Into The Music
Genres
Deep dives into the sounds that define us.
Genres
The Post-Genre Collision: Music in 2026
The term “post-genre” has been thrown around for years, but in 2026, it has finally become the literal reality of the music industry. We are no longer living...
Genres
Afrobeats: The Sound That Did Not Wait for Permission to Go Global
Afrobeats did not ask permission to become one of the dominant sounds of global popular music. It just became that, gradually and then all at once, and the...
Genres
Soul Music Has a Problem With Its Own Name and Has Never Cared
Soul music has a problem with its own name. The word “soul” gets used to describe everything from sixties Atlantic Records gospel-influenced R&B to nineties neo-soul to whatever...
Genres
Pop-Punk: The Genre That Keeps Getting Eulogized and Keeps Not Dying
Pop-punk has been declared dead so many times that the declarations have become their own genre. Every five years or so, someone publishes a piece about how the...
Genres
New Wave: The Genre That Never Agreed on What It Was and Somehow Became the Blueprint for Everything That Followed
New wave arrived without a proper announcement and left without a clear ending. That is part of why it is still so difficult to pin down even now,...
Genres
Grunge Changed the Grammar of Rock and Never Asked for Credit
Grunge arrived in mainstream consciousness with the force of something that had been building underground for years before anyone in Los Angeles noticed. Seattle in the late 1980s...
Genres
Art Pop: The Genre That Never Agreed on What It Was and Kept Going Anyway
Art pop is the genre that music critics reach for when they want to describe something that refuses to fit anywhere else. It is also genuinely one of...
Genres
Synth-Pop: The Sound That Made the Machine Feel Human
Synth-pop arrived with the 1980s and never really left. It outlasted the decade it defined, shed several of its worst habits, kept the best ones, and quietly became...
Genres
Emo Was Never Just a Phase. It Was a Language.
Emo is one of those genres that people have been eulogizing since roughly the moment it became visible, which suggests either that it keeps dying or that it...
Genres
Indie Folk: The Genre Nobody Wants to Name and Nobody Can Stop Making
Indie folk is a genre that nobody wants to name and everybody is willing to inhabit. Ask someone who makes it whether they play indie folk and they...
Genres
Dream Pop: The Genre That Sounds Like Memory
Dream pop is one of those genre names that does too much explaining and not enough describing. It tells you the mood, roughly, and it tells you the...