Melodigging logoMelodigging name
dariacore

Dariacore

United States · 2020s
DancingIntenseHappySentimentalDark

Your digging level

For this genre
0/8
🏆
Sign in, then listen to this genre to level up

Description

Dariacore is a hyperactive, sample-forward microgenre that emerged on SoundCloud in the early 2020s. It is characterized by frenetic cut‑ups of recognizable pop hooks, TV/anime snippets, and internet ephemera, smashed together at high tempos with breakbeats, club triplets, and hard sidechain compression.

Aesthetically, it sits between hyperpop/digicore maximalism and plunderphonics/mashcore collage. Producers frequently pitch up (nightcore-style), hard-clip, and brickwall-limit the mix, embrace abrupt key/tempo shifts, and use meme-y drops or fake-outs for shock value. Tracks are usually short (often 1–2 minutes), hook-dense, and deliberately chaotic, with tongue-in-cheek 90s/00s net-culture visuals (the name references MTV’s Daria).


Sources: Spotify, Wikipedia, Discogs, Rate Your Music, MusicBrainz, and other online sources

History

Origins (early 2020s)

Dariacore coalesced on SoundCloud around 2021, when Jane Remover (fka dltzk) popularized the term via the alias “Leroy” and a pair of viral, collage-heavy releases. These tapes distilled hyperpop/digicore’s DIY ethos into a rapid-fire plunderphonics approach: sped-up pop hooks, amen breaks, jersey/philly club patterns, and noisy, over-the-top compression.

DNA and aesthetics

Musically, dariacore fuses the maximalist sound design and internet-native songwriting of hyperpop/digicore with the sampling chaos of plunderphonics/mashcore and the rhythmic intensity of breakcore/jungle. The result is a meme-aware, hook-driven barrage that treats the pop mainstream as sample fodder. Visuals often riff on 90s/00s teen-culture (hence “Daria”) and early web nostalgia.

Diffusion and community

Within months, a loose SoundCloud scene formed, with anonymous/throwaway aliases dropping one-off edits and mini-mixtapes. The genre’s short, instantly-gratifying format made it especially shareable on social platforms and in Discord servers, encouraging rapid iteration and stylistic cross-pollination with jersey club, drum & bass, and nightcore revivals.

Present day

Dariacore remains a fluid, tongue-in-cheek practice more than a rigid format. Producers treat it as a playground for sample collisions, fast edits, and maximalist drops—an internet-native continuation of plunderphonics for the hyperpop era.

How to make a track in this genre

Core palette
•   Source recognizable material: short hooks from mainstream pop, TV/anime stingers, ad jingles, and internet ephemera. Clear a cappellas if available, or isolate hooks via EQ/phase tools. •   Tempo: typically 150–190 BPM. Nightcore-style pitching (+200 to +500 cents) is common; time-stretch to grid after pitching. •   Drums: layer amen/think breaks, or build jersey/philly club patterns (BOOM—tap‑tap—BOOM—tap‑tap) with hard, clicky kicks, sharp claps, and off-beat snares. Add fills and quick triplet rolls.
Arrangement and harmony
•   Keep tracks short (1–2 minutes) and section-dense: hook → fake-out → drop → sudden switch-up → closing tag. Abrupt key and tempo shifts are acceptable; musical whiplash is part of the charm. •   Harmony is secondary to impact. Use simple looped chords or droning bass; let the sampled hook carry melody. Don’t be afraid of clashing keys in transitions for shock value.
Sound design and mixing
•   Embrace maximalism: OTT/brickwall limiting, aggressive sidechain, and deliberate clipping. Layer multiple hooks; carve space with tight EQ cuts. •   Use stutter edits, tape stops, reverse swells, and resampling. Sprinkle ear-candy (UI sounds, cartoon hits, YTPMV-like chops) to punctuate edits.
Workflow tips
•   Work fast and iteratively: build a library of one-shots, breaks, and premade risers for rapid arrangement. •   Visual identity matters: go for irreverent, retro-internet/teen-culture aesthetics in cover art and tags. Keep a playful, tongue‑in‑cheek attitude throughout.

