The top 15 songs of 2024 (+15 honorable mentions)
The countdown is over.
Inside you’ll find Temu phonk, zooted regalia opulence, scrappy digicore rock, Charli fan-fic, and some “real” genres…. welcome 2 the abyss
Spotify playlist
Honorable Mentions
d.silvestre - Bolhas Makiavélicas
Best song that feels like a tractor is rolling over your brain. It’s a cranial unnerve examination.
DJ JL3 & DA ZN - Automotivo Magia Terrorífica
Phonk was once a genuinely intriguing sound; it’s a term coined by SpaceGhostPurpp with origins in 90s Memphis rap. Then it became globalized and amorphous—Russian drift phonk, Brazilian funk-phonk—and now it’s being soullessly puked out by TikTok clout-chasers and Spotify grifters thirsty for a quick buck. Call it Temu phonk. I’m astounded by how many streams this music gets—you can find dozens of barely distinguishable steroid-swollen phonk beats with hundreds of millions of plays. The Barstool bros and AI coders and content farmers must be blasting this 25/7.
The wasteland of worthlessness has rightly scared critics away, but there are a few scraps of excitement worth excavating from the muck. There’s a sickly thrill to “Automotivo Magia Terrorífica,” which sounds less like music than an accordion being abused. The drop spasms between abyssal black and heavenly white, like you’re flashing across life and death.
EVILLAIRE - “B*TCH MADE” prod. RODEOGLO
Am I crazy or did RODEOGLO lift three seconds of the Big Time Rush aaa-ah-ah intro, reverse it, and loop it as the eerily sweet backdrop for this diabolical beat? Nothing screams “internet rap hex” like TV-pop rewinded so it sounds like a devilish curse. (Duck CEO Jameson, h/t for this heater, “performed experiments” and reached the verdict that he is “skeptical this is a Big Time Rush sample although it does have a sonically similar texture,” adding that he can’t conclusively “rule out the possibility.” The case is open, researchers.)
HEXXING AIN’T DEAD. Try blasting this while smashing the accelerator.
fakemink - “Shih Tzu” ft. xaviersobased prod. blickyhomeboy / “Crush” prod. OK
There’s a shortage of genuine joy these days, that feeling when you’re not thinking about anything—you’re 12 years old, no anxiety on the brain, bent over in a fit of laughter so fierce that when you see your friend’s face and it makes you laugh even more, you nearly pee yourself. There’s something about fakemink’s prettiest songs like “Shih Tzu” and “Crush” that restores this feeling, the breathless rush of being present. His voice blows against your ears like the gentlest blizzard, transporting you to an impossibly white field covered in little whizzing sparrows. It has a kind of faded poignancy but also an infectious nowness. Maybe it hits harder because it’s a British dude riffing on an American sound, and its halcyon halo makes me feel like I’m a kid again visiting London and feeling dumb-kid-excited about the future.
femtanyl - “ATTACKING VERTICAL”
It’s bizarre that femtanyl’s music provokes such visceral hate; it’s not egregiously derivative or shitposty zoomer skibidi-bait. The music is like a cursed pastiche of golden era rave, dialling the clattery clutter up to max mutant for the kids who grew up spamming Jeff the Killer jumpscares. This song, a highlight from her recent EP, is simultaneously dreamy and deranged—imagine Donkey Kong Country’s “Aquatic Ambience” on damaging amounts of Adderall.
Her New Knife - “purepurepure” / nightcore+++
Outside of a few real innovators, I’ve found a lot of this new generation of shoe- and grungegaze to be pretty MOR so far—a tornado of TikTok revivalists, MBV cosplayers, and young producers simulating the full-band arena sprawl with DAWs who I wish I enjoyed more. There’s something about Her New Knife’s sharpest songs that transcends the horde. Whereas their Julia’s War labelmates feeble little horse juxtapose the noisy blur with twee cuteness, HNK’s “purepurepure” burbles with industrial unease: a baleful metallic plink, foghorns from the nether realm, screams that rip like XXXTentacion war cries.
nightcore+++ thrills not because of any particular song but its hyperockist approach. It reaches the angelic incoherence of Cocteau Twins and MBV bliss by accelerating everything until the vocals shriek like giddy opossums and the noise shrouds you like chilly mist in a glacial Amazon forest. 2025: we need less labels making sped-up everything detritus and more speedgaze.
