Music in 2026 has a problem. Over the past six months, a new generation of broadly electronic artists has moved closer to the mainstream: Underscores released an early album of the year contender U, Ninajirachi became the breakout star of Coachella, and 2hollis has been cemented as one of the figureheads of a new maximalist wave sweeping music. But the problem is that no one seems quite sure how to label them.

Read about these artists online and you’ll likely see some combination of three terms thrown about: electroclash, emphasising a collision of rock and electronica; electronic pop, a broad catch-all increasingly used where hyperpop once might have been; and rage, focusing on the influence of key Gen Z reference point Playboi Carti, who sparked a wave of distortion in rap music at the turn of the 2020s.

It’s a radical new intersection – not only are electronic artists increasingly occupying the role of rock stars on main festival stages, but hip-hop kids and electronic kids have never had so much in common. A strange convergence can be found, for example, in how emerging rap acts like Slayr and fakemink are increasingly booked for the same lineups as (often queer and trans) electronic artists like Jane Remover and Underscores.

Over the past year, all of these artists have been collectively labelled “underground” – be it in the diffuse UK Ug scene, or on the rap-based subreddit /r/Ug_music, which has increasingly featured queer electronic artists as their sonic similarities became undeniable. In recent months, however, a new Reddit community has made the case for a more specific label: /r/Sleazepop.

“I’d say sleazepop is electronic music that takes a lot of inspiration from rap and a bit of rock – it’s like rap-inspired-electroclash,” says anonymous internet user Sleaze Pop Daily (SPD), who first coined the term on an Instagram fanpage in March, 2025, before migrating to Reddit a couple of months ago. “I saw /r/Ug_music and, while there was a lot of overlap with sleazepop, it was aimed at a very specific, rap-only audience. I thought, ‘There’s no reason why I shouldn’t start a subreddit for sleazepop’. Instantly, there was a surge of people posting a ton of stuff.” 

Himself in his early 20s and based in LA, SPD conceives of sleazepop as primarily an LA movement, tracing it back to The Hellp’s scuzzy, dance-punk take on indie sleaze to 2hollis’ blown-out rap production a decade later. Indie sleaze is also a visual descriptor, helping to frame a return to hipster aesthetics – flash-lit parties, skinny jeans and half-ironic rockstar posturing – that encompasses artists as disparate as LA pop-girl Tiffany Day, Feng and fakemink (who even included a picture of The Hellp on the cover of his debut album London’s Saviour). In other words, sleazepop does not necessarily describe artists who sound identical so much as a shared collision of rap, electroclash and internet-age indie sleaze.

But it’s also clear that the story of sleazepop is broader than that; almost as broad as popular music itself. Throughout our conversation, SPD (also known as /u/Chunky910fan on Reddit) references artists like LCD Soundsystem, Skrillex and Charli xcx’s 2024 Brat Summer as key steps towards an electronic music that is increasingly divorced from dancefloors, overwhelmingly defined by Gen Z kids in their bedrooms, and rapidly taking over the mainstream. 

Sleazepop artists
by u/chunky910fan in sleazepop

Parallels with the much-maligned pseudo-genre hyperpop abound here – not least because neither term was coined by the artists themselves. Initially associated with the rise of PC Music and SOPHIE around 2014, before being appropriated by Spotify to describe a whole wave of internet-based artists later in the decade, hyperpop (in its later form) exhibited much of the same crossovers between rap, EDM and pop music as sleazepop. The difference, at least in theory, is emphasis: where hyperpop was often defined by glossy and cartoonish digital maximalism, sleazepop leans into something messier, grittier and more physical. And while hyperpop was plagued with confusion throughout its lifetime and has since shrunk into a descriptor for terminally online sonics rather than a so-called “real genre”, SPD seems to believe that the more recent injections of rage and rock music give sleazepop a better chance of sticking.

Still, it’s important to note that SPD, and the genre he’s coined, are both pretty controversial online – even on his own subreddit. Critics have variously branded /r/Sleazepop a label psy-op, unmanageably broad, and, above all, contrived. “I’m pretty sure it’s a front for Chaotic Good or some record label,” one anonymous internet user tells me over Reddit DM, referencing the digital marketing agency accused of manufacturing online buzz around Geese through fake fan-style pages and algorithmic tactics. “Notice how Nettspend (who’s only ever done rage and jerk) is somehow considered sleazepop, but his peers Che and Xaviersobased (who have actually done electroclash and cloud rap respectively) aren’t. It just seems to describe more of a demographic of fans than an actual genre, aesthetic or sound.”

In conversation, SPD remains cryptic about his professional life, maintaining that he had both previously worked with an “underground rapper in LA” and achieved success on TikTok, but also that “music is definitely not my main job.” Still, he is keen to dispel the industry allegations. “Labels have definitely reached out, but I’ve never been paid to post an artist I wouldn’t have posted beforehand,” he tells me. “I’ve recently tried to move away from [/r/Sleazepop]. I don’t want to be the guy controlling the narrative once it becomes its own thing.”

Jane Remover's music be like
by u/DougDingus in sleazepop

While it seems unlikely that /r/Sleazepop is truly a label psy-op (if only because SPD’s posting has been too chaotic to have been bankrolled by the big bucks), this controversy does reveal one thing: today’s digital age makes it harder to identify distinct genres than ever before. Where previous movements like hip-hop had a clear origin story rooted in a particular time and place (‘it started in the Bronx’), space and time on the internet are often warped in ever-hybridising ways. Take 2hollis and fakemink, for example: they might have a shared reference in The Hellp, but it’s equally hard to argue that they share as much in common, in terms of their sound, as artists like Grandmaster Flash and Kool Moe Dee did back when hip-hop was birthed in the Bronx in the 70s.

Music in 2026 clearly has a problem, and perhaps an unlikely answer can be found in the case of hyperpop. Having descended from a genre to a loose adjective over the last ten years, the term illustrates the pitfalls of describing music scenes born on the internet. Today, it seems nigh-on impossible to fully define a genre when, individually, each artist’s influences shift as quickly as changing tabs on a web browser, but hyperpop still remains a useful descriptor for sounds that blend pop songwriting and advanced digital production (or, in Spotify’s case, a collection of listening habits). While it looks unlikely to cement itself as the next big genre, perhaps sleazepop will have a similar fate.