Five songs that kickstarted new genres in 2024
It’s becoming ever more difficult to truly glean new genres from each passing year of popular music. In an age of mood-centred playlists and fragmented online communities, gone are the tidy, easy sonic signifiers and clear accompanying sub-cultures that spring to mind when envisioning genre’s arguable UK heyday in the popular consciousness, being the early 1980s with its clashing cultural mosaics of New Romantics, skinhead punks, mod revivalists, and heavily patched denim-jacketed metal heads.
Artists now positively thrive in the era of genre dissolution. A new generation of pop stars whose musical tastes were shaped as much by the iPod Shuffle over the LP collection of old, a gleeful dismantling of genre’s peripheries and artful compositing of once disparate sonic elements are now par for the course of some of contemporary pop’s biggest names. Billie Eilish, Arca, and Mykki Blanco all reflect a genre fluidity and disregard for labelling as much as Gen Z’s general ambiguity regarding sexuality, gender, and traditional political identities.
Genre can be spotted underneath pop’s aural soup of swirling flavours, however. While intrepid, sonic frontiers have indeed been forged, you can dissect any current chart topper and pick out its elements. Just as there’s no truly new colour to be discovered beyond the light spectrum, music is doing what music does, dividing and multiplying in fascinating new permutations and hybrids that are splintering into a myriad of new branches the ’50s generation who birthed popular music as we understand it today could never conceive of.
Post-genre, ‘new genre’, or “genre-blending”, as the music industry likes to call it. Whatever state genre is in, we pick five artists who released singles last year that can claim to forge the new sounds as best an artist can in the postmodern age.
Five songs that kickstarted new genres in 2024
5. Tristwch Y Fenywod – ‘Blodyn Gwyrdd’
From the moment their debut album is played, ‘Blodyn Gwyrdd’s funereal electronic drums kick in like a martial mantra, the smoggy heartbeat to the ethereal zither that plucks and scrapes in a hazy shoegaze fog enveloping the bass’ ritual rumble. Welsh for ‘The Sadness of Women’, Leeds trio Tristwch Y Fenywod’s heady brew of darkwave and gothic dreamscapes beckon a disparate community of likeminded folk Britons such as Shovel Dance Collective or the medieval synthesis that litter Bristol‘s Avon Terror Corps that hover in the sural intersections between the arcane and the cutting-edge contemporary.
‘Blodyn Gwyrdd’ and the rest of their eponymous debut’s haunting cuts tap into the collective yearning for a higher purpose, looking back to the arcane and excavating through the barrow hills’ ancient mounds, excavating sodden relics and ghosts of old Europe. Authentically resurrecting the old world amid a climate of tech-ubiquity and the absence of mystery, Tristwch Y Fenywod’s archaic post-punk resurrections serve as mystical nourishment to a society robbed of belonging.
4. Tyla – ‘Truth or Die’
The Saturday night soundtrack for many, be it London or Johannesburg, is the evolving offshoot of South Africa’s Afrobeats, the amapiano dance fusion of log drums, house music and dash of the township’s kwaito musical roots, which saw well over a billion streams on Spotify alone last year. Taking the amapiano sound and injecting a dose of contemporary R&B for further global appeal, Edenvale’s Tyla looks set to harness a new flavour of ‘the pianos’, the genre’s Zulu translation, that may well centre the upcoming pop star at the fore of scene’s world conquer.
The second single off Tyla, ‘Truth or Dare’ carries on where 2023’s ‘Water’ left off: another immersion into sultry, sexual energy steaming against crisp programmed drums and rippling guitar that lifts the amapiano groove into a new tier of sonic accessibility. While coming from a rich afrobeats tradition, ‘Truth or Dare’ manages to craft a new road for future amapiano stars to follow.
3. kwes e – ‘Juggin’
Treading the sonic paths paved by grime and UK rap, Canterbury’s kwes e lifts the genre’s familiar clap tracks and piano samples but joins the ranks of esc pln and CMillano in crafting melancholic hip-hop which balances the club beats with downbeat synth smatter that’s less party and more the end of a big night’s stagger into reality, figuring your way back home in the early hours as you’re contemplating everything you tried to forget at the club.
‘Juggin’, slang for drinking and general imbibement, explores kwes e’s unique sonic quirk starkly. A hollow keyboard spooks throughout with a downbeat haunt audaciously at odds with the ostensibly celebratory lyrical front. Channeling the fatigue of a social life becoming ever more difficult in a failed economic climate, kwes e’s post-grime malaise rap may well have scored the country’s weary, austerity-stricken groan.
2. Avalanche Kaito ‘Borgo’
The natural melting pot of Indigenous West African music and post-punk at its scrappiest has found its most cosmic convergence yet with experimental trio Avalanche Kaito. Wrestling frenzied, intoxicating grooves at their most somatic and primal from the creatively snarled tension between Burkina Faso’s rich oral heritage and the gritty sonics of contemporary electronica, Lankoué frontman Kaito Winse along with Brussels noise artists Benjamin Chaval and Nico Gitto conjured a slice of industrial griot that’s disorienteing as it is intoxicating.
Opening their sophomore effort Talitakum, ‘Borgo’ serves as a stark illustration of the trio’s disquieting energy. Imbued within its propulsive beat and slithering polyrhythms are Winse’s flickering Fulani flute and mouth bow, the traditional instruments that double as a means to reconnect with a spiritual ancestry. This reach across the mortal realm is aided by textured guitars and sampled brass that hurtle the listener into a strange and cerebral plane, and hopefully, a whole new world of imminent post-punk jeli to follow.
1. Butterbro – ‘Verknallt in einen Talahon’
This is reported with no pleasure. Consider it a stark, deeply serious warning about the very real quagmire that awaits in the ever-evolving sophistication of Artificial Intelligence. Allegedly put together as a joke, Austrian producer Butterbro ‘created’ the easy-listening schlager lampoon using Udio, the first AI song to ever reach the German pop charts and counting millions of streams on Spotify. Its aural uncanny valley and synthetic artwork are enough to break one into a cold sweat, drearily bereft of any ounce of human creativity or thought.
Aside from its queasy ambiguity as to its derogatory appeal to Germany’s emboldened racist far-Right, tapping into the conservative cultural musical heritage and littering the lyrics with tropes of immigrant young men and their interest in white, Volkish young girls, ‘Verknallt in einen Talahon’ also throws another depressing spanner in the works for artists already fighting a cost of living and dismal streaming revenue to now compete with AI-generated abominations that can only lead to a complete fucking hellscape unless major reforms are implemented pronto.