Top albums

Dariacore 2: Enter Here, Hell to the Left
Dariacore 2: Enter Here, Hell to the Left
leroy
Grave Robbing
Grave Robbing
leroy
Dariacore 3... At Least I Think That's What It's Called?
Dariacore 3... At Least I Think That's What It's Called?
leroy
7 Grand Dance
7 Grand Dance
tdstr
Dariacore
Dariacore
leroy
TO-THE-CORE_153BPM
TO-THE-CORE_153BPM
xaev

Best playlists

Dariacore
Dariacore
Melodigging
The Sound of Dariacore
The Sound of Dariacore
Every Noise at Once
Dariacore
Dariacore
Chosic
Dariacore Mix
Dariacore Mix
Spotify
Best user-generated playlists
Best user-generated playlists

Main artists

Related labels

Full Metal Records
Full Metal Records
MAD BREAKS
MAD BREAKS
Lost Frog
Lost Frog
memory//scape
memory//scape
Dreamcorp. Records Inc.
Dreamcorp. Records Inc.

Top tracks

Locked
Share your favorite track to unlock other users’ top tracks
Influenced by
Nightcore
Nightcore is an internet-born editing style that speeds up and pitch‑raises existing songs—typically by around a third in speed—so the vocals become brighter and more youthful and the groove turns more urgent. Practically, a classic nightcore edit accelerates a pop, Eurodance, or trance source by roughly 20–35% (the canonical meme is ~35%), which also lifts the pitch by about five and a half semitones—similar to playing a 33⅓‑rpm record at 45 rpm. The result is euphoric, hook‑forward, and highly kinetic, and it is often presented with anime or fan‑art visuals that emphasize its internet‑native identity.
Hyperpop
Hyperpop is an internet-native pop movement known for its maximalist sound design, pitch-shifted vocals, and frenetic genre collisions. It exaggerates pop tropes—ultra-bright synths, hard-clipping drums, sugary hooks—then smashes them together with elements of club music, trap, and experimental electronica. The style favors hyper-synthetic timbres, extreme processing (auto‑tune, formant shifting, heavy sidechaining, distortion), and abrupt structural left turns. Lyrically, it swings between irreverent internet humor and disarmingly sincere confessions, often reflecting online identity, queerness, and hyper-modern life. Although diverse, the common thread is a playful, self-aware push of pop to surreal, high-saturation extremes.
Digicore
Digicore is a Gen Z–native, internet-bred pop-rap microgenre that emerged from SoundCloud and Discord communities. It blends hyperpop’s maximalist sound design with emo rap’s confessional songwriting, trap drum programming, and nightcore-style pitch-shifting. Songs are typically short and hook-forward, with heavily processed, Auto-Tuned vocals, clipped or bitcrushed textures, stutter edits, and glossy but intentionally digital artifacts. The palette often includes bright synth bells, plugg/pluggnb-inspired 808 patterns, widescreen OTT compression, and glitchy micro-cuts that highlight the music’s online, DIY origin. Lyrically, it leans into adolescent angst, online identity, relationships, and self-reflection, mirroring the hyper-connected culture that birthed it.
Plunderphonics
Plunderphonics is a sample-based music practice in which new compositions are made entirely or predominantly from pre‑existing recordings. Rather than using short, unrecognizable snippets as texture, plunderphonic works foreground recognizable materials—pop hits, classical excerpts, commercials, voice-overs—and transform them through juxtaposition, layering, pitch-shifting, time-stretching, and collage. Coined by Canadian composer John Oswald in the mid‑1980s, the term names both a technique and a critical stance that questions authorship, originality, and ownership in the age of reproducible media. Plunderphonics often functions as cultural commentary or satire, drawing attention to how meaning changes when familiar sounds are recontextualized. Stylistically, it ranges from dense cut‑up cacophony to groove-oriented rearrangements that remain danceable and accessible.
Mashcore
Mashcore is a hyperactive, sample-dense offshoot of breakcore that collides pop-culture mashups with brutally chopped breakbeats and hardcore kicks. It embraces comic juxtaposition and shock value, placing familiar acapellas, TV jingles, novelty tunes, or chart hits over blitzed Amen breaks, gabber/distorted 909 kicks, and quick-fire edits. The result is fast, chaotic, and tongue‑in‑cheek: a rave-informed, collage-heavy style that feels like a high-BPM warehouse party spliced with a pirate radio of memes and memories.
