Top 20 Weirdest Music Genres

The term genre is loosely defined on this list, since styles such as seapunk make up a microscopic section of the electronic music iceberg. This musical movement is obsessed with aquatic and nautical themes and is strongly influenced by 1990s pop culture. Seapunk emerged from the landscape of Tumblr in the early 2010s—and doesn’t really have a codified sound. Hip-hop, electronic and 90s-style R&B can often all be found mixed together on a seapunk track. While it started as a trendy internet meme, seapunk has largely faded from the public zeitgeist.

To paraphrase the New York pop-punk band of the same name, cute is what kawaii metal aims for. The word kawaii translates to a Japanese cultural aesthetic that embodies cuteness and innocence in its design. The band Babymetal combined kawaii with heavy metal in 2010, and in doing so created their own strange little subgenre. Kawaii metal blends those catchy, earworm vocal hooks found within most J-Pop acts with hard-hitting, modern metal riffs. The resulting juxtaposition is a sort of musical “you got peanut butter in my chocolate” situation—where two great tastes end up tasting great together.

There actually isn’t any hardcore punk rock influence in this subgenre of rap music. Instead, the term horrorcore basically serves as an umbrella for a lot of darker, death-obsessed hip-hop lurking in the underground. We’re not really talking about the more realistic gangsta rap of the ‘90s, but instead MCs who tend to gravitate toward more fantastical, gory or metaphorical themes. The Gravediggaz were hugely influential to this movement—as were the more supernatural songs from the Geto Boys. Elsewhere, artists like Necro, Goretex, Mr. Hyde and others combine macabre lyrics with atmospheric soundscapes and boom-bap beats to create occult-obsessed awesomeness.

The jury is still out as to whether or not djent is an actual genre of music or simply a style of guitar playing. Fans tend to be split on the two definitions, but many agree that Sweden’s Meshuggah helped (for better or worse) forge the djent sound. It’s all about the rhythms when it comes to this approach to technical death metal—specifically, a palm-muted technique that emphasizes a complex groove alongside dizzying lead guitar breaks. There’s also a dissonance that tends to accompany many metal bands that are labeled as “djent.” Animals as Leaders and Tesseract are considered progenitors of the style, while modern applicants can employ everything from metalcore breakdowns and rap vocals to the mix.

Themes of sadness, longing and self-destruction embody this controversial subgenre of a metallic style that’s globally known for pushing boundaries. DSBM trailblazers like Xasthur, Silencer and Shining took cues from second- and third-wave black metal artists like Katatonia and Bethlehem. These groups incorporated slower tempos, acoustic sections and even the occasional clean vocal section to create something new. Make no mistake, though. Most DSBM vocals are harrowing shrieks, the sort of gut-wrenching caterwauling that sounds birthed from absolute, gutter-dwelling madness. This style of music definitely isn’t for everyone. It’s a corner of the black metal world that’s always bound to spark debate.

Those living outside of the U.K. might not be familiar with the subgenre known as chap hop. This is a style that’s both visual and musical, since it combines old world British aesthetics and steampunk subculture with modern hip-hop. The end results are as strange as that description implies, with a very limited number of artists laying claim to the “chap hop” label. That said, the music of artists like Mr.B the Gentleman Rhymer and Professor Elemental certainly stands apart from the pack. This is the kind of hip-hop you check out when you’re absolutely burned out on every other commercial iteration of the style.

Ask any alternative rocker of a certain age about their favorite cult albums and it’s highly likely that at least some of them will fall under the “shoegaze” category. That’s because this subgenre of indie and alternative rock was something fresh and new back when bands like My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive were defining the sound in the ‘80s and ‘90s. The soft/loud dynamic of quiet, emotional vocals and blasting guitars helped endear these groups to the cool kids of the day. Meanwhile, U.K. groups like the Chameleons helped influence the blackgaze movement headlined by France’s Alcest. This take on traditional shoegaze incorporated elements of black metal into the mix to create something that was both bold and beautiful.

The world of folk metal casts a wide net, under which many bands of varying styles can be found. The core of this subgenre is the embracing of traditional folk elements—and tempering them with the aggression of heavy metal. This could be seen in the Jethro Tull-isms found within Britain’s Skyclad or the Scandinavian cultural themes of Ensiferum, Moonsorrow and Bathory. Finland’s folky polka-like style, called “humppa,” is incorporated by groups like Finntroll and Korpiklaani. Elsewhere, Sweden’s In Flames took traditional melodies and amplified them within a melodic death metal context. It’s a rich, cultural tapestry that’s enabled folk metal to gain fans all around the world.

The Belgian band Agathocles may be the world’s foremost mincecore band, but their style of politically-left leaning extreme music also serves as an offshoot of basic grindcore. This is an ultra-extreme combination of death metal and hardcore punk that usually emphasizes overkill amounts of speed. Napalm Death, Terrorizer and the early works of Carcass helped draft a grindcore blueprint in the 1980s, while Agathocles’ mincecore sound tends to contain slower, more stomping riffs in its arsenal. This group’s anarcho-punk politics followed grindcore’s U.K. origins, but grind bands have been known to sing about everything from gory horror movies to hardcore adult films, all in the search for extremity.

It was a blink-and-you-missed-it affair: the fusion of funky rhythms and slap bass with high-octane thrash. Funk metal was initially hyped by many underground press outlets in the early ‘90s as the next big thing, but it didn’t really pan out that way. This was despite funk metal-adjacent groups like Faith No More, Living Colour and the Red Hot Chili Peppers achieving certified chart success. Today, the term funk metal tends to be applied to more cult artists like Fishbone or Mordred. The latter’s San Francisco roots speak to funk metal’s West Coast origins, with their traditional Bay Area thrash riffs being tempered with DJ scratches and emotive, exaggerated vocals.