Ja66 - “shareyourspirit” / “drag sesh”
There’s a couple of tics that recur across so many of Ja66’s tracks: a deep, taut ah! and a clipped vocal that sounds like he’s cut off before he can finish: esh. These shards of syllable makes songs that would otherwise hit like a serene breeze turn icily askew. The fidgety sleekness is mirrored by the manic yet manicured lyrics—Ja swerves between sipping beer at a frat house and fighting demons in the mirror, speaking “fluent Overdosenese” and flaming Shein. He should win a prize for “All these niggas dorks, make that choppa sing like Bjork.”
jackzebra - “你怎么知道” / “认真你就输了”
When I first listened to jackzebra after seeing him on an AVYSS EOY list in 2021, I was startled he had no fanbase. I couldn’t understand the lyrics, but his delivery felt fresh—the way he smeared his voice so it blotched across the mix and every melody came out curved, illusive, swirly like an expressionist painting.
His rise has been fun to witness; I’m sad I couldn’t see him perform at 2 a.m. at The Broadway this past month. The “Chinese Bladee” meme was doofy and shallow but maybe that’s what the masses needed to be onboarded, and the zooted opulence of his regalia beats have made Anglophones fill in the comprehension gap thinking his lyrics must be genius. It turns out his lyrics do include meaningful references to 1700s literature and reflections on things like Chinese class divides. Dreamy plugg’n’b might be our twenty-first century Tower of Babble.
Magdalena Bay - “Image”
I like Mag Bay well enough, but the adulation around Imaginal Disk was exhausting: Oh my Gilgamesh, best album ever! Two geniuses from Mars! For a certain faction of TikTok pundits and RYM fiends, Imaginal Disk became the magda opus of the 2020s, the art-pop masterpiece for synth nerds who worship JPEGMAFIA. Blame some of this on the streaming era’s shortage of finely sculpted concept albums, and the resulting tendency to praise anything remotely intricate and operatic as next-level godly. There’s also just not much competition in the “hyperpop x synthpop x Tame Impala x galaxy-brain themes” lane.
All that said, I love the curtsying waltz of “Image.” Mica Tenenbaum overuses her feathery-frail register but here it really fits, tendrilling around the warm drum and piano like a lavender perfume. The word “pirouette” pretty much always scans as pretentious in music writing, but this is one of the only songs with such a delicate glide that it feels deserved. All those angelic, barely-there words: coiling, billowing, swishing, translucent. She’s a whirling sprite, thin as air.
mica levi - “slob air”
The artist’s first release with Hyperdub zeroes in on the swooning climax of a shoegaze song and stretches it out for 12 minutes, til your dopamine-receptors are aching. Keys hover in a feverish glissando, like they’re supposed to make a decision but daydreaming distractedly, while a drum clangs blurrily. If mica levi ever decides to go full Praxis mode and architect a 10,000-population state in the middle of the Mediterranean that blasts “slob air” as its national anthem on a never-ending propaganda-loudspeaker loop, count me the hell in.
MJ Lenderman - “Wristwatch”
I’ve been into Wednesday for ages but it took me a while to give in to the hype around their guitarist’s solo music. “Wristwatch” is undeniable: The cresting slam-dunk of the main riff, the campfire loghouse warmth, the begrimed ache of his pathetic pleas. The himbo dome, baby.
Nettspend - “Shut Up” / “Skipping Class” / “Cha Ching” w/ Osamason
You could print a zine of the cheesiest Nettspend insults:
His voice is so off rhythm it’s like the beat friendzoned him!
This is counterculture for Roblox gooners!
Walmart Bladee!
Xavierso-not-based!
To Pimp A Butterfly for iPad kids!
