On July 29, 2024, Matmos’ Drew Daniel had a dream. A raver was telling him about a style of music, in 5/4 time, at 212 BPM, with “super crunched out sounds,” as he explained that morning in a tossed-off post describing the imaginary genre, which in the dream was called “hit em.”
Soon, the dream spilled into real life: People began responding to Daniel’s post with homemade hit em tracks of their own. One sounded a bit like ambient cumbia with Rhodes keys; one was made solely with Chipmunked vocal samples; one had a fluffy FlyLo vibe; one was sort of shoegaze rave. NPR, The Guardian, and Stereogum all covered the phenomenon. Within a week and a half, a record label in Bend, Oregon, had released a 16-track compilation dedicated to the style; another compilation, curated by Daniel and Machinedrum’s Travis Stewart, is due out this fall, whittled down from more than 90 submissions.
You could look at all this viral creativity as just another meme. But I think the outpouring of enthusiasm for a made-up genre speaks to a curious nexus of frustration and desire in the air right now, at the midpoint of the 2020s. There’s a nagging feeling that electronic music, for all its former promise, is spinning its wheels. And there’s a yearning for something more—an unspoken wish that things could be more interesting, more daring, more audacious.
Before you counter with, “Well, what about [insert your envelope-pushing fave]?” I’m well aware that there’s no shortage of great, groundbreaking works of genius being made regularly. But electronic music used to be motivated less by genius than by what Brian Eno once called scenius, the hive-mind buzz of ideas evolving as they rippled across the community. That sense of collective creativity is currently in short supply. In the West, anyway, when’s the last time a fledgling subgenre made a significant impact on the scene? Planet Mu’s Bangs & Works, Vol. 1, the compilation that broke Chicago footwork to the outside world, came out 14 years ago. I suspect the enthusiasm for hit em—even if it is confined to a tiny circle of experimental connoisseurs, Ableton geeks, and online nerds—speaks to a subconscious wish for a radical new style to flip our collective wigs, a sound that might supply the same kind of rush that footwork did, or dubstep, or jungle, the first time you heard it. A sound that you struggle to process. A sound that feels like a dream made real.
Whatever dreams may have been swirling in electronic music’s collective unconscious on January 1, 2020, they were fated to die on the vine. Reports of the novel coronavirus began circulating widely that month, and, by March, governments in Europe and North America began imposing needed lockdowns. A wave of venue closures and grounded flights brought dance music to a standstill. A sense of disbelief set in, but so did a sense of shared purpose (remember “flattening the curve”?). “There should be an ethical responsibility where we say, ‘We’d rather stop everything for two weeks, see how things evolve, and hopefully this doesn’t reach the summer,’” noted a European booking agent I spoke to at the time. “Because if this reaches summer, we’re all properly fucked. That’s going to be a catastrophe.”
“Fucked,” it turns out, was an understatement. More than a year of closures, cancellations, restrictions, and on-again-off-again ups and downs lay on the horizon. Summer festivals that canceled their 2020 editions planned 2021 comebacks, only to put the kibosh on those, too. And whether it was the catalyst or simply the first link in a grim chain of misfortunes, COVID marked the beginning of vast economic shifts in the industry. Roughly 31 percent of the United Kingdom’s nightclubs went out of business between March 2020 and December 2023; a report this spring tracked the continued loss of five UK nightclubs every week across 2024. Some commentators theorize that clubs are struggling because partygoers are reserving their raving for festivals. (That was one of the reasons the owners of Berlin’s storied Watergate club gave when they recently announced its closure, after 22 years at the center of Berlin’s scene.) But festivals are struggling, too. Coachella’s ticket sales slumped this year, as did those at a number of other large festivals. And, in the UK, 50 festivals were reported to have given up on 2024.
