Graphic by Chris Panicker<\/a><\/p>\n ayowitty and bunii\u2019s \u201cdotsong\u201d<\/a> hits like a flashbang of textural excess: regal strings, K.K. Slider squiggles straight out of Animal Crossing, churning drums that could spawn a moshpit. There\u2019s no time to get your bearings; an EDM drop smashes everything to pieces, then a pained voice croons in the rubble while drunkenly mashing a detuned guitar. Insect noises bring you to rest. None of these things should go together, yet they somehow do, bound by raw intuition and force of will. Imagine The Garden<\/a> if they made an anime intro\u2014triumphant yet terrorized by yearning and anxiety. It\u2019s a category-mutilating mess that\u2019s pleasurably spontaneous.<\/p>\n ayowitty is a talented upstart in a swarm of artists amorphously referred to as the \u201cindie scene\u201d\u2014not indie like DIY shoegazers from Pittsburgh or aspiring popstars who can\u2019t get signed because they only have 3,000 monthly listeners. This is \u201cindie\u201d as it\u2019s understood by the online rap underground, which could mean a multitude of things: They used to make rap music and suddenly decided to make alt-rock, they\u2019re members of SoundCloud collectives, they use beatmaker techniques\u2014like opening and ending songs with slowed versions of the instrumental, or spamming sound effects like ad-libs. On YouTube, bedroom producers post tutorials<\/a> on how to make \u201cindie rock beats (without a real guitar).\u201d<\/a> Despite the genre label, this music is closer to emo\u2014often aggressively dramatic, either in the volatile sounds or the woe-stricken lyrics.<\/p>\n A particular strain of depressive droning over looped guitar beats has really taken off in the last year. Many newcomers have been accused of imitating jaydes and wifiskeleton, who, like XXXTentacion before them, began in the rap underworld before turning to tears-and-terror rock. jaydes was arrested last year<\/a> and charged with attempted murder, while wifiskeleton, who had his own allegations of grooming circulating online, died of a suspected drug overdose in May. wifiskeleton\u2019s poignantly titled \u201cNope your too late i already died\u201d exploded around the globe after his death, vaulting him to eight million monthly listeners on Spotify.<\/p>\n \u201cThe indie scene\u2019s popular right now, but a lot of these new guys don\u2019t even like indie music or care about it,\u201d ayowitty tells me. \u201cYou\u2019ll have someone that was making trap a month ago rebrand their Spotify name to, \u2018she\u2019s cutting my skin open and i\u2019m dying,\u2019 and start making shitty indie music\u2026 It\u2019s all just like, \u2018I\u2019m gonna make this wifiskeleton type song and change my name to \u2018scars on my leg.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n witty\u2019s charting a different path for this nebulous cluster. On the 20-year-old\u2019s electrifying album #wings, nearly every track sounds like he started without any clue how it would end. \u201cShe\u201d<\/a> dreams up a cosmic pluggnb canvas for TJAYY before ditching the idea and unleashing a chiptune breakdown worthy of a Pok\u00e9mon Mystery Dungeon boss fight. \u201cI make my music really fucking loud because it\u2019s the only time where I can feel immersed in something,\u201d he says of his sound, which he calls \u201ccryy.\u201d \u201cIt allows me to think and feel like a person for a little bit. When I\u2019m outside, there\u2019s nothing going through my brain, just fried.\u201d<\/p>\n witty says he grew up listening to Pok\u00e9mon soundtracks and that it was pluggnb<\/a>, not classical training or a jazz music education, that taught him how to write chord progressions. He\u2019s also obsessed with video games, particularly the cartoonish fighting game Brawlhalla, which he\u2019s played professionally since age 14. Under the handle STING RAY, he\u2019s won thousands of dollars at tournaments and been one of the top 15 players for the last five years\u2014even reaching number two in the world. \u201cI feel like the gaming got me good at music,\u201d he says. \u201cI looked at it through the perspective of improving in a game.\u201d One way to interpret his work is through the lens of video game music, which he went to Berklee College of Music to study before he was kicked out. VGM treats vocals and instruments like elements to manipulate and mash up, emphasizing chaos that synchronizes with in-game clicks and actions. \u201cthe light left my iris<\/a>\u201d reminds me of the kind of epic symphony that would suit a cutscene.