Deep dives into the sounds that define us.
Footwork did not ask to be discovered. It emerged from Chicago’s South Side in the late 1990s as an evolution of ghetto house, built for battle: two dancers...
There’s been a quiet but unmistakable shift happening in pop music. Call it the return of the low-key. After years of maximalism, hyperpop production, and the relentless sonic...
Drill music was born in Chicago’s South Side around 2011 and 2012, and the name came before the fame. “Drill” was already street slang in that neighborhood for...
Cloud rap didn’t die. It just became invisible to people who weren’t paying close enough attention. The genre had its peak visibility window somewhere between 2011 and 2016,...
Lo-fi hip hop is a genre that has become more famous for its context than its content, which is either a criticism or a description depending on how...
Chillwave is a genre that had a brief, specific moment of cultural prominence and then retreated into a kind of wistful afterlife, which is appropriate for a genre...
Math rock is a genre defined primarily by its rhythmic complexity, and it is a genre that produces passionate arguments about what actually belongs in it. The name...
Post-punk is one of those genre names that explains itself and then immediately fails to explain anything. The “post” part tells you it came after punk. The “punk”...
Bluegrass is a precisely defined American music genre with a debated origin story and a devoted community that polices its boundaries more actively than almost any other genre...
Noise rock occupies a position in the taxonomy of music that is simultaneously clear and contested. The clarity: it is guitar-based rock music that incorporates noise, dissonance, and...
Twee pop is a genre defined almost entirely by attitude rather than sound, which makes it one of the more contested categories in the taxonomy of music. The...
Trap is a production style before it is a genre, and the distinction matters because it explains why so much music that does not share obvious aesthetic sensibilities...
Into The Music