Breakcore
Breakcore is a high-intensity electronic music genre built around hyper-edited breakbeats, extreme dynamics, and a deliberately transgressive, collage-like approach to sampling. It prioritizes rhythmic complexity, abrupt structural shifts, and heavy sound design over smooth continuity. Typical tempos range from 160 to 220 BPM (and beyond), with the Amen break, Think break, and other classic breakbeats chopped into micro-fragments, re-sequenced, and processed with distortion, compression, and glitch edits. The palette freely fuses elements from jungle and drum and bass with gabber kicks, industrial noise, classical or choral snippets, ragga vocals, metal guitar samples, and odd-meter patterns. More than a single “sound,” breakcore is a methodology: confrontational energy, maximalist editing, and anti-formalist structures that often subvert dance-music expectations. It thrives in DIY scenes, warehouse parties, and netlabel cultures, where forward-pushing experimentation and boundary-blurring sampling are central values.
Deconstructed Club
Deconstructed club is an experimental approach to dance music that dismantles the usual club structures (steady four-on-the-floor kicks, predictable breakdowns, and genre-pure palettes) and rebuilds them as jagged, collage-like forms. It combines extreme sound design, sudden dynamic shifts, and fragmented rhythms that reference—but refuse to settle into—familiar styles like reggaeton, jersey club, grime, techno, and dancehall. The aesthetic favors abrasive textures, hyper-detailed edits, and dramatic negative space. Samples are often cut into stuttering shards, drums arrive and vanish mid-bar, and synths lurch from crystalline to corroded. The result is club music that feels physical and cathartic yet conceptually critical, foregrounding ideas of hybridity, diasporic identity, and the politics of the dance floor.
Jersey Club
Jersey club is a high-energy, club-oriented dance music from Newark, New Jersey that evolved in the early 2000s. It is known for punchy three-kick patterns, chopped vocal stabs, stop‑and‑go drops, and a relentless, call‑and‑response party ethos. Typically around 130 BPM, the sound blends house and breakbeat drum programming with hip‑hop sampling aesthetics. Producers often flip R&B hooks, sprinkle in signature effects (notably the "bed squeak" timbre popularized in 2000s rap), and build arrangements around short, repeatable phrases designed for coordinated dance routines.
Philly Club
Philly club is a high-energy, sample-driven dance style from Philadelphia that sits between Baltimore club and Jersey club. It typically runs around 130–135 BPM and features chopped vocal phrases, aggressive kick–snare patterns, and rapid-fire edits designed for quick transitions and call-and-response moments on the dancefloor. Compared to its neighbors, Philly club often leans harder on rap ad‑libs, 808 sub-bass, and gritty party breaks, reflecting the city’s hip hop and radio mixshow culture. The result is a raw, percussive, and kinetic club sound built for block parties, mixtapes, and DJ battles as much as for late-night clubs.
Drum And Bass
Drum and bass (DnB) is a fast, rhythmically intricate form of electronic dance music centered on breakbeats at roughly 160–180 BPM and powerful, sub‑heavy basslines. It grew out of the UK’s early ’90s rave and jungle scenes, combining chopped funk breaks (most famously the Amen break), dub and reggae sound‑system aesthetics, hip‑hop sampling, and techno’s futurist sound design. Across its many substyles—liquid funk’s soulful harmonies, techstep and neurofunk’s cold, machine‑like bass engineering, jump‑up’s hooky bass riffs, atmospheric DnB’s pads and space—drum and bass remains a DJ‑oriented, dancefloor‑driven genre that prizes tight drum programming, deep low end, and precise arrangement for mixing.
Jungle
