You’ve heard it before. The drums feel like anvils dropped on your skull. The bass is a squishy bubble of mad distortion. There’ll probably be some cowbells, and there might be someone trilling in sultry Portuguese or a burst of wordless, stoic alpha-male grunts. Audio creatine, max-protein milk for your ears, these tracks radiate power. File under “techno that pumped so much iron it became as ripped as Joey Swoll.”
I’m talking about phonk, maybe the most curious case of a genre totally losing its original meaning in the last few decades. The name dates back to the early 2010s, when SpaceGhostPurrp and his collective Raider Klan popularized it with songs like “Pheel Tha Phonk 1990,” an eerie crawl through shadowy streets teeming with howls and threats. But the sound really goes back to the ’90s: Memphis rap was the key influence for them and many other phonk heads like DJ Smokey, who would rewire Playa Fly and Kingpin Skinny Pimp vocals with heavenly beats. They paid homage to wild innovators like Three 6 Mafia and Tommy Wright III, who spun whirlwind flows, baleful tales, and raw aesthetics out of scarce resources. Memphis was often shunted out of the mainstream music conversation, so many of these artists focused instead on distributing cassettes in their communities and developing local followings. Phonk music brought a renewed interest to these overlooked originators and inspired young producers to experiment with gritty horrorcore.
A decade later, phonk is now completely unrecognizable—detached from its subcultural rap roots and any kind of narrative depth to become a faceless, vapid, globalized dumping ground.
Phonk started to lose its shape in the late 2010s with drift phonk, a Russian variant of the sound heavily associated with clips of cars racing and anime edits. Though many of the tracks sample Three 6 Mafia vocals, it feels more like they’re trying to crib the cobwebbed cool of old Memphis rap than pay tribute. Kordhell’s “Murder In My Mind” and DVRST’s “Close Eyes” are more like roided-up house than rap, pulsing with four-on-the-floor beats, and they infested TikTok in the early 2020s. DJ Paul cleared the samples, and who could blame him? This stuff has racked up hundreds of millions of streams through CapCut-core TikTok hype edits. Drift phonk grew so huge that Fast & Furious released an official Drift Tape. Not all drift phonk is uninspired, but the style quickly subsumed the original sound and devolved into a simplistic formula of crazed kicks and Celsius-energized synths—or “trendy cowbell music,” as phonk producer Von Storm put it.
Drift phonk was only the start. Soon, nearly every country and microgenre had their own version of phonk, riffing on the TikTok-patented Phonk Recipe. The Korean boyband Stray Kids sampled phonk on the careening bounce house “LALALALA.” There’s Mexican phonk adorned in triumphant trumpets and ¡Ándale! calls. CXNTAGIXUS, a producer of unknown origins, has made “INDIAN MEME PHONK,” “JEWISH MEME PHONK,” and something called “Yoinky Sploinky Phonk.” Type in any ethnicity plus phonk, and chances are there’s a viral anthem with hundreds of thousands or hundreds of millions of plays. While local sounds going global can spawn a slew of thrilling iterations—take drill—the way people use phonk often feels more like a trite aesthetic, bait for “Which Country Has The Best Phonk?” TikTok fodder. Drift phonk has such little substance to begin with that these "national" variants don't have meaningful identities.
The most popular splinter-genre by far is Brazilian phonk. It’s a particularly confusing label because of its overlap with Brazilian funk, or baile funk, and the way it gets conflated with funk automotivo, the pummeling Brazilian sound tied up with the country’s car culture. Brazilian phonk typically combines baile funk’s off-kilter percussion and mad MC-ing with turbocharged house and sugar-coma synths. Producers then crank up the distortion to death-decibel levels. The style’s pressure-cooker peak conjures visions of iShowSpeed backflipping at nightcore velocity. The Brazilian hyper-phonk tune “Slide da Treme Melódica v2” flails like a sputtering Transformer.
While there’s still inventive shrapnel worth excavating from the demolition zone, so much of modern phonk feels optimized to be indistinguishable so gymgoers and gamers can hit play and cede control, racking up streams endlessly. Von Storm, a member of the O.G. phonk collective Holy Mob, was baffled by the new selections on Spotify’s official phonk playlist. “The top tracks definitely aren’t my cup of tea, they almost sound like meme music. It’s like Looney Tunes cartoon sound effects mixed in with Brazilian phonk,” he told me. “They’ve really chewed up [the genre] and spit it out.”
