Clout Rock

Searching for substance within a fleeting subgenre.

Last July, the crypto-powered music marketplace nina protocol unveiled a new playlist called “cloudrock,” and, much like Spotify’s infamous “hyperpop” one, with it seemed to coin a new genre. The inaugural edition featured Danish alt-pop songstresses ML Buch and Fine, Dimes Square adjacent rock outfits Chanel Beads and patch +, LA slowcore group untitled (halo) and Swedish Alex G impersonators Horse Vision.

The term “cloud rock” can be read in a couple different ways. On the one hand, it hearkens back to the famous “cloud rap” era of the early to mid 10s, a catch-all phrase for the ethereal, bass-fried and auto-tune warbled trap music that became popular on Soundcloud during that time. On the other, the phrase is also fitting for how the music sounds: it’s fog-filled rock cast through a blurry haze, with muddled guitars and drums seemingly distorted by rings of smoke before reaching your ears. That blurriness isn’t restricted to the music alone, either. It also applies to the phrase’s boundaries. What is cloud rock, really? 

A good place to start is in Copenhagen, where something of an avant pop renaissance has been in motion for the past five years or so. Led by homegrown labels like Escho and iconoclastic artists like Erika de Casier and the aforementioned ML Buch, the Danes have quietly rewired 80s dream-pop and 90s trip-hop for the digital age, producing music that is both melodically rich and rhythmically dry, somehow zigging while giving every indication of zagging. Cloud rockers share these artists’ propensity for psychedelic experimentation, but they also may draw from heavier influences such as My Bloody Valentine and Pavement, stemming in part from the TikTok-fueled zoomergaze wave of the past few years. Looming equally large is the cavernous art-rock of London’s Dean Blunt, whose name appears at the very top of nina’s cloud rock iceberg chart. There’s also a sense that cloud rock sits downstream from the indie sleaze revival that dominated downtown Manhattan in the early 2020s. In this last case the overlap is less vibe than it is tribe, as many of the same record labels and media institutions that propped up the former are now doing so for the latter. I think of cloud rock as one prong of indie sleaze’s eventual exit strategy, the obvious endpoint for kids who realized they were more interested in tinkering with guitar chords recorded into Ableton rather than getting together to play them in garages.

Back in November, I caught this scene in action at the And Always Forever festival in Los Angeles. Billed as “LA’s first all-ages electroclash and shoegaze festival,” the lineup for this 2-day concert at the Echo/Echoplex read as a sort of free associative Spotify playlist, featuring a number of the artists from the original cloud rock playlist along with OG influences such as Drop Nineteens and His Name Is Alive, and a mishmash of genre adjacent acts like Bassvictim and DJ Python. At $100 a pop, tickets were pretty steep for what is essentially a local festival featuring mostly unknown acts, but such is life at a LiveNation venue. I figured what the hell and copped a one-day pass for half price, intrigued by the idea of catching a physical glimpse of a scene which for me had mostly existed in cyberspace up until that point.

I got to the venue around 7 and walked inside at the tail-end of untitled (halo)’s set, a trendy LA band whose first ever single, “el prado freestyle,” name-drops a notoriously scene-y wine bar. Formed in early 2023 by producer Jay Are, guitarist Jack Dione, and bassist/vocalist Ariana Mamnoon, the group makes sludgy post-rock that also sucks trace amounts of trip-hop, dream pop, and slowcore into its murky void. I don’t really “get” their music. Most of it’s so blurry I can barely make out what I’m supposed to be listening to, and in the moments I can catch a glimpse behind the fuzz, there’s just not all that much there. “blunt subconscious” is a good song, though.

In a recent interview, (halo) described their writing process as “endlessly sampling things and overcooking tracks,” which is a hallmark of a lot of the other contemporary acts on this bill. All artists crib from their forebears to some degree, but this is a scene that also actively advertises its thievery. Case in point, my friend Jack later pointed out that one of the members of untitled (halo) was wearing a Brian Jonestown Massacre shirt on stage. I would argue that this referentiality is almost as integral to the success of these bands as their music, perhaps even more so. It’s not just what you make that matters, but who you’re pulling from. This is a phenomenon that exists largely due to our time-flattened era of Are.na mood boards and Spotify playlists. In an age where seemingly all of culture is a few keystrokes away, the act of curation has taken center stage in the levying of artistic value.

After the set ends, Jack and I step outside into the covered alleyway that extends out the back of the Echo. There, amidst the festival’s zine marketplace, also curated by untitled (halo), we run into a girl toting a fresh pack of Red Vines in one hand and a 20-oz beer in the other. Red Vines don’t actually have any licorice in them, which should be obvious if you’ve ever had one. Their classic flavor is known as “Big Red,” and I couldn’t describe it any better myself. Whenever I eat one, I have to immediately have another to remind myself of how it tasted because they leave no residual imprint on the palate. The girl holding them is standing in front of a folding table with a bunch of books on it. The covers resemble the album artwork a lot of these bands go for: collages of arcane digital images set against blank backgrounds with either extremely basic or impossible to read fonts. I’ve been half-jokingly told that to be in the scene you have to put a Ziploc bag over your camera, and alas, one of the book covers in front of me is diffused by a gauzy piece of film overlay. If I were to put my art critic hat on, I’d say all this stuff is an effort to reconcile the illusory permanence of our digital footprint with the very real impermanence of our mortality. We can hold thousands of photos in the palm of our hand, write several lifetimes’ worth of novels in our Notes app, document every waking moment on a camera the size of a pack of gum and store it on a box we’ll never see in the middle of nowhere for next to nothing. But death will come, and then where does this stuff go? Lost to the ether, a ghost just like its creator. 

Downstairs in the Echoplex, a couple is making out on stage in between drags of a cigarette. A light flashes in front of them, intermittently illuminating their bodies in the dark. From this far back I can’t make out who’s holding the camera, but I’m willing to bet it’s The Cobra Snake. Next to this sideshow, members of the NY shoegaze band Sweet 93 are crawling around to the cacophonic drone of an electric guitar getting crushed by the weight of its own distortion. A crowd of about 60 stands before it all bathed in blue, engaged but unmoved. 

The next band up is Minnesota shoegaze group she’s green. I get right up front for this and end up enjoying it much more. Earlier in the night, I had asked one of the guys in our group if he liked any of the music we were about to see, shoegaze and slowcore and whatnot. He said that “it usually depends on how close I am when I hear it,” which was proving to be the case now. In the midst of the pit, enveloped by the thick and heavy wall of sound, I let go of my reservations and joined in on the reverie, allowing a smile to light up my face as an impromptu mosh pit formed during one of the final tracks. It also helped that she’s green played things a lot straighter than Sweet 93. There weren’t really any theatrics here, just dudes strumming furiously on their low-slung guitars and a lead singer twirling about in a black lace dress like a gothic sprite. After the show, I put one of their EPs on to soundtrack my drive home, but was unfortunately disappointed as the recordings carried little of the attack and verve of their live performance, fading into a dull wash of rehashed reverb.

Usually I’m a proponent of the “taste trumps skill” line of thinking, but there has to be something that informs that taste beyond the simple notion of “I like this, I think, this is cool.” The resounding question I have after listening to a lot of this stuff is simply, Why? Like, why was this made? When I interviewed the artist Mila Culpa last year, she told me that Slauson Malone asked her the same question when she was younger and that it changed her approach to writing. I don’t believe that art must be in service of a greater purpose per se, but it should certainly serve a greater purpose for those making it. That purpose doesn’t even have to be known; it just needs to be felt, and when you’re engaging with things honestly, I think it’s pretty easy to tell what stuff has it and what’s just vanity.

About halfway through the performance, I dislodged myself from the crowd to pop back upstairs and scope out The Echo again. The buzzy laptop twee duo ear was performing next. ear, composed of Bard College students Jonah Paz and Yaelle Avtan, look backwards for inspiration too, specifically to vintage Warp-style IDM and turn-of-the-century folktronica, but they ape it with a playful, memetic sensibility that gives the material new life. Lo and behold though, upon making my way to the back of the Echoplex, I found myself staring at a wall of seventy people cutting widthwise across the room, all waiting in line to do the exact same thing as me. It turns out my friends and I weren’t alone in wanting to see ear. Eventually, the line started moving and we were allowed upstairs, but only because the set had already finished and people were now streaming back out of The Echo. I met up with my friend from earlier who had gone up before us and was able to see ear perform. He said they were the real deal to which I nodded my head in agreement, having seen them put on a great show in 2025 behind an apartment complex. Passing through the venue, I looked up to see that DJ Python had already taken the stage and was playing some sugar-rush inducing trance music to a crowd that was paying little attention to him. It was odd to see the venerable producer and DJ, known for his sweetly contemplative take on Latin club rhythms, cast as some weird interlocutor between sets. He looked like a deer in headlights up there, reflecting on the decisions in his life that had led him to playing for a crowd of dopamine-depleted early twenty-somethings on a Sunday evening in the heart of Echo Park.

Age is an important factor to consider when trying to understand why this scene sounds the way it does. Many of its participants and fans were born around the turn of the century, entering the heyday of their youths just as the pandemic shut the world down and forced everyone inside. Time that would’ve been spent partying in bars and dorms turned to time spent posting on Instagram and Discord, and this pent-up energy manifested in a nostalgia for the days when we all took a more devil-may-care attitude to living life. The source of that nostalgia is mostly the 90s and early-00s, a time period which holds the promise of unbridled youthful freedom and beauty to this age group because they have no concrete memories to prove otherwise. Emulation will only get you so far though, like a screenprint of a painting or the transcription of a speech, there’s something about the original work’s character that gets lost in rote reenactment. If you go back and listen to some of the primary texts from that era, Slowdive’s Soulvaki or Duster’s Stratosphere, for example, there’s a warmth underneath the wall of sound that to me is lacking from many of these early cloud rock songs. That many of the genre’s most standout releases thus far (Suntub, Rocky Top Ballads, Goodbyehouse) come from the aforementioned Copenhagen scene, which is rather insular and localized to not just a particular city, but a particular University even, speaks to the value of place, community, and seclusion in artistic development. 

I step outside to catch some air and then reenter the Echo to catch the final act of the night, the LA duo After. After makes what they’ve termed “trip-pop,” an upbeat and hyper-stylized variant of trip-hop that leans heavily on early Y2K-era pop sensibilities. Their songs all sound like they could score a Hilary Duff movie, and their visuals look like the product of giving Chat GPT a Fruitiger Aero mood board and telling it to go wild. They’re the ultimate pastiche in my opinion, and somewhat of a fitting close for a festival that was built atop references. Seeing After act like it was 2003 all over again made me step back and wonder, again, what the point of this all was. A band like After, to me, says nothing about our current time and place except that we happen to be looking back at another for ideas. Consuming culture does not create culture; culture is the product of imaginative and artistic thinking applied to everyday surroundings, it is equal parts aspirational and habitual. What’s ultimately exhausting about this scene is that it offers very little in terms of connective tissue with the real world, that is, the world outside of its own objects. It’s why, upon leaving the festival, I didn’t feel as if I’d come any closer to understanding the people or music that populated it. If anything, I felt further ostracized, having just been in such close proximity to both and still finding myself unable to pierce the veil.