For dance-music historians, the first few years of the 2020s may end up looking like the beginning of a lost decade, the blackened rings in the proverbial tree trunk where a fire decimated the forest. What is strange, then, is that just four and a half years after COVID-19 hit, it can be hard to remember that it happened at all. Musically speaking, the dance and electronic music scenes today look more or less like business as usual. Lineups aren’t much different from what they were five years ago. Glance at Pitchfork’s best electronic music of 2019—Four Tet, Caribou, Joy Orbison, Overmono, Peggy Gou, Octo Octa, AceMoMa—and it would be easy to assume it was a list from 2024. And vice versa: Pitchfork’s 2023 list—Aphex Twin, Actress, DJ Koze, Four Tet, Everything But the Girl, Octo Octa, Overmono, Skrillex, Yaeji—is heavily titled toward established artists and sounds.
This shift back to business as usual is even stranger when you consider the social upheavals and global turbulence of the past five years. In 2020 and 2021, the Black Lives Matter movement briefly seemed to presage a moment of reckoning in dance music, a scene largely rooted in Black communities and traditions in the United States and worldwide, but the idea that dance music might be a vehicle for social change feels more distant than ever in 2024, in the context of Russia’s war on Ukraine and Israel’s aggression against Palestine and Lebanon. Torn between engagement and escapism, dance music’s nominally progressive communities have struggled to agree upon a meaningful response. Perhaps a scene predicated largely on partying isn’t a good vehicle for political organizing in the first place. At the same time, it seems odd that in an era of social upheaval on any number of fronts—the right wing’s attack on civil liberties and reproductive freedom in the United States; white nationalist and populist parties’ electoral victories in Europe; the looming catastrophe of climate change—electronic music, on the macro level, seems barely to have noticed.
If any style benefited from the doldrums of lockdown, however, it’s ambient music. Ambient had already been on the upswing, aided both by a creative resurgence (signaled by exploratory, atmospheric work from artists like Oneohtrix Point Never, Emily A. Sprague, Huerco S., and Sarah Davachi, and the roster of the Music From Memory label) and the growing demand stoked by streaming culture and mood-based playlists. But, in 2020, as people found themselves confined to their homes, pulse-lowering mood music became a big mood indeed. Artists from all across the genre spectrum got in on the act—Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker and James Krivchenia; members of Future Islands and Napalm Death; even trance maven Ferry Corsten and EDM chameleon Diplo.
By 2022, sleep and mood playlists were directing millions of plays—and, despite streaming’s paltry economics, surprisingly robust royalty checks—to nominally obscure experimental musicians like William Basinski, whose music otherwise has little outwardly populist appeal. The past five years have given us a wealth of recordings that push the boundaries of what ambient music might be—the murky intensity of Laurel Halo’s Atlas, the expansive drones of KMRU’s Peel, the fogged nostalgia of Burial’s Antidawn—along with timely reissues of classic works that suddenly sound more meaningful than ever. The idea that electronic music is as much for listening as it is for dancing—as much for inner transport as physical movement—has never been stronger.
At the other end of the spectrum, the post-pandemic return to clubbing kicked off a kind of silly season, as all that pent-up demand exploded in an expression of irrational exuberance (to quote the philosopher of an earlier bubble). Tempos are widely noted to have risen precipitously, soaring from 120 or 130 BPM to well into the 140s or above, reflecting clubbers’ growing hunger for styles like hard techno, trance, and drum’n’bass. DJ-focused streaming platforms like Boiler Room and Hör, instrumental in spreading club culture beyond the boundaries of physical clubs, are awash in hard dance. Ruminative styles like deep house and minimal techno are out, replaced by Eurodance edits and Y2K pop nostalgia. Acts like Berlin’s Marlon Hoffstadt (aka DJ Daddy Trance) and DJ Heartstring are drawing massive crowds, and racking up streaming numbers, with unabashedly feel-good sets packed with trance-pop chestnuts (Darude’s “Sandstorm,” Alice Deejay’s “Better Off Alone”) and bouncy, 155-BPM “Hotline Bling” edits. In the underground, Two Shell have introduced shitposting irreverence to a scene traditionally known for complex rhythms and cool restraint.
Older heads love to grouse about these shifts; there are anecdotal tales of a new generation of inexperienced clubbers hitting the scene and altering its social fabric (although, as scene ombudsman Shawn Reynaldo recently wrote, it’s debatable how true that scenario really is; is the club scene that driven by youngsters who hadn’t begun clubbing by 2019 yet flooded the clubs in 2022?). Yet even fans of 2024’s dizzy tempos and gaudy colors explicitly tie the birth of the new sound to the aftermath of COVID-19. “I wanna thank these lads,” enthused the Boiler Room MC as DJ Heartstring began cueing up the sparkly, speedy, yet sentimentalist intro to their 2023 set at Belfast’s AVA festival. “They helped me start feeling again after the pandemic.”
