Is This Post-Plugg?

This piece originally appeared on March 10, 2023 in Sound Signal, our biweekly newsletter that identifies emerging artists, scenes, and trending tracks, crafted by the world's best writers and curators. Sign up here to never miss our take on what's next in music.

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Music moves fast on the internet. That’s one of the joys of staying plugged-in to the underground that develops in microscenes on Soundcloud and Bandcamp—every day new sounds are mutating and splintering off of existing ones. Over the last few weeks one of these nascent new scenes bubbled up to my attention thanks to a tweet from Iglooghost, an experimental electronic producer and an ever-curious listener. He wrote that much of the most exciting electronic music is coming from “THOSE SORTA PLUGG PRODUCER KIDS WHO HAVE GRADUALLY BEEN DRIFTING CLOSER TO LIKE AMBIENT IDM MICROBEATS.”

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Written in all-caps and filled with jargon that only makes sense to the most-online music nerds, his proclamation might sound like gibberish to the wider listening public, but it was enough to pique my interest. Plugg, for context, has become one of the most popular rap subgenres on the internet over the last few years, marrying a post-Soulja Boy approach to breathy flows and colorful melodies to beats inspired by labyrinthine video game OSTs and cloud rap.

There’s no single name for it yet, but artists like cutspace and Silas Roe are taking the DNA of plugg’s and stitching it together with stranger sounds, like minimal synth music and the jittery braindance of early 90s experimental electronic music. Their compositions occasionally feature rap vocalists, but more often than not they’re instrumental and collage-like. There aren’t a lot of people listening to this stuff, at least not yet—the most-played tracks in a Soundcloud playlist collecting essential songs from the scene have a few tens of thousands of plays. But it’s really interesting to watch it develop in more or less real-time, to trace the different innovations that each producer is making, pushing the sound further and further. Each release from these producers feels truly free and new; each artist is still in a career phase unburdened by the expectations of releasing music to an established audience. As special and unique as it is, it’s hard to imagine it’ll be too long before more people catch on.

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