It’s baffling why people even label this music phonk anymore beyond semantic inertia—we’re so far from SpaceGhostPurrp’s Gothic freakiness. There’s still people making “classic” phonk, like rappers Freddie Dredd and the massively successful $uicideboy$, but the music barely ever rises above retrobait Memphis homage. And the most viral new-gen phonk bears no resemblance to Memphis rap besides the apocalyptic menace. It’s all belligerent and garish, spiced up with little textural and melodic tweaks. Speaking with me last year, the UK producer dashie was conflicted about being in the scene. He began making dariacore, the frantic mashup craze pioneered by Jane Remover, before pivoting to phonk after he had a mortality scare and wanted a faster way of finding success through music. They told me there are some genuinely genius phonk producers, but also a mass of copycats. “This iteration of phonk has no cultural backing or anything. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. It’s just, truthfully, kids looking to make an easy buck or trying to get really popular, really quickly,” dashie said. “At the end of the day, my sole motivation was: I need to make this financially viable.”
Phonk’s reach is staggering but not real. Sure, Spotify’s official playlist has nearly 10 million saves—more than half of RapCaviar, the streamer’s main hip-hop playlist. But it’s not playing outside or at clubs in the US, and most of the phonk producers are faceless. This is music of the ether, functional autobot anthems with no artistic raison d’etre. “I can very much see why people get so frustrated with it,” dashie said. “It’s almost sacrilegious to the EDM scene.”
Andre Benz, the founder of the infamous YouTube channel Trap Nation and the label Broke, which works with many new phonk stars, was upfront about the genre’s soulless hunt for virality. “There’s not a lot of artistry in phonk,” he told me over the phone. “If you talked to a lot of artists, they’d probably agree. They’re making it for financial reasons and they’re making it to go viral.” As the head of Broke, Benz typically offers contracts for phonk singles, such as giving an advance in exchange for marketing to influential creators and anime pages. He calls phonk “edit music,” saying it’s stayed so viral because the producers mold their sound to fit trends. The monetary incentive is massive: Benz said he’s worked with teen producers who’ve raked in $150,000 a month.
Some of the biggest phonk heads like the Norwegian Slowboy and Brit $werve, who have over 10 million monthly listeners between them, have already abandoned the style to test other viral sounds. They’ve made flaccid versions of jumpstyle and krushclub, two other genres soundtracking an endless abyss of TikTok edits. The French producer lrokz’s catalog reads more like a genre-coining algorithm than actual music: “Sigilfunk,” “FUTURA FUNK,” “FUNK UNIVERSO,” “FUNK UNIVERSO (Sigma Version).” One song doesn’t even have a name, just the mashup equation: “EEYUH! x Fluxxwave.” The vast bulk of popular phonk also appears to use AI-generated cover art, which further devalues the music and blurs everything into one morass. Half the art is superhuman sprites shrouded in fire and lasers; the other covers look like Grok was trained on an anime gooner algorithm.
Some have argued that phonk has political relevance, that it’s “a subversive soundtrack to a generation rallying against authority.” If anything, phonk radiates a pure anti-politics, a cursed air raid siren for the polycrisis. It’s evil white noise built for mindless grinding, a life where every second must be filled with bludgeoning beats. This iteration increasingly feels like the marching music for a technofascist state, the soundtrack of a future where computers generate new megahits in two clicks. The most popular YouTube phonk mixes all have inane titles like “playlist for moggers,” “best looksmaxxing music,” and “MAIN CHARACTER VILLAIN - AURA PHONKS.”
How about we call this new generation of copy-paste electro-phonk-funk something else—turbo phonk? diarrhEDM? Edit-core? There's no sign of the sound slowing down. New stars across scenes are hopping on phonk-ified beats by the day. BLACKPINK K-pop celebrity JENNIE’s new album features a drift phonk beat produced by electronic overlord Diplo, who’s hinted that he’s ready to pounce on the sound. “There’s a new song doing a million daily streams every week, every month,” Benz told me.
Anyway, we need some way to separate the sludge from the shards of brilliance, like DJ JL3 & DA ZN’s synapse-frying “Automotivo Magia Terrorífica.” Ânya and d.silvestre’s “Destrói Phonk, Cê Jura Eu Juro” twists the distortion up so high it’s like you’re raving on an active volcano. The most inventive new phonk leans into the vulgar insanity and pushes it to the breaking point, until you feel like you’re being blinded by a 4D IMAX movie two inches from the screen. Even more unhinged gems rewire wickedly blown-out, rapidfire phonk with giga-slowed-and-reverbed filters—imagine five Cybertrucks crashing in a slow-motion pileup blaze. The video is always some glorious nonsense like a hype edit of the mustachioed Angry Birds character Foreman Pig.
As a standalone song, dashie’s “ultraphunk”—which has over 100 million streams across all its “Slowed” and “Super Slowed” edits—is thrilling, like a soundtrack for a Gladiator duel in the year 2275. If only there was another timeline where artists and labels alike chose creativity instead of cash. At a time when electronic music is wracked by nostalgia and vapid genre collisions, the most addictive 2020s phonk offers the thrilling promise of a wild new style. It’s unfortunate that mercenaries squeezed the life out of it so quickly. But it’s not too late to set it all ablaze.
What I’m listening to:
