#10 - saoirse dream - "when your pizza rolls" & leroy - "dilf repellent" + "awesome ends with ME and ugly starts with U" (tie)

Dec 14, 2021

Choosing one dariacore track is like being forced to pick a favorite color. Every color is great in a certain context, and there are thousands of shades. I love a good ruby red beanie when I’m feeling gregarious. A blue-black hoodie for the days I want to speak to no one. I love the peak Los Angeles peach-melting-into-hibiscus horizon, Santa Monica’s cerulean shore washing over light yellow sand, persian green palm fronds covering the ash gray concrete. In high school, I shamefully went through a phase wearing the most abrasively bright floral shirts and a salmon-pink hoodie. I love all colors.

(For the unenlightened, dariacore is a strain of lo-fi hymnal music that marries ASMR xylophone strums to Auto-Tuned praying mantis vocals and often features a hornucopian dronepipe. Some tracks, for additional flavor, include the earthy squelch of a didgeridoo.)

All that to say, my favorite dariacore tune changes by the hour. I picked these three because they’ve stuck with me the most.

What I love most about dltzk aka leroy’s “dilf repellent” is its intro, a sped-up version of the riff from Eyedress’ “Jealous” fused with Matty Healy’s vocals, which then fissures into a mechanical explosion. Everything becomes chaos. Glitched vocals flash in and out of earshot, the words losing their meanings as the snares and bass thuds pummel.

“awesome ends with ME and ugly starts with U” is bursting at the seams with pretty much every sound you can imagine. It features accelerated PinkPantheress vocals, a “h-h-h-h-holy shit” sound splice, Yeat ordering take-home Benibachi, titanic electronic splurges that sound like Skrillex hooked up with Flume, and Brittany Taylor (a character from the TV show “Daria”) saying, “Where’s my lipstick?”

Meanwhile, webcage member saoirse dream’s “when your pizza rolls” feels like an entire two-day festival experience packed in two minutes. There are as many genre influences and textures in this song as there are planets in our solar system. A frantic breakbeat; Jersey club bed squeaks; a stuttering plugg producer tag; a snippet of Justin Bieber and the Kid Laroi’s “Stay”; a rapidfire edit of Porter Robinson’s “Shelter”; EDM chaos galore.

Part of dariacore’s appeal is this rabid recontextualization of earworm pop anthems and rap lines. It offers a similar thrill to hearing a nightcore remix, slowed-and-reverb flip, or alternative version of a song. They’re still the same core sounds you already have deeply nestled in your brain, but manipulated slightly (sped-up, blended into other songs), the intensity heightened, almost like you’re listening while really really really drunk.

Check out saoirse dream:

https://soundcloud.com/saoirsedream

Check out leroy:

https://soundcloud.com/c0ncernn

The list:

#20 - aya - "what if i should fall asleep and slipp under" and "Emley lights us moor"

#19 - rrodney - Jersey club remix of Trippie Redd ft. Playboi Carti’s “Miss the Rage”

#18 - aghast - “thas wut i do” (prod. lungskull & wavebird)

#17 - Yves Tumor - “Secrecy Is Incredibly Important To The Both of Them”

#16 - kaystrueno - “PRETTY B!TCHES NEVA DIE”

#15 - kurtains - “spawn”

#14 - Ecco2k - “PXE”