Written by Mano Sundaresen and Millan Verma, editors of No Bells.

No Bells is an independent music blog that covers online and IRL scenes and subcultures with a focus on rap. Its column Bells & Whistles is written primarily by editors Mano Sundaresan and Millan Verma and features a handful of song recs and a bounty of thoughts of whatever’s exciting or bugging them in music at a particular moment.

Mano Sundaresan: I go to rap shows at the same three or four places in New York and experience the same frantic, poisoned, beautiful mess. Phones light up the darkness as xaviersobased hits those dance moves, as kasper gem barks into the mic, as Nettspend flails around like an NPC. The machinery of gorgeous synths and hazy Auto-Tune spillage puts you in a trance, the auditory equivalent of losing yourself on a crowded street. Whenever I get online, the sounds I encounter drill holes into my brain. Some of the music is terrible, some of it is incredible, and all of it has been fascinating to witness.

Internet rap, a term we can loosely define as “rap music that is made by and for internet circles,” is approaching such a level of cranked-up cacophony that even the ostensible mainstream feels avant-garde. In my mind, we are at least one era removed from Whole Lotta Red, the classic Playboi Carti album that set off the 2020s with its scalding overdrive. That was the Rage Era, roughly 2021-2022, where everyone was sliding on those glossy synths popularized by F1LTHY et al on WLR. Yeat quickly became the torchbearer of this new generation of cyborg-rap, but there was also Ken Carson and Destroy Lonely, Sofaygo’s ascension to Travis Scott’s Cactus Jack Records, and some one-off hits here and there that fleshed out the era’s canon. Complex attempted to codify this movement as “SoundCloud 2.0,” but it never felt like the second coming of 2016 to me. A lot of it blended together. Seeing how quickly this sound was upstreamed through the Lyrical Lemonade YouTube channel and tipped by influencers like Zack Bia and Bobbalam, as though they simply wanted to showcase the Next Thing instead of something actually cool, almost felt nefarious. What we saw was the lawlessness of the SoundCloud boom sanitized into a souped-up, streaming-era product. Minions music. By the time Yeat himself had started to shift into a funkier style with his September 2022 album Lyfe, it felt like the sound was slowly dying.

But something shifted late last year. New York rapper-producer xaviersobased was gaining a bit of buzz around his song “patchmade,” which sounded like what’d happen if you turned up the buffering on a scratched-up CD (in the best possible way). Los Angeles producer kashpaint’s beat cascades like cirrus clouds and is rhythmically fresh—I hear a bit of Milwaukee in its pattering snares. Elsewhere in xavier’s catalog, you’ll hear atmospheric walls of sound, bass turned up to unreasonable levels, and restless vocals that rarely stay at just one pitch. “patchmade” has been an institution of Underground TikTok all year and has set off a whole wave of rappers iterating on the so-called “jerk” sound (no sonic relation to LA’s “jerkin” scene of the late 2000s). Maybe most notoriously, the young VA rapper Nettspend has gained a bunch of lovers and haters this year for his stuttering, glossy take on jerk (but mostly for looking absolutely absurd in every video).

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