Yeah, it’s reduced-calorie moshpit music. But his best bars and vocal chains, filtered through the mega-cluttered, hyperkinetic production, sound hysterically alive. Let’s Create Art <3
thatcherblackwood - “basalt”
Hit play for the six minutes of haunted rock (RIYL: digicore with strings that make you feel like you’re in a forest, a claustrophobic chorus of cries that for some reason makes me think of Tim Burton, mathy acoustic licks). Stay for the insanity that comes next: A color bass explosion so warped it makes my stomach drop like I’m parachuting out of a plane.
twikipedia - “room for one”
I remember hearing this the day I landed in Granada, stuffed on a small bed in a tiny Airbnb so close to a bustling plaza that cheers and chatter filled our room all day. The dusty scrappiness of “room for one” really resonated in the moment. It’s nothing like the digicore pioneer’s earliest experiments, but it’s got that same knack for melody and feeling. It’s the soundtrack for the spring of your life, a three-minute bildungsroman that makes you want to get up and live.
vyrval - “✻H+3+ЯД✻7luCJIo0T6...”
10 months after this song spread, I still have no idea who vyrval is, where they’re from, what the title’s supposed to mean, and how it came about. This was the first song the mysterious producer ever released, and it has over 100 million Spotify streams. Earlier this year, it became a bizarre anthem in the wake of the Crocus City Hall massacre, in which 145 concertgoers in Moscow were killed by alleged terrorists. YouTube uploads of the track were inundated with Russians commenting “RIP” with flower emotes. It feels less like a piece of programmed music than a field recording from a Death Star demolition zone. It’s the most electrifying sonic nightmare from what I call cursed jumpstyle, a sallow, sickly 2020s version of the gabber subgenre that buries its distinctive spongy kicks in apocalyptic synths.
There are so many freaky iterations on this new style — creepily languid slumpstyle, Yabujin’s angelic spells. You could file vyrval’s song under jumpbile. It’s a toxic waste cesspool of kicks, breakbeats, and screwy synth chaos that’s nauseating yet irresistible.
BONUS: Ceri ASMR - THE BREATHIEST FAST AND AGGRESSIVE ASMR WITH STUTTERS
ASMR is going psycho these days… this is basically the “Stop Breathing” of whispering videos, borderline glitchcore pop. Her voice quivers so frantically she’s practically hyperventilating—she even said she can’t do the effect for too long because it makes her nauseous and headache-y. But everyone in the comments is like, “you’re the best ASMRtist ever.” One person even wrote that their brain memorized every relaxation trigger timestamp so they “can’t tingle the next time.”
The Top 15
#15 - wokeups - “fragged aht”
Dearest Deacon of Fraggersville,
I write with an urgent entreaty. Thou must listen to “fragged aht” by wokeups. It arrived in my eardrums like a messenger on horseback, a carrier pigeon in the night.
There, betwixt the percussive shards and voluptuous synth line, thou shall behold a pillar of vocal matter so luminous it shatters my conception of the real, the human — and verily I am a humanist but its sheer majesty surpasses all that my mortal mind is capable of envisaging. None of my feeble transcription services were able to convey its meaning in lyric form. I tasked my scrivener, Spongluss, with deciphering the message. His result: GUOOOGOOOEGOOAAAH. Upon the instant I heard its gleaming GUOOG, I felt myself o’ercome with a sense of rapture — a glorious surrender it twas indeed in the way it vouchsafed beatified brain-bliss. Heretofore I had never experienced such an emptying of my ego. It makes the plebeian bards in the town square busking “Medieval Rap Type Beats” with their costcutter woodsmiths’ mandolins resemble mere Shakespearean fan-clubbers.
Prithee take heed of my heart’s petition: thou must persuade Pope SoundCloudius XIVX to deploy this sonic blessing as a potential antidote for those suffering from the Streambait Plague. My dearest, thou know I have been gravely afflicted by illnesses such as Long Covid. I must say, the singular beam of radiance that is “fragged aht” cured me of all my sundry ailments — grippe, quinsy, vent gleet, dropsy, the French pox.
Ensconced in the celestial swath of synthesizers and regal Auto-Tune wizardry, I have become a healed and holy man. Rather than litter gravestones with flowers and “RIP” text, I propose we protect our dead with wokeups’ lyrical fragments. I just went to the cemetery and inscribed “Ho got hella coke, she finna blow her nose galore (galore)” on my grandnan’s tomb.
