For Pitchfork: An examination of how hyperpop’s most radical traits—its communal ethos, gender-oscillating freakiness, sonic futurism—have calcified into stale tropes or dissolved entirely.

“Even if hyperpop is approaching peak sterility, we still have a bounty of memories and musical genius to look back on.” The Lost Promises of Hyperpoptimism.

For The Face: The illegal free-party rave scene in New York. I hit parties by crews like Helltekk and Nocturnal Creature Society in Queens, Staten Island, and Brooklyn.

“A man in uniform sprints into the room. A pack of police follow him. ​’Party’s over! Get out, you have to leave,’ a cop yells, shining flashlights in our faces. On the frontlines of New York’s renegade rave scene.

For The New York Times: A report on Minecraft’s speedrunning scene, which is thriving even 15 years after the game’s original release.

He said he had loaded more than 1.3 million Minecraft worlds to get his best time, which is 10 minutes 30 seconds. Minecraft Is An Infinite Sandbox That’s Being Beaten In Minutes.

For Nina Protocol: A deep dive into the ambient plugg beat scene on SoundCloud; with interviews from scene heads like cutspace, wifi, and xang; a tribute to the late Iokera.

“He was rewired by a 7-gram shroom trip. Trapped in an abyss of ego death, he said he heard seraphim communicating through a call-and-response of piano, violin, and harp. He decided to try to translate the transcendent experience into terrestrial music. “We’re trying to take essentially how angels talk and put it in a human perspective,” he said. The Frenetic Frailty of Ambient Rap.

For No Bells: Maybe the most expansive survey of “sigilkore,” the demon-themed sibilate-rap subgenre that’s one of the most inventive and electrifying new sounds of the 2020s.

“If Biden listened to sigilkore it would probably kill him.” The life (and death?) of sigilkore.

For The New York Times: Descending into the rabbit hole of Roblox users “Bypassing audio” to sneak illicit music into the game, and the subgenre “robloxcore” created by players.

Methods include layering a song 32 times so the lyrics become deafening and indecipherable, or purposely raising or lowering its pitch so it sounds incoherent to moderators, before readjusting it in the game. How Roblox Sparked a Chaotic Music Scene.