Dance music has always been a site of tension between opposing forces—niche tastes and underground communities on one side, massification and commercialization on the other. Movements, reactions, and counterreactions come in waves. The original disco scene, Black and queer, begat normie acceptance and Saturday Night Fever; the racist, homophobic “Disco Sucks” backlash sent the music back underground, where it would morph into house music. Today, to a certain extent, boundaries between underground and overground are dissolving.
One day, Four Tet—as emblematic a representative of old-school, DIY values as you’ll find—might play Coachella’s main stage, or Madison Square Garden, alongside Skrillex and Fred again..; the next day he’s closing Lollapalooza with an impenetrable Autechre deep cut. Techno—once the music of Black futurists in Detroit, then countercultural rabble-rousers in post-reunification Berlin—is today the stuff of TikTok memes and arguably more popular than ever before. But contemporary techno, in its narrow focus on pummeling kicks and buzzsaw arpeggios, miles from the quirks and sensuality of ’80s Detroit, or the relentless focus of ’90s Berlin, looks almost like a simulacrum at best, or a parody at worst. And Fred again..’s stadium-filling, pleasant-at-best mashups of deep house and pop suggest what happens when electronic music loses its oppositional charge, its sense of urgency.
Some of dance music’s recent massification is almost certainly a good thing. It seems undeniable that there are more people making and enjoying dance music than ever before, and not only in North America and Europe. Just look at Boiler Room, whose recent broadcasts include packed rooms and surging crowds in Singapore, Bengaluru, Johannesburg, Mumbai, Bogotá, Seoul, Delhi—the list goes on. More than ever, trying to come up with a totalizing account of dance music feels like a fool’s errand, even within the walled garden as seen on Boiler Room. Is it Brazilian DJ Ramon Sucesso reinventing everything you know about DJing? Is it Special Request and Anz banging out crowd-pleasing garage and house? Is it Charli XCX going brat in Ibiza? Is it Sama’ Abulhadi headlining a showcase of Palestinian artists in Ramallah?
That explosion of worldwide activity is also good news for hit em fans, and everyone else who is hankering for music that sounds strange, uninhibited, and unexpected. In Asia, a patchwork of scenes and subgenres is yielding new sounds and even allegiances that challenge hegemonic Western perspectives and colonial histories. Brazil’s funk scene is a hotbed of radical sonics, from the spartan, almost gothic minimalism of DJ Anderson do Paraiso to the trebly overload of DJ K and the blown-out industrial sonics of D.Silvestre. In Tanzania, an experimentally minded set of producers is pushing the country’s singeli sound to ever more bewildering limits. Venezuelan club pioneers like DJ Babatr are finally getting their due, buoyed by interest in the diverse array of styles and scenes that’s sometimes called—however erroneously—“Latin club.” Egyptian producers like 3Phaz and ZULI are turning out dazzlingly textured club tracks fusing experimental sound design with intricate rhythms.
At this month’s Unsound festival, in Kraków, I found myself dancing to spry, swift-moving bass music in a tiny Ukrainian expat club—the dancefloor must have fit 20 people, tops—where the energy was so completely lit, the sound so refreshingly now, that it seemed impossible there was another club on the planet that night that could lay a more authoritative claim to being the center of the dance-music universe. The best thing about electronic music at the midpoint of the 2020s is that there is no center, no norm, no standard; everything is up for grabs.
Even before arriving in Poland, I’d been taking inspiration from artists like Chuquimamani-Condori, whose 2023 album DJ E collages together Andean styles like huayno and kullawada into an overwhelming, ecstatic rush of frequency and sensation. While rooted in the California-born artist’s Aymara culture and heritage, its firehose-like rush of sound feels a lot like trying to make sense of electronic music in 2024. It sounds, in fact, like something you might encounter in a dream.