Yours fondly,
K
#14 - 2hollis - “crush”
Maybe my favorite musical moment of the year erupts at the end of “crush,” when the yearning ballad breaks into a shotgun spree of kick drums. It pumpfakes the popstar pomp, the Top 40 hooky chorus, before degenerating into rawstyle, a form of hardstyle that’s an even more serrated and downright disgusting form of an already electric subgenre. “crush” is ostensibly a romantic song, an ode to an unnamed cutie. Instead, the tune makes me feel like my face has completely melted off, cheeks and eyebrows incinerated.
#13 - bleood - “ooo” / yuke - “ian goin”
REPORT: ‘Symphony of Shrill’ Strains the Bounds of Listenability In Paradigm-Shifting Survey
Abstract: This experiment seeks to determine the material health consequences of the human ear canal, or the external auditory meatus (E.A.M. Triplin), when breached by music at the outer reaches of listenability. Patients were subjected to two symphonies of shrill, bleood’s “ooo” and yuke’s “ian goin,” produced by zai and karakuli, respectively. The former has been described by award-winning music journalists as a “tantalizing orgy-orchestra of bleeps, tweeps, and shrieks,” while the latter has been called the “logical excruciating endpoint of the ‘terror plugg’ style,” in which the 808s “cry like feral lemurs.” By forcing the subjects to listen to these songs on repeat while they are under captivity in remote observation, we hoped to see a Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest evolution take place in live-time.
Lack of data on the subject has led this paper to be named a Fulbright Scholar “Pioneering Study” of 2024.
General Enjoyability
‘Absolutely gas!’ 11% of respondents
‘Texturally intriguing but not replayable’ 39% of respondents
‘No opinion one way or the other’ 1% of respondents
‘Failed to make an agreeable impression’ 29% of respondents
‘Total dog diarrhea’ 20% of respondents
Hearing Damage
No loss detected: 28% of respondents
-0.1-1.0dB loss: 51% of respondents
1.1-dB+ loss: 25% of respondents
Complete deafness: 6% of respondents
Free Response Section (select, anonymous answers shown)
“There’s something delightfully Proustian about the crinkly, mutilated bird-cries of bleood’s beat.”
“im like not trinyng to draw sympathy, but ‘ian goin’ brought me bac to a terrible time in my life when i got run over by a tractor and my ruptured ears were bleedin and shit, so im gonna sue u”
“I’m Mainly Filling This Out Because They Said I’d Get A Free Amazon Prime Gift Card”
“This stuff is cool, Im gonna show my son when he gets back from Mormon camp!”
Our survey was conducted with 564 humans and 1 snow camel on September 13, 2024, in Yakutsk City Hall, as part of an effort to warm up those cold Siberians. The methodology included base weighting for percentages of telephone numbers and Discord handles sampled in the stratum. More research is needed to accurately determine the effects of music.
#12 - anarchy - “superbowl” prod. dj ess
Bass so fat it’s like your mind is in a microwave, like a 50-pound bowling ball’s been dropped on your face, like you’re kissing the sun, like your brain’s a hot air balloon, like eating a Phaal curry, like the 808s got a BBL and their ass is clapping up an earthquake, like a sandstorm, like hellfire, like riding Kingda Ka and the wind’s stretching your mouth wide. I have no clue what the title is referencing—the football game? A massive bowl of weed? All I can think of is a 14-year-old standing in the eye of a dust bowl, commanding the grimy gale like an airbender.
#11 - Fine - “Coasting”
Everything is too fast nowadays, too stimuli-fucked sludge-content nightcore hysteria MrBeast retention-roided corecore psychoscrolling. What about some radiant lethargy? Where are the moments of contented stillness, the absent-minded daydreams, the hours that dilate and stretch out like an endless school period? I’ve spent a lot of my life running, trying to break PRs and sprint a mile in four minutes. Now I want to coast. I want to hit the top of the mountain and let gravity guide me down the crest. I want to lose myself in the leathery swirl of “Coasting.” There’s no accordion in the song, but it makes me imagine falling into a bed-size version of the instrument, sleeping between the bellows in its soft folds, drifting off while being lightly tossed to and fro.
