other words can describe. 

To that end, I remind you and entreat you to think of subgenres, these days, as vibes. And vibes are never here to stay. We have firmly left the time of an artist announcing themselves as Americana and sticking to that genre forever. We have migrated into the foggy, marshy, mystical land of vibes.

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