Jungle is a fast, breakbeat-driven electronic music genre that emerged in the UK in the early 1990s. It is characterized by heavily chopped and re-sequenced funk drum breaks (most famously the Amen, Think, and Apache breaks), deep sub-bass rooted in reggae and dub, and frequent use of ragga and dancehall vocals. Typically around 160–175 BPM, jungle emphasizes syncopation, polyrhythms, ghost-note snare articulations, and swung grooves. Production often features time‑stretching artifacts, pitch‑shifting, rewinds, sirens, and dub‑style effects, creating a kinetic, raw, and rhythmic sound world. While closely related to drum and bass, jungle retains a distinct identity through its reggae/dancehall influence, looser and more chopped breakbeats, rough-and-ready sample aesthetics, and sound system culture sensibility.
Speedcore
Speedcore is an extreme offshoot of hardcore techno and gabber characterized by extremely high tempos, typically 240–350 BPM and often far beyond. Its core is a relentlessly driving 4/4 kick, heavily distorted and clipped into a percussive bass-tone that dominates the spectrum. The style emphasizes aggression and intensity over melody or harmony, drawing on industrial sound design, harsh noise textures, and horror-tinged sampling. Although many tracks are dark and abrasive, some scenes (especially in Japan’s j-core community) blend speedcore tempos with bright, anthemic leads and pop-cultural sampling. Speedcore is both a club style and a studio-centric craft: producers sculpt the kick drum as the central instrument, layering saturation, compression, EQ, and pitch envelopes to achieve the trademark pounding continuum.
Glitch
Glitch is an experimental electronic music genre that foregrounds the sounds of technological error—digital clicks, pops, clipping, buffer underruns, CD skipping, software crashes, and bit‑reduction. Rather than hiding artifacts, producers use them as primary musical material, often arranged through extreme micro‑editing and non‑linear sequencing. Texturally, glitch spans austere minimalism to warm, hazy ambience. Rhythms tend to be fragmented and asymmetrical, with sudden cuts, stutters, and silences that create tension and negative space. The palette commonly includes sine‑tone grains, granular clouds, filtered noise, and hyper‑detailed percussive fragments, sometimes sitting over subdued drones or dub‑inflected low end. The style emerged in the late 1990s around labels such as Mille Plateaux, influenced by IDM, minimal techno, and the aesthetics of failure in digital media. It later permeated pop and beat‑driven styles through sound‑design techniques that evoke imperfection and transience.
Mashup
Mashup is a genre and production technique in which two or more pre‑existing recordings are combined to form a new track, most commonly by placing the vocal (a cappella) from one song over the instrumental of another. It relies on beatmatching, harmonic mixing, and careful editing to create the illusion that disparate sources naturally fit together. Unlike a traditional remix (which typically reworks stems from a single song) or a medley (which plays songs sequentially), a mashup emphasizes simultaneous overlay and interplay between multiple songs, often highlighting humor, contrast, or surprising continuity. The style rose to prominence in the early 2000s UK “bastard pop” scene and spread via file‑sharing, blogs, and video platforms; it remains popular in DJ culture, pop culture countdowns, and internet meme communities, while inhabiting a legal gray area due to copyright.
Soundclown
Soundclown is an internet-born remix and mashup style that thrives on comedic juxtaposition, bait‑and‑switch reveals, and hyper-referential sample collage. It blends pop hits, game and cartoon music, ad jingles, meme sounds, and viral speech into quick-cut audio gags. The genre developed across YouTube and SoundCloud, favoring shock humor, nostalgia, and absurdity over traditional song form. Hallmarks include sudden key/tempo whiplash, exaggerated pitch-shifts, ear‑rending “earrape” peaks, and punchline drops that transform a familiar source into something hilariously incongruent. Because it is fundamentally platform-native, soundclown is as much a memetic editing culture as a musical style. Its tracks often function like sonic shitposts: fast, punchy, and built for instant recognition and shareability.
Meme
