I can feel my ears extending, hind legs protruding, fluffy tail drooping down; I have an uncontrollable urge to gnaw with my front teeth and binky (excited jump). I've traversed so many rabbit holes I myself seem to be transforming into a bunny. Throughout the year, I've thought that maybe covering a certain amount of scenes and trends would unlock some secret key to the universe—a final solid bottom, a cultural bedrock. But every hole led to another hole, and I kept finding more hidden gates and passageways that sparked curiosity. There's so much more I want to write about, but while we're still in 2025, here's a look back at some of my favorite ideas and sounds that didn't make it into a full column.
5. Love in Lethargy
We were in the basement of an old brutalist mall beside a bustling motorway on one end of Kraków, Poland. A haunted red enveloped the room. Silent observers huddled together on the floor and against columns. I was in the back stuffed in a leather booth with a few British friends, espresso martinis daintily pressed to the lips. We were here at Unsound Festival listening to Joanne Robertson as she filled the hush with awkward smalltalk, incidental noises as she adjusted her position, and her spare yet sumptuous music. Intimate and lowkey, it felt like we were observing a friend scuffle through her first public performance.
I’ve been entranced by a specific strain of singer-songwriter ambient this year, like Malibu’s Vanities, where low drones hang in the air and wordless moans swallow up the sky like slowed and reverbed Gregorian chants. “So Sweet & Willing” and “Lactonic Crush” feel like being blinded, overcome and eaten whole by a gorgeous grayness. It took my dopamine-fucked ears a while to appreciate the luxe languor of choke enough, but then it became one of my go-tos through the year. There’s something restorative about Maria Somerville’s “Spring,” the way every ghostly vocal line reaches out of the void and applies sonic acupuncture to your tired pressure points. The title of deer park’s Terra Infirma describes both the hypnotically hazy sound and the texture of our retconned, slippery existence right now, where the only thing real is the rawest feelings.
The festival-sized version of this is something like Addison Rae’s “Headphones On,” her slow-motion drift through the idyllic countryside of Reykjavik, Iceland. Enough accelerationism, enough cognitive overload: 2026, give us some more dreamy lethargy.
4. Laptop Twee
When I hit play on MASSI’s “tiny robot, big city: the day in the life of a friendly android,” early memories of eagerly flipping the pages of Richard Scarry’s Busy, Busy Town blew through my mind. It’s dinkytronica, a sublimely cute spree of register buzzes, forklift whirrs, and cybernetic chirps. Suddenly, the Industrial Revolution becomes not a mistake but a miracle. Imagine friends and family as transhuman cyborgs in one great Lego civilization.
The song also made me think of “laptop twee,” a slew of new artists who rewire precious twee and indie pop aesthetics with intricate sound design, fatass sleaze bass, or otherwise cracked 2020s style-shards. Coined by the blogger friends&, laptop twee has become linked in my brain to a certain elven twinge that makes me think of Medieval bards or MIDI pixelation. You can feel it in the weirdo-dance duo Bassvictim’s halcyon-years psychedelia and their friends Worldpeace DMT and Rowan Please, whose old-school inspo spits out baby spittles of glitches. You can extend the framework beyond indie rock and pop to include some of what’s happening in digicore, like ASC’s “love quest,” where he raps in Times New Roman font about completing a “quest inside thou hearten” while nightingales sing atop an adorably clunky Runescape-y beat.
Maybe my favorite find this year is the London-based 300skullsandcounting, a self-described “cy-Baroque anti-folk pop violence” artist who also accepts the description “Undertale on fent.” Nothing beats cuteness except watching violence be enacted upon the cuteness; like an aural Happy Tree Friends, Skulls tosses pom-poms of fuzz into the sky then desecrates them. “Eagle vs. Sheagle” turns almost excruciatingly abrasive, while “wait here while i pee” waits 107 seconds (long ass time to pee) before unleashing a heavenly torrent of twee-mo screamo.
Laptop twee feels promising because it re-injects a cutesy calmness and a childlike joy into a machine that’s become symbolic of so much soul-eroding shittiness. It makes me think of ungainly, playful GeoCities websites, flashing back to an era when I was a puny kid whose favorite sounds were the 8-bit symphonies twittering out of my Gameboy Advance. It suggests something kind and small-scale, eager to be colored in crayon, not garish neon.
3. Jugg Edit rap
In the underground rap side of TikTok, there is something called a “jugg edit,” which is basically a type of flashy video that hypes someone up as a deliciously distorted rap song plays. In these clips, the screen judders and blurs, the lights fluttering in a mad blitz, as if this person’s aura can overwhelm the time-space continuum. There’s a new microgenre of music that feels custom-designed for these psychotic videos. The vocals mutate like asphyxiated Wingdings and aborted thoughts. Instrumentally, these musicians seem to apply the twitchy snare rhythms of jerk rap to sequences of sound effects and sidechained bass that swallows everything.
