If you’re sick of your regular music, tired of going around your usual playlists, or just looking for something new, push your musical repertoire to include these obscure subgenres that you’ve maybe never heard before.
Dembow
Dembow is a subgenre formulated in the Caribbean during the mid-1990s. A dembow song is instantly recognizable for its reggaeton rhythm, repeated lyrics, and simple, dancehall structure. The genre originated in poor areas of Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic, but caught fire around the world. The two bar loops in dembow are easy to remember and easy to move to. Built around Riddims, the genre has evolved very much, affected by early rap and hip-hop in a transition away from its more homophobic roots (“dembow” was slang for a gay man).
Listen to: “Muevete Jevi” by El Alfa El Jefe
Qawwali
This form of Islamic devotional music from India and South Asia is notably present in the regions of Pakistan and Bangladesh. Qawwali music is typically spoken in Persian, Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, and Punjabi, but the dialects vary depending on their regional origin. The songs are poetic and reverent and typically last between 15 and 30 minutes, bringing the listener to a hypnotic prayer state.
Listen to: “Haq Ali Ali Haq” by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
Vaporwave
Vaporwave is a microgenre of electronic music, though the term itself was popularized by meme culture. This genre mainly grew from Ramona Xavier’s 2011 album Floral Shoppe, taking after the hypnagogic pop and chill, trippy, surreal vibrancies. Internet chats became havens for fans and creators of vaporwave types, with Reddit, 4chan, Last.fm, and eventually, Bandcamp flooding the Internet with the wideset capital aesthetic titles and VHS-style glitch art.
Listen to: “A1” by Daniel Lopatin
Straight edge
Sometimes called sXe, Straight edge is a subgenre of punk that actually deviates from the drugs and sex, contrary to its umbrella term’s tendencies. The term came from a 1981 song of the same name by the band Minor Threat and focuses on the intolerance of substance use, promiscuity, and the hellbent ways of classic punk, including even the promotion of animal rights and veganism as well as disdain even for caffeine. It mostly originated in Washington D.C. and was carried by Minor Threat frontman Ian MacKaye with influence from Ted Nugent.
Listen to: “Keep it Clean” by the Vibrators
Bubble trance
Particularly hard to sump up as one recognisale genre, bubble trance is more a combination of other trance genres than one itself, incorporating Dream trance, Progressive trance, Hard trance, and Euro dance trance. All these words simply boil down to a hardstyle bass, heavy reverb, house techno, and soundwave experimentation. It is believed that trance itself came from 1990s Germany and Klaus Schulze, a new minimalist artist who released an album called En=Trance.
Listen to: “Outside World” by Sunbeam
Mumble rap
Mumble rap is a term given to a genre that strays from succinct, Chopper rap and spins pronunciation and lyricism on its head by utilizing more rhythmic patterns. Though the lyrics in mumble rap are harder to decipher, the melodic undertones have been aesthetically appealing for a number of rappers, and most of the top rap songs employ this style in some way. Popularized by Rich Gang’s “Lifestyle,” a song that was also “meme’d” by the Internet, mumble rap has gotten flack within the rap world. Regardless, it breaks the bounds of strict rapping and has expanded into microgenres of its own.
Listen to: “March Madness” by Future
Solipsynthm
Solipsynthm – a conjunction of solo laptop synthetic rhythm – is a self-explanatory name given to independent beatmakers and producers and their experimentations. Technology has allowed producers to expand simple beats and layer subgenre upon subgenre. This one’s hard to define because the genre covers almost any indie project using production technology. Who knows, you might have the next best solipsynthm song waiting to be made.
Listen to: “We live the dream” by London-Utrecht
Lowercase
Lowercase is a genre titled by Steve Roden, a minimalist artist who popularized ambient music in a library-commissioned album entitled Forms of Paper. Lowercase music is quiet and bare, with very little musical composition at all, but rather silence peppered with tiny sounds and micro-background noises. Lowercase music is intensely digitally magnified, so that producers can record the smallest, most insignificant of noises – like grass growing, bacteria forming, ant colonies moving, or even snow falling.
Listen to: “Bell is the Truth” by Steve Roden
Dancehall
This revolutionary subgenre comes from Jamaican reggae in the 1970s, a versatile genre that popularized dance moves now recognizable from mainstream hip hop music videos. Dancehall elicits dance competitions in clubs, marked by rapid rhythms and even quicker movements. The genre itself is a competition of sorts, with each new dancehall song faster, harder, sexier, lyrical, and tougher than the last. You can’t help but dance along.
Listen to: “Under Mi Sleng Teng” by Wayne Smith
Baroque pop
This obscure genre fuses styles of rock, classical, pop, and baroque to create an orchestral and often melancholic mood. “In My Life” by The Beatles is a famous baroque-meets-pop tune that employs harpsichords, which artists like Lana del Rey would later return to with “Video Games” and others. Baroque was created in the 1600s and is most prominent in the work of J.S. Bach and Antonio Vivaldi. Baroque pop in the sixties was able to bridge the gap between rock and psychedelia, claims music journalist Matthew Guerreri. It fell out of fashion when punk became popular in the seventies but never lost the allure of soulful sixties songs.
Listen to: “Sunday Will Never Be the Same” by Spanky and Our Gang
Bossa nova
Bossa nova is a samba-based genre of Brazilian music that literally means “new trend” and gained traction during the sixties among the youth in the South Zone of Rio de Janeiro. The instrumentation of Bossa nova is important, from the classical guitar to the percussive downbeat. Bossa nova tunes are often love songs and typically avoided political conversation, which eventually caused the genre to fall out of favor during the turmoil of the mid-sixties.
Listen to: “The Girl from Ipanema” by João Gilberto
Ska punk
This genre of rock takes after reggae beats, and became popular in the United Kingdom just before the advent of punk. The rocksteady rhythm blended seamlessly into hardcore punk rock in a way that appealed to Londoners especially, where a large population of Jamaicans lived. The transition away from the overproduced music of the seventies introduced a new era of shameless, boundless punk rock in the U.K. and beyond. A revival of ska punk came about during the 2010s with bands like Sublime and Slightly Stoopid.
Listen to: “New Girl” by Suicide Machines