Meme is an internet-native umbrella genre for songs and audio clips that are created for, shaped by, or propelled through online meme culture. It blends humor, parody, and fast-turnaround production with infectious hooks designed to spread rapidly across platforms. Stylistically, meme music is eclectic. It can be rap, pop, EDM, rock, or mashup-driven collage; the common thread is comedic framing, referential lyrics, exaggerated vocal processing, and recognizable samples that cue shared online in-jokes. Tracks often favor short runtimes, bold punchlines, and instantly loopable sections optimized for social media. Because it thrives on virality rather than a fixed instrumentation set, meme functions as a meta-genre. It borrows techniques from mashup culture, YTPMV, soundclown, nightcore, and novelty/comedy traditions, while using platform-specific aesthetics from YouTube, SoundCloud, Vine, and TikTok.
Collage Pop
Collage pop is a sample-forward approach to pop songwriting that builds hooks, verses, and bridges from mosaics of found sound, micro-samples, and archival media. Instead of tracking a band in a room, producers assemble hundreds of short fragments—snatches of old records, ad jingles, field recordings, voice clips, and YouTube detritus—into bright, melody-first compositions. The genre balances pop immediacy with experimental technique: hip‑hop breakbeats and dance grooves underpin earworm melodies while abrupt edits, tape stops, and jump‑cut transitions create a sense of surprise. Vocals are often chopped, pitch‑shifted, or layered with choirs of sampled voices, producing a playful, nostalgic, and sometimes dreamlike sheen. A key aesthetic is juxtaposition—the emotional resonance comes from placing disparate eras, genres, and textures side‑by‑side, then “gluing” them with modern mixing (sidechain compression, warm saturation, and wide stereo imaging) so the collage feels like a coherent pop song rather than a mere medley.
Weirdcore
Weirdcore is an internet-native microgenre and aesthetic of experimental electronic music that leans into liminal nostalgia, eerie memory, and uncanny ambience. Its sound palette often combines misty pads, degraded samples, tape hiss, and bitcrushed percussion with disembodied voices, classroom and mall PA announcements, retro operating system chimes, and field recordings of empty or transitional spaces. Harmonically, weirdcore favors drones, slowly shifting modal clusters, and ambiguous, memory-warping intervals that feel familiar yet distorted. Rhythm ranges from beatless, foggy soundscapes to brittle, broken 2-step and slow, stumbling downtempo pulses. Heavy time-stretching, granular manipulation, wow-and-flutter, convolution reverbs, and spectral or cassette-style degradation are central to its texture. Although closely tied to a visual aesthetic (liminal spaces, late-night analog glow, low-resolution signage), weirdcore as a musical style is defined by its uncanny collage sensibility: sampling and warping everyday audio detritus until it becomes emotionally charged, melancholic, and faintly unsettling.
Glitchcore
Glitchcore is an internet-born microgenre that fuses pop-forward songwriting with hyperactive, digitally mangled sound design. It is characterized by bitcrushed and over-distorted synths, stuttered edits, sudden beat-switches, and heavily pitch-shifted, Auto-Tuned vocals. Arrangements tend to be short, hook-centric, and maximalist, often compressing multiple sections and textures into tracks that last 90–150 seconds. The genre borrows the emotive directness of emo rap and bedroom pop, the rhythmic backbone of trap, and the candy-coated sheen of hyperpop and bubblegum bass, while leaning into deliberate digital artifacts—glitches, dropouts, resampling, and hard clip distortion—as expressive tools. Culturally, glitchcore is inseparable from online communities (Discord, SoundCloud, TikTok), where rapid iteration, meme literacy, and DIY production workflows shaped its sound and aesthetics.
Has influenced
No genres found
Challenges
Digger Battle
Let's see who can find the best track in this genre
© 2026 Melodigging
Legal
Melodding was created as a tribute to Every Noise at Once, which inspired us to help curious minds keep digging into music's ever-evolving genres.
Buy me a coffee for Melodigging