Mostly teens, these artists grew up listening to pop-punk, emocore and songs like S3RL’s 2007 “Pretty Rave Girl,” the nightcore classic that was a fixture of the web in the late noughties. Just like grunge influenced the first string of SoundCloud rappers-who were born in the mid- to-late 90s-similarly 2000s music is returning as a nostalgic touchstone for a new wave of producers and performers. Bladee, the Drain Gang rapper who veils his voice in an ethereal mist of Auto-Tune, also seems to be a central reference. It’s essentially an evolution or a sister-genre of hyperpop, although some artists in the scene may also fit under the label “hyperpop,” which has become a sort of umbrella term for fast, experimental electronic pop.ġ00 gecs, the genre-annihilating duo whose goofy chaos-pop walked the tightrope between inventive and outrageous last year, are emerging as a key influence. Cook and apply it to an array of styles, such as trap and alt-rock.

This glitch wave, while similar, isn’t exclusively pop-these artists draw on the cellophane flavor of hyperpop artists like SOPHIE and A.G. There is some overlap between this new scene and hyperpop, which refers to the sparkly, exaggerated electronic pop subgenre that erupted in the middle of the '10s. Unlike the old SoundCloud rap, though, these rappers and singers pull as much from hyperpop and 2000s electronica and pop as they do Lil B and Chief Keef. It’s a messy, hilarious blitz of digital malfunction.

Avalanches of clip art and freaky GIFs rain down on him. Clips rewind, speed up, stretch, layer, rotate, turn green, saturate to oblivion. But he filters the visuals the same way he does the vocals-through a ridiculous, infectious gridwork of glitches. In the video, David Shawty is doing what has been done in rap videos a thousand times over: he’s walking, dancing, menacingly waving his fingers in the air. The moment lasts for only a second before, like a show that was only buffering momentarily, he finishes his thought: “D-dancing on the sidewalk, lights flicker.” The rest of the track continues like this, cycling between coherent sentences and pitch-fried croons. “D-d-d-d,” he warbles, his voice injected with a ludicrous amount of aural Botox (Auto-Tune, pitch shift). These are the sounds of a rapper’s voice spliced into fragments, placed in front of nearly every bar, like punctuation. Suddenly, though, you hear a slew of stutters as fast as bullets. Disembodied coos from the rapper, David Shawty, warp around the soundscape. Hit play and everything seems normal at first.

Tik tok stuttering song