<\/p>\n bunii, another leader of the scene, grew up listening to ayowitty and now works with him actively. The 17-year-old convinced his hero to collaborate after he saw his music on a repost channel. His solo music is much more guitar-forward, all math rock freakouts and intricate chord progressions. He lists Paramore, MCR, American Football, and Japanese rockers like susquatch and The Cabs as fixations. But even the most analog songs shimmer with producer tags: BASTARDS! Before getting into the guitar, bunii started making beats after hearing the pluggnb of Autumn!<\/a> and Genius\u2019 beat deconstruction videos.<\/p>\n This so-called indie music is delightfully immature and cracked at the seams, recorded in that climactic sliver of adolescence when you\u2019re not a clueless kid but also not so old that you\u2019re jaded. Many of the artists are self-taught. \u201cWhenever I\u2019m in my room, there\u2019s always a guitar in my hand,\u201d says bunii. In high school, which he just graduated from, he developed distinct chord progressions by rewiring elements from his favorite jazz pieces. Parts of the skyscraping \u201cgrand mal\u201d came from Kenny Dorham\u2019s jazz standard \u201cBlue Bossa.\u201d<\/p>\n In this world, every heartbreak stings like a million acupuncture needles. It\u2019s the inverse of self-censoring in fear of being called cringe; pain is a virtue and insecurities lay bare.<\/p>\n \u201cThey love me more than I fuck with myself, it’s insane,\u201d bunii wails on “you don’t gotta love me, i just wanted to be yours\u201d \u201cI know they\u2019re mortified, I wanna blow out my brain.\u201d Boosted by surreal trends<\/a> too convoluted to explain, he\u2019s<\/a> now fielding label offers. He deferred college enrollment for a year to focus on music.<\/p>\n witty and bunii are increasingly being<\/a> lumped<\/a> in with other alt-rockers<\/a> in the underground, ones who more closely resemble lodestars jaydes and wifiskeleton. Dig a little and you\u2019ll find an entire gloom room of misery-rockers with all-lowercase song titles that read like whispers for help: \u201cdrowned myself in the tub,\u201d \u201ccan we just forget each other,\u201d \u201cwaste away inside my room.\u201d overtonight\u2019s \u201cwould u notice\u201d vomits up a toxic slurry of pills, Everclear, blood, and references to mental illness. \u201cWould you even notice if I ever got killed?\u201d the song ends. At worst, it\u2019s completely derivative of XXXTentacion\u2019s weepy acoustic rock music, with lyrics conjuring up trigger-happy outcasts ready to end it all or act out maliciously<\/a> if one more thing goes haywire.<\/p>\n The ripoffs \u201cirk me so much because I\u2019m scrolling on TikTok and I hear the seventh [wifiskeleton] instrumental with a new person on it,\u201d says bunii. \u201cEverybody has 100k monthly listeners, they\u2019re all using the same Alex G samples.\u201d These artists are frustrated even if they\u2019re benefiting from the rising interest and TikTokification of the sound. \u201cThe cloning is getting to a point, bro,\u201d ayowitty groaned. \u201cThat used to be career-ending shit.\u201d<\/p>\n But between the copy-paste pessimism and lovesick mumbling, there\u2019s a handful of artists on the edge of the underground rewiring guitars in inventive ways. These include aeter, whose recent tape imagines himself as a clown. He\u2019s inspired by the antics of Angus Oblong, the mastermind of The Oblongs, an Adult Swim show that centered around a disfigured family living in an area plagued by radiation. The music is similarly mutant\u2014chords and kick grooves that sound like they\u2019re coming from instruments shaped like tornado knots and bramblethorns. \u201cthe party\u201d rumbles like an MGMT theme for the afterlife. The starkissed sweetness of some of this music masks violent, sometimes disturbing lyrical confessions. guitarbf\u2019s \u201cmaybe im the crazy one idk\u201d sounds chipper as rainbows while the California musician describes a woman tagging his car and stalking him. \u201cim such a failure i can\u2019t even tie a noose\u201d could pass as anodyne alt-rock if not for his unsettling use of samples; every other pitched-up line ends with sickly laughter and robots repeating, I\u2019m gonna off myself. It\u2019s a simple idea deployed to hypnotic effect with addictive guitar loops. Call it BandLab rock, so straightforward you could program it on your phone.<\/p>\n Originally Appeared on Pitchfork<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nWhat I\u2019m listening to:<\/h5>\n