#10 - Tinashe - “Nasty”
I’ve been a nasty girl, I whisper to my therapist as I join our weekly video call.
“Hmm, okay!” they reply in the Zoom chat (their camera is always off because they lack self-confidence). “I’m glad you’ve overcome the dry streak you kept talking about.”
Will you match my freak? I ask, coquettishly.
“Ha Ha, I don’t think that’s super professional,” they type, with a “:P” emoji at the end.
Pillow talking got my throat raspy, I continue.
“Maybe you need a softer fill!” they say.
I got stamina, they say I’m an athlete.
“Oh, you’re running again? That’s a great way to stave off seasonal depression.”
If you do it too good, I’m gonna get attached.
“Ah yes, the scientific term for that is transference, we can’t—”
‘Cause it feels like heaven when it hurts so bad.
They type for a second. Pause. Type again.
…
“Hey, Stockholm syndrome is real. You’re valid! If there’s something painful going on in your life, the patient-therapist confidentiality agreement doesn’t cover that, and you need to tell me.”
No, you DUMBASS, I snort, I’m just reciting the lyrics to Tinashe’s hit single “Nasty,” a sultry slow-glide of a tune that revels in the heady glow of abandoning your inhibitions. Even more electric is Jane Remover’s “Match My Tweak” remix, which sounds more suited for bopping uncontrollably than sensual grinding. My God, I’m listening to it right now—you can’t hear it because I’m wearing tiny AirPods—and I think it’s solved my depression! Bye!!!!!!!
#9 - Cash Cobain - “Rump Punch”
There was a whole lot of sexy drill this year that’s sweet, sensual, seductive—stuff you’d sing in the shower thinking about your crush or blast out of the car as you’re swaggering downtown. Nonchalant dudes humming about drowning in pussy. What attracted me most was “Rump Punch,” a Cash Cobain hit so sparse and subdued it’s borderline melancholic. There’s the lightest lick of percussion, and synths so blue it’s as if you’re staring into the Mariana Trench. Then you have Cash with a typically raunchy, horndog hook that sounds so weird in this woeful context: “Girl, you got the fatty, wanna be callin' me daddy/Top-five nasty, you ain't even gotta ask me.” He says a woman tastes like rump punch and scolds guys who can’t make their girl come once, when he can do it twice. But with this overcast sky, it’s like, are you munching or mourning? Are you getting a nut off or going nuts yourself, dissociating in the punch?
#8 - Jane Remover - “Flash in the Pan”
Jane’s catalog is an exquisite corpse, emphasis on exquisite. Her witches brew of sounds is almost always intoxicating, from dariacore to digital shoegaze to drum’n’breakdowns. “Flash in the Pan” breaks down and rewires sonic particles like she’s trying to reveal a new chemical element. There’s angelic K-pop melodies, sexy drill’s tickling percussion; everything crests into a 1000-degree alt-rock blaze. What elevates it beyond just a stew of sounds is how she sprinkles it with concrete storytelling. It’s a tale of delirious yearning filtered through a trip on the NJ Transit, from 30th Street through Newark Penn Station, with a piercing image of her “laying on the tracks at Metropark Station, waiting on you to come save my life.” And unlike so much so-called “genre-fusing” music in Spotify’s “Anti-Pop” playlists, the hook is anthemic yet endearingly original, a playful producer-brained taunt: “P-pretty boy said I was just a flash in the pan… I could take her flow if I can't take her man.” The Periodic Table of Jane keeps expanding with unknown gems and new precious minerals.
#7 - EQ, Estratosfera, Qiri - “Boytoy”
Yes yes believe me I’m sick too of the endless tedious indie sleaze discourse — but forgive me this final paragraph on the subject. The output from this new wave has largely been uninventive and insipid, like The Dare’s poser prurience, or only offers fleeting thrills like Snow Strippers’ overclocked electroflash. ‘Indie sleaze’ was always a dogwater algorithm-bait framework anyway—musicians have made sleazy-sounding hyperactive tunes for ages. It’s suddenly a “moment” because a famous photographer is taking pics of hot girls in clubs, and publications need new trends, new cultural epochs to cover.
