Glitchcore

United States · 2010s

Intense Dancing Dark Sad Dreamy

Your digging level for this genre

0/8

🏆

Description

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.

History

How to make a track in this genre

Best playlists

The Sound of Glitchcore

Main artists

Related labels

Top tracks

Locked

Share your favorite track to unlock other users’ top tracks

Influenced by

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.

Nightcore

Nightcore is a remixing style that speeds up and pitch-shifts existing songs—most often Eurodance, trance, and pop—creating a brighter, higher-pitched vocal timbre and a faster, energetic groove. Typical edits raise the tempo by roughly 20–35% and increase the pitch 2–4 semitones, giving the vocals a youthful, "chipmunk-like" sheen. Born from a Norwegian DJ duo’s party edits in the early 2000s and later amplified by YouTube communities, Nightcore functions both as an aesthetic and a technique. It emphasizes momentum, euphoria, and emotive immediacy, frequently paired with anime or fan-art visuals that reinforce its internet-native, youth-centric identity.

Trap

Trap is a subgenre of hip hop that emerged from the Southern United States, defined by half-time grooves, ominous minor-key melodies, and the heavy use of 808 sub-bass. The style is characterized by rapid, syncopated hi-hat rolls, crisp rimshot/clap on the backbeat, and cinematic textures that convey tension and grit. Lyrically, it centers on street economies, survival, ambition, and introspection, with ad-libs used as percussive punctuation. Production is typically minimal but hard-hitting: layered 808s, sparse piano or bell motifs, dark pads, and occasional orchestral or choir samples. Vocals range from gravelly, staccato deliveries to melodic, Auto-Tuned flows, often using triplet cadences.

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.

Cloud Rap

Cloud rap is a hip hop microgenre defined by ethereal, reverb‑drenched textures, soft pads, and minimal drum programming that creates a floating, dreamlike atmosphere. Beats tend to be sparse and space-conscious, with airy synths, distant vocal samples, and gentle 808s supporting raps that are often introspective, deadpan, or emotionally detached. The sound crystallized online in the early 2010s through platforms like DatPiff, Tumblr, and SoundCloud, pairing Southern rap rhythms with ambient and chillwave aesthetics. Rather than virtuosic density, cloud rap prizes mood, negative space, and a sense of weightlessness, translating internet-era solitude and nostalgia into hazy, pastel-toned hip hop.

Emo Rap

Emo rap blends the confessional lyricism and melodic sensibility of emo and pop‑punk with the rhythms, production techniques, and flows of contemporary hip hop and trap. Songs often feature sung‑rap deliveries, heavy use of Auto‑Tune, minor‑key progressions, guitar loops or samples, and 808‑driven drums. Themes typically center on heartbreak, loneliness, anxiety, substance use, and self‑reflection, presented in direct, diary‑like writing. The sound crystallized on platforms like SoundCloud, where artists embraced lo‑fi aesthetics, short song lengths, and highly personal cover art and branding. Emo rap’s crossover appeal brought rock textures back into mainstream rap and helped pave paths for a new wave of genre‑fluid pop, punk‑rap energy, and internet‑native micro‑scenes.

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.

Bubblegum Bass

Bubblegum bass is a hyper-sweet, high-gloss strain of experimental pop that exaggerates mainstream chart tropes until they feel surreal. It blends candy-coated melodies, plastic synth timbres, and pitch-shifted vocals with club-ready drums and maximalist sound design. Emerging around the London-based PC Music collective, the style often juxtaposes childlike hooks with abrasive textures, sudden drops, and tongue-in-cheek, consumerist imagery. The production is meticulous and synthetic—supersaws, metallic hits, hard sidechaining, and formant-shifted toplines—yet it retains an earworm pop sensibility. The result is music that feels both satirical and sincere: an ecstatic, futuristic twist on electropop and dance-pop that helped set the stage for the wider hyperpop movement.

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.

Has influenced

Dariacore

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).

Corecore

Corecore is an internet-native, collage-heavy audiovisual microgenre that turns the endless stream of online content into emotionally charged montages. It typically pairs melancholic or atmospheric music with rapid-fire edits of news clips, social-media posts, movie fragments, webcam confessions, and found audio, using juxtaposition to evoke overload, alienation, and fragile intimacy in the age of feeds. While it is primarily known as a video-editing aesthetic (especially on TikTok), its musical identity leans on ambient, vaporwave, breakcore, and experimental collage, favoring texture, mood, and narrative over traditional song structure. Rather than having a fixed sonic palette, corecore uses existing tracks—often downtempo, hazy, or nostalgic—then re-contextualizes them with speech samples and visual montage to produce catharsis and social commentary.

Meme Rap

Meme rap is an internet-native strain of hip hop that blends humorous, ironic, and highly referential lyrics with trap-leaning beats and low-to-mid budget DIY production. The focus is less on traditional notions of authenticity and more on virality, punchlines, and the rapid-fire circulation of jokes and cultural references. The style treats platforms like YouTube, Vine, SoundCloud, and TikTok as both stage and distribution network. Songs are often built around a single meme, catchphrase, or comedic premise, using exaggerated personas and wink-at-the-camera delivery. While playful on the surface, meme rap can be musically savvy, borrowing current trap, cloud-rap, and internet remix aesthetics to engineer instantly shareable moments.

Hyper-Rock

Hyper-rock is a contemporary fusion that welds glitchy, high-gloss hyperpop sound design to the riffs, songcraft, and catharsis of alternative and pop-punk–leaning rock. Productions typically feature blown-out drums, distorted guitars, sub-heavy 808s, and extreme vocal processing (hard autotune, formant shifting) delivered at adrenalized tempos. The genre embraces sudden switch-ups, meme-age collage aesthetics, maximalist drops, and compressed, internet-native songwriting. It keeps the immediacy of pop hooks while channeling the grit and angst of emo and post-hardcore, often presenting vulnerable lyrics through an aggressively modern, digital sheen.

5th Wave Emo

5th wave emo is a 2020s, internet-native evolution of emo that fuses midwest emo’s twinkly guitars and confessional lyricism with hyperpop/digicore production tricks, glitchy sound design, and DIY bedroom aesthetics. It tends to juxtapose emotive guitars, punk-derived vocal intensity, and mathy accents with digital drums, breakcore fills, Auto-Tune, bitcrushed synths, and loud/soft jump cuts. The result feels both nostalgic and forward-looking—anxious, diaristic music that speaks to online adolescence, depersonalization, and identity in the algorithmic era.

Challenges

Digger Battle

Let's see who can find the best track in this genre