ayowitty and bunii’s “dotsong” hits like a flashbang of textural excess: regal strings, K.K. Slider squiggles straight out of Animal Crossing, churning drums that could spawn a moshpit. There’s no time to get your bearings; an EDM drop smashes everything to pieces, then a pained voice croons in the rubble while drunkenly mashing a detuned guitar. Insect noises bring you to rest. None of these things should go together, yet they somehow do, bound by raw intuition and force of will. Imagine The Garden if they made an anime intro—triumphant yet terrorized by yearning and anxiety. It’s a category-mutilating mess that’s pleasurably spontaneous.
ayowitty is a talented upstart in a swarm of artists amorphously referred to as the “indie scene”—not indie like DIY shoegazers from Pittsburgh or aspiring popstars who can’t get signed because they only have 3,000 monthly listeners. This is “indie” as it’s understood by the online rap underground, which could mean a multitude of things: They used to make rap music and suddenly decided to make alt-rock, they’re members of SoundCloud collectives, they use beatmaker techniques—like opening and ending songs with slowed versions of the instrumental, or spamming sound effects like ad-libs. On YouTube, bedroom producers post tutorials on how to make “indie rock beats (without a real guitar).” Despite the genre label, this music is closer to emo—often aggressively dramatic, either in the volatile sounds or the woe-stricken lyrics.
A particular strain of depressive droning over looped guitar beats has really taken off in the last year. Many newcomers have been accused of imitating jaydes and wifiskeleton, who, like XXXTentacion before them, began in the rap underworld before turning to tears-and-terror rock. jaydes was arrested last year and charged with attempted murder, while wifiskeleton, who had his own allegations of grooming circulating online, died of a suspected drug overdose in May. wifiskeleton’s poignantly titled “Nope your too late i already died” exploded around the globe after his death, vaulting him to eight million monthly listeners on Spotify.
“The indie scene’s popular right now, but a lot of these new guys don’t even like indie music or care about it,” ayowitty tells me. “You’ll have someone that was making trap a month ago rebrand their Spotify name to, ‘she’s cutting my skin open and i’m dying,’ and start making shitty indie music… It’s all just like, ‘I’m gonna make this wifiskeleton type song and change my name to ‘scars on my leg.’”
witty’s charting a different path for this nebulous cluster. On the 20-year-old’s electrifying album #wings, nearly every track sounds like he started without any clue how it would end. “She” dreams up a cosmic pluggnb canvas for TJAYY before ditching the idea and unleashing a chiptune breakdown worthy of a Pokémon Mystery Dungeon boss fight. “I make my music really fucking loud because it’s the only time where I can feel immersed in something,” he says of his sound, which he calls “cryy.” “It allows me to think and feel like a person for a little bit. When I’m outside, there’s nothing going through my brain, just fried.”
witty says he grew up listening to Pokémon soundtracks and that it was pluggnb, not classical training or a jazz music education, that taught him how to write chord progressions. He’s also obsessed with video games, particularly the cartoonish fighting game Brawlhalla, which he’s played professionally since age 14. Under the handle STING RAY, he’s won thousands of dollars at tournaments and been one of the top 15 players for the last five years—even reaching number two in the world. “I feel like the gaming got me good at music,” he says. “I looked at it through the perspective of improving in a game.” One way to interpret his work is through the lens of video game music, which he went to Berklee College of Music to study before he was kicked out. VGM treats vocals and instruments like elements to manipulate and mash up, emphasizing chaos that synchronizes with in-game clicks and actions. “the light left my iris” reminds me of the kind of epic symphony that would suit a cutscene.
bunii, another leader of the scene, grew up listening to ayowitty and now works with him actively. The 17-year-old convinced his hero to collaborate after he saw his music on a repost channel. His solo music is much more guitar-forward, all math rock freakouts and intricate chord progressions. He lists Paramore, MCR, American Football, and Japanese rockers like susquatch and The Cabs as fixations. But even the most analog songs shimmer with producer tags: BASTARDS! Before getting into the guitar, bunii started making beats after hearing the pluggnb of Autumn! and Genius’ beat deconstruction videos.
This so-called indie music is delightfully immature and cracked at the seams, recorded in that climactic sliver of adolescence when you’re not a clueless kid but also not so old that you’re jaded. Many of the artists are self-taught. “Whenever I’m in my room, there’s always a guitar in my hand,” says bunii. In high school, which he just graduated from, he developed distinct chord progressions by rewiring elements from his favorite jazz pieces. Parts of the skyscraping “grand mal” came from Kenny Dorham’s jazz standard “Blue Bossa.”
In this world, every heartbreak stings like a million acupuncture needles. It’s the inverse of self-censoring in fear of being called cringe; pain is a virtue and insecurities lay bare.
“They love me more than I fuck with myself, it's insane,” bunii wails on "you don't gotta love me, i just wanted to be yours” “I know they’re mortified, I wanna blow out my brain.” Boosted by surreal trends too convoluted to explain, he’s now fielding label offers. He deferred college enrollment for a year to focus on music.
witty and bunii are increasingly being lumped in with other alt-rockers in the underground, ones who more closely resemble lodestars jaydes and wifiskeleton. Dig a little and you’ll find an entire gloom room of misery-rockers with all-lowercase song titles that read like whispers for help: “drowned myself in the tub,” “can we just forget each other,” “waste away inside my room.” overtonight’s “would u notice” vomits up a toxic slurry of pills, Everclear, blood, and references to mental illness. “Would you even notice if I ever got killed?” the song ends. At worst, it’s completely derivative of XXXTentacion’s weepy acoustic rock music, with lyrics conjuring up trigger-happy outcasts ready to end it all or act out maliciously if one more thing goes haywire.
The ripoffs “irk me so much because I’m scrolling on TikTok and I hear the seventh [wifiskeleton] instrumental with a new person on it,” says bunii. “Everybody has 100k monthly listeners, they’re all using the same Alex G samples.” These artists are frustrated even if they’re benefiting from the rising interest and TikTokification of the sound. “The cloning is getting to a point, bro,” ayowitty groaned. “That used to be career-ending shit.”
But between the copy-paste pessimism and lovesick mumbling, there’s a handful of artists on the edge of the underground rewiring guitars in inventive ways. These include aeter, whose recent tape imagines himself as a clown. He’s inspired by the antics of Angus Oblong, the mastermind of The Oblongs, an Adult Swim show that centered around a disfigured family living in an area plagued by radiation. The music is similarly mutant—chords and kick grooves that sound like they’re coming from instruments shaped like tornado knots and bramblethorns. “the party” rumbles like an MGMT theme for the afterlife. The starkissed sweetness of some of this music masks violent, sometimes disturbing lyrical confessions. guitarbf’s “maybe im the crazy one idk” sounds chipper as rainbows while the California musician describes a woman tagging his car and stalking him. “im such a failure i can’t even tie a noose” could pass as anodyne alt-rock if not for his unsettling use of samples; every other pitched-up line ends with sickly laughter and robots repeating, I’m gonna off myself. It’s a simple idea deployed to hypnotic effect with addictive guitar loops. Call it BandLab rock, so straightforward you could program it on your phone.