Just as a lot of these genres are tough to define, this format is no exception. At its heart a satire of consumerism, Vaporwave emerged as a genre in the 2010s across various online music communities, beginning with artists such as James Ferraro and Vektroid just to name a few. Start with a foundation of basic pop music and add a heavy dose of 80s and 90s pop culture, then mix samples of smooth jazz and corporate lounge music while using pitch shifting and loops to achieve a distorted sound and you've got yourself some Vaporwave.

Today’s popular music is all about dense, catchy, overwhelming beats and compositions—you know, hooks and massive choruses. By contrast, lowercase asks listeners to experience sounds drowned out by the auditory clutter of the world. Lowercase artists digitally amplify natural sounds like anthills and flowers growing, taking a microscope to sounds otherwise imperceptible to the human ear. Others, such as Steve Roden, isolate everyday situational sound, like the handling of paper, or the sound of a quiet library. Minimalist and ambient it may be but lowercase is unlikely to top the Billboard charts anytime soon.

In the early 2000s, ‘HORSE the band’ jokingly coined the term “Nintendocore” to describe their unique style of music, which combined metal with 8-bit video game inspired synth. The term caught on, leading other video game-inspired rock and metal musicians to adopt the term. Nintendocore’s ancestry can be traced to Chiptune, a genre of music spawned in the 1980s that incorporated 8-bit synth from the video game world and EDM like tempos. It’s a formula that is just so crazy that it works, leaving video game fans everywhere looking for the nearest mosh pit.

Hardcore techno and gabber were among the first EDM subgenres to push the number of beats per minute in an aggressive direction. But splittercore and extratone make them look tame by comparison. Both splittercore and extratone fall under the larger umbrella genre of speedcore, which is defined as any EDM where the BPM exceeds 300 BPM. Splittercore is speedcore on amphetamines, usually exceeding 600 BPM. It pushes the boundary of recognizable EDM to its very limits... and then extratone demolishes those limits, going beyond 1000 BPM. In fact, the human brain struggles to keep up, and the individual beats sound like a single pulsating drone.

Who were the original metalheads you ask? So metal they were metal before metal existed? Pirates! Pirate metal pays homage to the original headbangers of the sea by mixing power metal, thrash metal and speed metal with traditional pirate ballads, chants and the folk sound associated with seafaring. Lyrically, pirate metal is all about buried treasure, rum, kidnapping landlubbers and other pirate pastimes. Pirate metal fans around the world have 80s metal band Running Wild to thank for inventing the genre when they abandoned their Satanic imagery for the pirate life with their third studio album, Under Jolly Roger.

There seems to be a clear correlation between weird music and genres that end in “core”. In this case, our hybrid genre combines crunk music with screamo and emo. This is usually achieved by pairing vocal styles more commonly used in emo and screamo with electronic beats similar to those found in Southern hip hop. That being said, crunkcore really feels like an odd pastiche of pop culture from 2005 to 2010. Throw everything you can find including hip hop, scene kid fashion, emo, screamo, techno, suburban youth, auto-tune and Hot Topic into the mix and you get the neon monster that is crunkcore.

Avant-garde is a term that can be applied to any piece of art which pushes beyond the accepted boundaries of that given art form. In the case of music, it’s difficult to set any specific set of characteristics, but a number of composers from the 20th Century rose to prominence by radically altering the definition of music, and came to be commonly known as avant-garde composers. Among them are Arnold Schoenberg, who worked with serialism, a technique of composition using a series of systematic values, and John Cage, whose most infamous piece consisted of four minutes and thirty three seconds of sitting in front of his piano in silence.

Psychedelic synth and folk music feel like an unlikely pairing to begin with, but add Catholic symbolism to the mix and things get really weird. The 60s and 70s resulted in a lot of experimentation, but this genre stands out from the crowd. Sister Irene O’Connor’s Fire of God’s Love/ Songs to Ignite the Spirit sounds innovative and experimental even today, without considering that it was recorded by an Australian nun living in a monastery in 1976. Musicians Pastor John Rydgren and Emily Bindiger each made significant contributions to the genre with their respectively trippy releases Silhouette Segments and Emily.

This is another genre that is more about an idea than any distinct musical characteristics. It is considered to be a form of avant-garde music, but it pushes the definition of music so far beyond recognition that danger music is also called anti-music. Confused yet? You should be. Danger music is defined by one thing - the theory that some music can be inherently dangerous. Musicians creating danger music prove this hypothesis in various ways, such as playing loud enough to deafen an audience, attacking the audience, or writing “the performer should blind themselves 5 years after performing this piece” in the sheet music. Fun.

Noise music is produced all over the world, but no one does it quite as weird as the musicians of Japan, who have developed a distinct and highly regarded noise music culture, known as Japanoise. While the 1980s and 1990s were certainly the high point of the genre, Japan maintains its position as a mecca of noise music. The Japanoise movement encompasses many subgenres of noise music coming out of Japan, from the tabletop electronic noise of MSBR or the Incapacitants, to more punk inspired Japanoise artists like Ruins. Japanoise has also produced arguably one of the most famous and respected noise musicians ever, Merzbow.




Do you actively seek out others who enjoy a niche style of music? What are your thoughts on those that “gate-keep” their love of a particular genre? Let us know in the comments!