I really need to figure out a name for this kind of music. It’s like Apparat and Weval: electronic music that has a four on the floor base rhythm but sometimes sprinkled with broken beats, feels like IDM but not noisy, feels soothing but not ambient, feels to have a good drag but not uptempo, has some odd and live-sounding instrumentation but not necessarily actually live instruments, feels sophisticated but not classical.
I was thinking, how about “ballroom techno”, because it’s a techno base but more sophisticated and not dance floor-oriented. Then I found that this is already used for something else, of course. So this was the point where, being 2026, I turned to AI to see what it would suggest for a genre specification here. The result: leftfield indietronica and melodic IDM. That’s actually not bad to express what I mean, it’s just pretty long for a single genre.
Well, for this album specifically I’ll make piece with IDM overall, considering the record as a whole, and then let’s see how I feel about these above genre specifications the next time I come across music like this.
Oh, and btw, this album is awesome. I’ve been coming back to it for a few months now. It’s versatile and playful, groovy but not obtrusive when it’s a backdrop, has easy hooks and some depth, too.