#5 - Syzy - "Take my energy!" / "Can you keep up?"
The first music genre I seriously got into as a tween was gloriously gaudy EDM trap. YouTube Minecraft PVP montages put me on to Flosstradamus, RL Grime’s bombastic “Love Sosa” remix, TNGHT; from there I found Flume, What So Not, Mr. Carmack, SOPHIE (it’s funny how “MSMSMSM” was a fixture of this scene before she expanded her sound). I became a diehard in high school, religiously tapping in with r/trap (remember r/xtrill?) and making frenetic mixes inspired by RL Grime’s Halloween series and Ekali. At a certain point, I fell out of love with it—after G Jones, Boombox Cartel etc. pushed the hybrid bass sound to its breaking point, it felt like the scene self-destructed and stopped innovating. The lurid bangers lost their luster.
Weight of the world is the most electrifying EDM trap album (riddim? Future bass? Hyper-dubstep? I could never get a handle of these subgenre tags) I’ve heard since 2019’s Hi This Is Flume. It could be the Glass Swords of the 2020s, a treasure trove of next-level drops and scalpel-incisive sound design that’s as indebted to dariacore and digicore as much as PC Music and EPROM. Every song unravels like an archeological site on a distant planet, packed to the brim with crumbs of crystal debris, crinkly lightning zaps, and AI mukbang mouth sounds. I can’t remember the last time an album felt so much like its own new, addictive world.
The list:
#13 - bleood - “ooo” / yuke - “ian goin”
#12 - anarchy - “superbowl” prod dj ess
#9 - Cash Cobain - “Rump Punch”