“Digicore is not a genre,” says Billie Bugara, a creative director at Soundcloud and the curator behind Soundcloud’s official digicore playlist.
Digicore, an offshoot of the equally difficult to pin down hyperpop, began on soundcloud in the late 2010s, but gained traction at the start of the 2020s as the U.S. and many other countries around the world went into lockdown. The scene bubbled up as young artistic kids suddenly had nothing better to do but hang out on discord and work on music with one another. For many fans of soundcloud’s underground hip hop scene in the late 2010s, digicore, with its innovative style and soundcloud rap roots, offered an escape from the emo rap community which had become watered down with disingenuous figures whose sole interest in the genre was to capitalize on its trendiness.
At least that’s what I was thinking when I started listening to digicore artists about a year ago, but the more I learn about the scene, the less I’m convinced of the narrative that digicore spawned out of a dying soundcloud rap scene. While digicore did and does offer an oasis for fans of the 2010s hip hop scene, what’s special about digicore is its lack of a singular influence or style. All of the artists in the scene are inspired by and make very different types of music, yet are still put under the same label. How could kurtains’ “spawn," a lyrically bitter yet soft piano track, and quinn’s “i don’t want that many friends in the first place," an overblown, loud banger about (you guessed it) not wanting friends, possibly be considered the same genre?
That’s because digicore was never supposed to be a genre.
Billie Bugara says: “It’s a tag to encompass many different things in one place.” Digicore doesn’t represent a sound so much as it represents a community. No two artists in the scene sound the same, but they’re all influenced by one another. As a result, the digicore scene became a melting pot of experimental ideas in 2020 as the pandemic forced artists indoors and on to their computers. Early in the pandemic when the rest of the music industry was at a standstill, the digicore scene flourished online as artists became friends and collaborated with one another through platforms like discord. “A lot of the kids’ beats that I hop on like elxnce and blackwinterwells, I haven’t even met in person, but they feel like family to me,” says midwxst, whose collaborations with the aforementioned producers started gaining attention in 2020 and eventually led to his signing with Geffen Records.
Following the end of lockdown, midwxst has been one of the few artists in the scene to continue to expand his fanbase. Many artists and collectives slowly faded away due to a failure to adapt their style as the trap influenced, glitchy sound of 2020 became stale for listeners. Today, the artists in the scene that have continued to flourish are the ones who have expanded into larger genres. glaive and ericdoa, who were once at the forefront of the digicore scene, have since branched into mainstream pop and emo rap whilst still retaining their digicore audience.
While this transition to a more widely appealing style may have given them greater commercial success, it removed the experimentation that made digicore so interesting. The biggest artists in the digicore scene are no longer teenagers who make music in their rooms, they’re industry backed stars with the resources of a massive record label.
While I have no problem with artists signing to labels, it’s unfortunate to see that the DIY side of the scene has essentially died out. The experimentation we saw in the digicore scene in 2020 and 2021 may have only been possible during the pandemic. While Covid-19 led to the streets of cities being totally empty, the internet was never more alive than it was then and it hasn’t been the same since lockdown ended. Digicore is a microcosm of that, as the community has slowly declined in popularity over the years.
While the scene might never be the same as it was during 2020, at least we’ll have all the music that came out of it to look back on.