Gen Z is lost – There Is No Sound Of The 2020s

Electronic music has never been more abundant. Yet the silos dominating our lives and shaping our habits are walling off new listeners and experiences. In Resident Advisor’s latest video essay, we examine the forces shaping the scene—from AI and inflation to digital exhaustion and generational disconnect—and propose a pivot. There Is No Sound Of The 2020s. Yet In the 80s we had house and techno. In the 90s the sounds of rave, drum and bass, and trip pop. The new millennium marked the arrival of minimal and dubstep. Then the 2010s brought us hyper pop, retro mania, and the EDM boom. But, the 2020s there have been shifts, but no real movement, no sound that’s reached the kind of mass saturation of these previous eras. We’ve got three years left for this decade to produce a sound of its own. So, what’s going on? First, let’s make it clear, there’s not a lack of quality. The problem is quantity. Different people would tell you there are many different sounds of the 2020s and they’d be right, but this heavy saturation could be creating a bottleneck, nightclubs, youth spaces, an internet that actually worked. These crucial structures that once pushed a sound into the mass consciousness are today all crumbling. Instead, we’ve got an ecosystem that can’t grow a genre. Real discovery has been replaced by algorithmic feeds that demand consensus, streaming services built for passive continuity, and an endless barrage of 15 second clips. There are a few reasons why this might be happening, and it can’t be reduced to simple influencer culture, corporate rave experiences, or TikTok techno. Monoculture is dead. The internet was once shared ground, now it’s a city of separate rooms, and most of us have no idea who’s next door. It represents a clean break with the past, and as the dance floor now lives increasingly online, this is becoming a problem for progress. Try to describe what new sounds are animating the underground. It’s a challenge, right? It may be keeping the revival of sounds like Prague, Tech House, and Dubtechno afloat. When a sound is easier to grasp and categorize. It’s easier to travel at a time when emergent sounds of the 2020s lack definition or even a name. The high knowledge and access required to enjoy them to the maximum can lock out casual enthusiasts, and it goes beyond genre. Where’s the next untrue coming from? The next discovery, homogenic black secret technology, oil of every pearl’s uninsides remain in light or double cup, not a cult classic, but a standard setter that has the power to reshape culture and receives the attention and support to guide it there. Electronic music needs new movements, new classics. No one laments that we’ve come to understand acid or hardcore, or any of the once niche sounds too well. When these moments arrive, they extend the life of the music and open up more entry points for more listeners. For now, the electronic music of the 2020s feels as if it’s pushed towards a strange double condition, fragmented yet also repetitive. Then there’s the economy. Since 2020 inflation has made risk taking harder, and risk is what any creative scene runs on. Think back only 10 or 15 years ago, when a club ticket cost seven pounds. It was affordable to flop for talking about young people kind of engaging with, with art generally, not even dance music culture, is is is kind of ticket pricing, and we can talk about this in a vacuum of club music, but I think just the general economic conditions of like the UK and kind of everywhere it feels like a really fucked when promoters gamble less, producers play it safe, and young ravers default to what they know. We know why the result is a silent stagnancy, where we’re exposed to more of the same, instead of a world of experiments, failures, and the odd lightning in a bottle success. The 2020s in electronic music needs the latter. We need experimentation and an economy that can support it. Otherwise, what’s the point? This is all compounded by an industry that is failing to connect with the next generation. Look at the lineups of most big festivals, and you’ll see the same sounds dominating the 2020s groovy house, bass line, hard techno. They please the audience in front of them, but it’s rarely where innovation comes from. Raw, noisy music is still out there. Lost Tutanaku, the rise of South Africa’s electronic underground, boundary pushing Brazilian music and the emerging sleaze pop universe. The path to the 2030s could run through chaos, and that’s just what we know. The global spread of electronic music should give rise to a world where anything can spring from anywhere, but that’s not happening. Hyper. Scenes stay overlooked, while historic hubs keep the center of gravity, and the old infrastructure labels PR music media is built to hold it in place, built to miss whatever’s cutting through somewhere else. We seem to be shackled to the