Finally, after all these false prophets, “Boytoy” hits like a little revelation. Here’s something genuinely sexy, charming, sonically jolting. Estratosfera sings sweetly about a man she’s been going out with for months, how she styles him and watches him throw ass at a gay bar, how “he’s so innocent,” and “I guess I’m so corrupted.” They’re in a liminal space where everything is oozy and lovely, the relationship limits haven’t yet been set. “Babe, with me you can be you, and, babe, with you I can be me,” she coos with a slight quiver, like a watt of electricity is tingling through her vocal cords. “It's just our modern love story.” Rather than light up the dancefloor with a fierce hook or cavernous lowend, EQ makes mesmerizing use of negative space: pom-poms of synth bass clap together, garbled vox pop and shiver like tickly whispers. There’s enough room to imagine the possibilities, to fill the void with furtive glances and blushing smiles. Estratosfera switches to Spanish, drawing syllables out seductively like she’s clawing at your neck. “I'm feeling so cheeky with you,” she teases. By the end, sentence structures have lost control and she’s just repeating boy, toy,boy, toy, geeked out on the infantilizing rush of desire.
#6 - xaviersobased - “Need Me” (prod. him and reklus1ve)
So much of the most electrifying new rap music feels like it lives in a liminal realm between teenage bedrooms and Discord channels. It’s easy to forget about all the real-world events that give lore and shape to these artists’ mythologies, like Nettspend’s “shine n peace” throwdown at Market Hotel, the clip of LAZER DIM 700 bobbing his head goofily at a listening party in Bed-Stuy, Drain Gang’s post-pandemic coronation luring every non-binary Brooklynite to Knockdown Center.
There’s a lot to like about the xav and reklus1ve-produced “Need Me”: the angel-yawn synths and dream-of-consciousness flow; the blurry slurry of lyrics about Asics and Yeezys and his collective 1c inexplicably being broadcasted on a TV. But what really gives it a distinct essence are the intro and outro, which splice in clips from an interview Xavier did with DJ Rennessy where they recall a show at the Bushwick venue The End (formerly Heaven) in late 2022. “That's legendary, bro,” DJ Rennessy brags in the song. “I'm telling you right now: We gon' pass, like, five-ten years from now, bro, and people gon' look at that show, I'm telling you.”
It was indeed a sweet night. All my usual misgivings about the venue (tight; hot; spatially vexing) evaporated. The lineup captured three of the most exciting new strains of the genre—evilgiane and eera’s cosmic ambience with Surf Gang, xaviersobased’s warped jerk, the addictive fever of Certified Trapper’s Milwaukee rap. Add DJ Rennessy and Drain Gang associate Woesum too. The young crowd was thronged with cups and joints, collaborators and friends, people who’d likely only known each other on Twitter before and traveled hours to get there. The highlight was Xavier, swaggering in the middle of a hulking mob, shirtless, hurling out a grabbag of bangers from his back catalog. The dancefloor became a juddering wormhole.
Listening to “Need Me” now with all that in mind feels like floating in the afterlife, a panorama of memories flashing in my brain. And putting myself in Xavier’s shoes, it’s like an eagle-eye glide above the scene he helped spark and the musicians in his wake. It doesn’t feel arrogant partly because Xavier still hasn’t gotten his flowers, with others riffing on his style and surging above him. It was clearly one of those pivotal nights, where every drip of sweat that hit me on the crammed dancefloor felt like a little bead of creative energy.
#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.
#4 - Bassvictim - “Air on a G String”
Bach was GOATed but his G strings don’t have shit on Bassvictim. It’s been a while since I’ve heard a song exude such an overt sense of fun—the kind of effortlessly playful that makes me forget I’m a music critic. Instead of immediately identifying what genre it is, the scene it’s riffing on, the layers of sounds and effects, my brain starts hula-hooping with glee: SCHOOL’S OUT! Time to dash through the beach in my underwear and bolt into the sea.
The duo said they recorded the song in one day, the day after they formed a band, which feels both serendipitous and sensible. Any more time spent laboring over the electroclash beat probably would’ve extinguished its winky spark. Even the synths sound like they’re off their tits, wriggling and spinning across the mix with the impish mischief of a troublemaking toddler. After a certain point, the storytelling falls away and Maria Manow just starts giggling. “My underwear is showing. I'm showing MY underwear! I don't even care, don't you dare tell me that's wrong.” It hits like some bizarre scene out of an R-rated Diary of a Wimpy Kid book. It’s horny and hot on the surface but really just silly and primal: I'm running around and I'm getting wild.
#3 - Charli xcx - BRAT but it’s an EOY blurb, or something
I tried pitching this story to a dozen places, but nobody wanted it. What the hell, this would’ve gone crazy on the pageview charts! Anyway, here’s the story of how I discovered a secret challenge at the Charli xcx Storm King Brat Album But It’s An Experience™ experience.
The other week, myself and a few hundred VIPs—other journalists, local stans, TikTok pundits—were invited to take the Metro-North upstate for a private Charli xcx concert at the outdoor Storm King sculpture garden. It was organized to celebrate the release of her remix album. This random Thursday felt late-term-pregnant with potential: Would there be free food? How would the remix album sound? Would I fall in bratty love with another Angel? What if Charli did a bump off a sculpture?
Upon arrival, the vibes were chill sesh. They shepherded us along a tree-flanked path, past immense sculptures and little creeks. We milled in a clearing, munching on BRAT-green hamburgers and pork buns stamped with Charli winking prepared by food carts. There was a lot of waiting; Charli was supposed to perform at 3pm, but she was late. Time yawned on and we grew restless—the tone of the collective conversation morphed from feverish glee to acidic confusion. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a glow stick waving in the distance, deep inside the tree-covered forest. It looked like a crossing guard with reflective gear at night.
I’m a journalist, so I knew I had to explore. Just when I started motioning toward the light, a plume of rapturous cheers exploded: Charli’s limousine was pulling up the hill, crushing all the vegetation underfoot, toward the giant BRAT sculpture erected in her honor. I had to make a split-second decision: report on the show, which I was supposed to do, or get freaky with it?
So I began sprinting toward the glow—which was starting to fade, just as Charli’s music was rising in volume. I fearlessly scrambled into the forest, nearly dropping my tote bag containing my new Uniqlo thermal gloves, and found the woman holding the colored stick.
“Welcome young Brat-awan,” she bowed. “You made it just in time. This is the Charli xcx Storm King Brat Album But It’s An Experience™ Pre-show Challenge Opportunity. Follow the signs.”
I realized that she was standing above a stairwell. Summoning up all my courage, which wasn’t much because I’m generally known as a pretty feckless and pathetic person, I descended. Festooned on the dank walls were portraits of Charli in various poses and points of her career. The stairwell speaker seemed to be blasting every song Charli has ever released at once, so it came out as a cacophonous, metallic onslaught, an omni-choir of pure 100% Charli potency.
At the bottom, it was revealed that I was about to enter a Gauntlet of the Angels. I would face a series of tasks and if I completed it, which no one had yet managed to do, I’d win prizes.
Round One involved mediating a conversation between two frenemies in what was a simulated “Girl, so confusing” situation. I sat down with them for hours, carefully teasing out their vitriol and reaching a point where both parties realized they liked each other. When I completed the challenge, Lorde came out of a secret hole in the wall and gave me a New Zealand-style hug.
Round Two was already insane: I needed to survive in a panopticonic GITMO-esque cell where I was bombarded with a relentless barrage of Addison Rae’s scream from the “Von dutch” remix. Each round, the pitch surged up and the volume became even more piercing, pushing me to the brink. As excruciating as it became—her cries are still ringing in my mind—I never quit.
For Round Three, they had built a mini-studio underground. Sitting inside was New York rapper Wiki. They gave me a brief and said I had to collaborate with Wiki and Charli xcx AI tools (I was to perform Charli’s vocals) to produce Bratking, a new album that tells the story of ambitious city dwellers striving to overthrow the tyranny of Dimes Square. The template record image showed an ouroboros of cocaine, symbolizing a ratking of debauchery. Despite my minor experience in music production (I had a brief stint as an emo rapper when I was 14), Wiki and I cooked up something thrilling enough to get a Brat New Music review by Witchfork writer A.G. Cook.
The staff member who let me in, who was giving me instructions over the loudspeakers, told me I made it farther than any other contestant today. I was briefly jubilant. But then she said I was about to face the toughest challenge of them all. The Final Round: The Brat Obstacle Course.
It began with a hall of swinging knives, which each had “sympathy” written on them; the final knife was wielded by featured artist Ariana Grande herself. Next I had to keep my wits about me as I swerved through a maze of funhouse mirrors; Bladee’s voice drifted out of every corner, offering nihilistic adages and anhedonic maxims to get me to lose faith and give up. I finally made it through and came upon a gargantuan body of cave water. To pass, I had to climb aboard and maneuver my way through the PC Music farewell tour boat, while Umru distracted me with a live DJ set. It was also midway sinking, in a 2020s hyperpop recreation of the Titanic.
Finally, the last stage—I needed to ascend a tall underground mountain while staff members wearing the costumes of every single featured artist pelted me with apples. They tore me up, bruising my forehead and shoulders and hands. “I hope you’re free bleeding!” the Caroline Polachek lookalike warbled angelically. When a staff member wearing a badly stitched Julian Casablancas getup smashed me right in the mouth, I nearly lost balance and tumbled back to the bottom. But luckily, I had equipped my Uniqlo thermal gloves, which gave me the grip to hold on.
“Congratulations,” the original staff woman grinned after I reached the summit. “You are the platonic brat, with an insatiable desire to be tamed.”
When I finished, they rewarded me with a chartreuse-green cocktail, a booklet with a guide on how to register to vote for Kamala Harris, a poorly manufactured tote bag, and a t-shirt that said “Art” in the BRAT font. I flipped the t-shirt on Grailed for $6 million. I’m now living on my own private island with a live-in Michelin star chef and a private farm with alpacas.
#2 - LAZER DIM 700 - “TAKE U OUT” / “SPEED DRIVE” (prod. KRXXK)
These are easily the hardest beats LAZER has ever rapped over. The beat for “TAKE U OUT,” 69 seconds of wicked adrenaline, is so whacked-out that Lazer uses the first few lines to process its weirdness—“Different beat, this a different sound,” he marvels. His fawks sync up perfectly with those evil tremors, and his relentless rattle makes him sound like a video game supervillain amid KRXXK’s cosmic hellscape. This is music for an arena show in the Distortion World, that indigo-black parallel Pokemon universe ruled by the winged beast Giratina. I can see LAZER floating in the sky, maniacally cooking up on BandLab while sending an army of fans into a seismic moshpit below. It’s tragic that he and KRXXK haven’t linked up again since.
#1 - st47ic - “*WGOKYS* GENRE KILLER”
st47ic should be one of the most celebrated of this generation, but I selfishly hope he stays underground so he’ll keep dropping hellspawn bass and writing titles so long they’re like evil haikus. “*WGOKYS* GENRE KILLER” is fucking mental, a final deathmatch of a beat that stutters like one long, malfunctioning producer tag. Sobs and samples flash in like bright faces in a scary fog: I reckon if this keeps up, I'm gonna die. Shards of scorn fly across the mix: Nerves; the worst; I put you in the dirt; you better fucking learn; pu-pu-put your shit back, ssshh- www- hhhh. Witch gang or kill yourself. By the end, st47ic has completely lost his face in the crazed churn, his voice chopped up in the musical meat grinder. “Witch gang or kill yourself,” he spasms repeatedly, every line punctuated with a command: KILL HIM!
Life in 2024 has become something like a perpetual jumpscare. Obviously, this song has nothing to do with any of that and isn’t trying to be deep—it’s basically just a 90-second ad for his collective, Witch Gang, telling you to kill yourself if you’re not part of the crew. But something about its sheer madness—those cold snares, the plaintive wails, the asphyxiating synths—feels distinctly of this sick moment.