The breakout smash from this scene (smash meaning one million plays on Spotify) is “everyday is the same” by ocelot. “Sleep paralysis demon” is an understatement—it feels like you have a lice infestation inside your ears, a looping, zombified death-crawl of a song built around broken phrases like “everyday is cut wrist” and “you can’t save,” that you can’t even discern because the voice is drowned by low end and clipped synths. The lyrics have the same anesthetized ennui as in emo rap and the new wave of online rock, but the beats are menacingly new and dead-set on defacing your consciousness.
I’ve also seen the music tagged “FXspam” on SoundCloud for its degraded samples. On tunes like ocelot and islurwhenitalk’s “pen to paper,” Minecraft effects—a ghast wailing, a spider hissing, potion spamming—function like another vocalist ad-libbing all over the shit-scape. ocelot, the king of this style, clearly descends from islurwhenitalk, a sigilkore deity who pioneered this sort of ultra-twitchy, rhythmic meltdown that’s as much dance music as rap. ocelot’s wildest tracks push the style built by people like him, Gomi, len333, syrgn, ss3bby, and a bunch more into pure oblivion; see “one two three,” built around a schoolyard counting hook that’s like a life raft amid the apocalypse.
Even further in Area 51 is ocelot’s collaborator 3c876—there are no sentences or even single consonants to grab ahold of anymore, it’s all geekified fleshless falsetto. People in the comments joke that you need “trained ears” to appreciate this shit. If you can’t handle, say, xaviersobased, don’t even bother with “my broder”; it’ll probably make your cochlear nerves turn inside out.
2. Bubblegum Bass
A few months ago, I listened to Dizzee Rascal’s “I Luv U” for the first time in ages and suddenly linked it to PC Music and SOPHIE: the chopped and girlish “I love you,” the skeletal, clattering drums; its sickly acid-burned thinness.
So much modern hyperpop music has a maximal thrash, which can be thrilling in some instances, like Ninajirachi’s “Fuck My Computer.” But I would love to strip it back, to melt the machine down to a sheet of vinegary silver again. The two singles dropped under SOPHIE’s name this year (and the “VYZEE MELODIC PART EXTENDED EDIT” that had a moment on TikTok) reminded me of how intoxicating bubblegum bass can be, how the hyperreal fakeness of “Hey QT” feels impossibly emotional. GFOTY’s “Don’t Wanna / Let’s Do It,” an anti-gravity panic room of fucked-up femme British vocals, from PC Music, Vol. 1, still sounds more futuristic than most of what’s being made today.
This year I also went down a rabbit hole of Adam Harper’s old pieces (shoutout all the Rabbit Holers that paved the way) and couldn’t believe how many gems I’d missed from the Early Bubblegum era. Try σníkα’s “bffs,” which twists what sounds like helium balloons deflating and cyborgian whales keening into a pristine, almost painfully pretty lovenote. In 2014, the TTS-robotic voice must’ve sounded so unreal that it made the track feel like a novelty; listening now, there’s nothing “uncanny valley” here. We live in the valley of chrome. Let’s keep tugging on this thread.
1. Friendship
For years, I’ve kept a Google Doc of every concert I’ve attended and all the friends I went with. At some point a few months ago, I forgot to upkeep—partly out of laziness and partly because I was going to fewer shows than in previous years (hit 26 and became auntie). I’m sure I’ll swing back to crazed concertgoing, but this year, I had the most fun seeing my friends play in bands, which felt less like going to a music performance than just hanging out. There was Josephine’s Next Million Miles playing what felt like a single continuous organism of a set at Windjammer in Ridgewood; Bleeder snuggled tightly in the slender chamber of Pete’s Candy Store; Damian Taxidermi jamming in some basement on the edge of Bushwick and in the back room at Piano’s.
I realized 2025 has been major for friendship—maybe it always is, but it felt especially pronounced this year between high school homie quartet Geese’s ascendancy, 2hollis’ “boylife” crew with Nate Sib and rommulas, and so many artists around the world forming little half-collectives outside the context of a normal “band.” In Argentina, the shitpost GOATs AgusFortnite2008 and Stiffy linked with Turrobaby and Zell to launch P.I.L.F. (pendejos… you know the rest), a “boyband” in the vein of One Direction. Mexico spawned La Obsesion, which includes guys like Yeyo, EZYA, Doony Graff, Novato El Flow; their debut offers a sprawling vision of gaseous futuristic reggaeton and new-gen “CHUGG” rap.
“digicore is back btw,” the podcaster Backlight declared a week ago. After the Great Splintering that seemed to occur after the pandemic, digicore artists are dropping posse cuts and random madcap loosies with each other again. I’ve enjoyed everything that’s come out of Best New Friend Group SEBii, kimj, Effie and The Deep, from Effie’s EP pullup to busan 4 morE hypEr summEr it’s gonna bE a fuckin moviE to kimj’s KOREAN AMERICAN and the shivery ménage à quatre “MY UNNIES.” Then there’s Stardust—the closest thing hyperpop has had to a real community manifesto in album form since 100 gecs’ remix tape. While Danny Brown’s album doesn’t fully hit, I admire the ethos and the attempt to bring a new generation of electronic outsiders and innovators together. Friendship will triumph over industry-sanctioned stagnancy!