#23 - skaiwater - "#miles"

2021 was the year a new generation of Jersey club rap took off. This year, a wide array of musicians discovered you can do more than just rap madly over Jersey club drums: you can scream and chant, whisper and gasp; you can warble with hyperpop doses of Auto-Tune; you can garble and snarl over an increasingly accelerating club rhythm until everything implodes. One of my favorite off-kilter jersey club experiments in 2022 is the skaiwater- and jdolla-produced “#miles.” Most of the track isn’t even proper Jersey club—it’s a drumless, twinkly synthscape full of skaiwater’s candied coos. But then those fiery kicks slowly rise in the background, flickering softly, biding their time, until finally they streak into the spotlight. The musician’s lyrics about relationship problems flutter away, replaced by frail whimpers and exclamations like “Oh my god,” which juxtapose prettily with the dissonant, pounding kick drums. There’s an excess of artists and producers who don’t toy with structure at all; as a result, their songs can feel like static clumps of cardboard—just a looped beat front-to-back. But “#miles” has a wonderful arc, a slow tension that makes you yearn for the kick drop.

There’s so much jersey club being produced now — some of it reeking of labels and big names exploiting the regional sound’s sudden ubiquity — it feels sort of like how the Amen break and UK garage rhythms were revived last year by a medley of musicians. TikTok’s viral sounds ran the whole gamut from bedroom pop’n’bass to UK garage softened into beachy dream pop. A cynic would say these re-trends augur the end of true innovation, that our future horizons will be confined to nostalgia-bait, drab retools of old sounds and styles. What’s next, the festival trap renaissance? Trance drill? Is it time for gabber and speedcore’s main character pop era? Still, a lot of these club offsprings like “#miles” are inventive in sound and structure. And nothing ever forms in a vacuum, anyway; the genre mutations could spawn their own scenes. The vanguard of music now is a tessellation of microscenes that combine previously popular styles—specific rhythms and vocal techniques and Auto-Tune effects—to make sounds that were once unimaginable.

The list:

#25 - Destroy Lonely - “NOSTYLIST”

#24 - elusin - “Elksling”