Dear listeners,
I’m Dani, a health reporter (and sometimes music writer) at The Times, filling in this week for Lindsay.
We’re — somehow — over a quarter into 2026. My favorite new music from this year mirrors the songs I loved a decade ago: sludgy, smeared-sounding rap tracks. Welcome to the cloud-rap revival.
“Cloud rap” is a pretty amorphous term, but these songs have the same basic ingredients. The production is hazy, smothered in synths. The rappers sound distant, like they’re murmuring several rooms away from the mic. There’s abundant reverb. But just because these songs are dreamlike doesn’t mean they’ll put you to sleep: They twitch and throttle, glitch and glide.
I’ve been starting my mornings lately listening to the London rapper fakemink’s EP from February, “The Boy Who Cried Terrified”; it’s 15 minutes of high-velocity cloud rap. I’ve also been devouring every single that the prolific Swedish rapper Bladee pumps out. So here I compiled a few of my favorite cloud-rap tracks, new and old, with some stalwarts of the genre — chief among them, ASAP Rocky — and some overlooked artists who deserve to get their due.
I know you see me, shining in my white tee,
Dani
Listen along while you read.
1. Lil Peep and Lil Tracy: “White Tee”
It took maybe a dozen listens to realize that Lil Peep, the godfather of SoundCloud rap, was sampling the twee indie-pop band the Postal Service on “White Tee.” Lil Peep, who died in 2017, was so good at distilling a murky muddle of emotions into just a few lines: “I used to think I love you / now I know it ain’t true / now I know it’s not you.” Alongside his frequent collaborator and fellow GothBoiClique member Lil Tracy, he drifts over the beat, rattling off verses like each thought is just now occurring to him. This track gets stuck in my head constantly, and it’s such a sweet, simple testament to Peep’s ability to make songs with real staying power.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
2. Bladee: “Eyelash”
Trust Bladee to find the weirdest way to tell someone you love them. “I want to be in your eye like an eyelash,” he mumbles here. “I want to be on your apps like an iPad.” His best lyrics are like this — sharp, specific and slurred enough that you wind up triple-checking to make sure you heard him right. But the production is what sells this song for me: the bass that wallops right through the chorus, the sudden rush of synths as he tries to say, in every strange way he can, just how he feels.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
3. Lil B: “Wonton Soup”
It wouldn’t be a cloud-rap playlist without Lil B. “Wonton Soup” is the genre at its most fun: chaotic, propulsive and punctuated with plenty of “Woos!” Even though the song is over 15 years old, it sounds like something that would blow up on YouTube today.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
4. fakemink: “Blow the Speaker.”
I’m calling it now: fakemink, a 21-year-old British rapper who’s been making music since he was 10, is going to stick around for a long time. His debut album is expected at some point this year, but to hold us over, he gave us “The Boy Who Cried Terrified,” a collection of skittering, intoxicating songs that don’t slow down for a second. “Blow the Speaker.,” the EP’s opener, starts with a swell of strings and then grabs you by the collar. “Turn the bass up,” fakemink implores over and over, and each of the maybe hundreds of times I’ve heard this song, I’ve blasted the volume in my headphones.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
5. Bones: “CtrlAltDelete”
This highlight from Bones’s 2017 album “Unrendered” is both understated and overlooked. He doesn’t need to do too much: The drums here are soft but insistent, and he spends most of the song speaking in a quasi-mumble. If the metaphor in the chorus feels like a bit of a gimmick now — “Once I hit you with that backspace, you ain’t coming back / Control alt delete you, give me space like tab” — trust that it felt at least a bit more novel when the song first came out.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
6. Wicca Phase Springs Eternal: “Just One Thing”
“It’s so hard to make out when my head isn’t on right,” Adam Andrzejewski, who performs under the charmingly convoluted name Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, moans in this track. He’s so good at writing about a kind of emotional claustrophobia: trapped inside his mouth and his mind, trying to connect with someone else through the thicket of his own thoughts. “Just One Thing,” off his 2019 album “Suffer On,” pulses forward with an irresistible drumbeat. He’s in pain, sure, but he also sounds like he’s having the time of his life.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
7. ASAP Rocky, Clams Casino and Imogen Heap: “I Smoked Away My Brain”
D.I.Y. mash-ups of ASAP Rocky’s 2011 song “Demons” and the producer (and cloud-rap icon) Clams Casino’s rework of an Imogen Heap song have catapulted across the internet for years. But in 2023, Rocky released an official version, blending and blurring these songs together. The result is mesmerizing: Rocky’s pitched-down vocals echo over Heap’s lilts. Everything collides in the chorus, with Heap’s voice swooping around Rocky’s: “Thinking about you, thinking about you, add it to your thoughts,” he croons.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
8. Ecco2k: “AAA Powerline”
Ecco2k has long made music alongside Bladee, Yung Lean and the Swedish collective Drain Gang, but his solo work is just as animating. “AAA Powerline,” from his 2019 album “E,” is where he shines the most. The song is enchanting, a four-minute long enigma, as he repeats the same few lyrics over and over. He oscillates between describing a specific sense of dissociation — so nauseous he can’t sleep, feeling like his arms are zip-tied together — and his looming existential worries: “Will I ever feel whole again?”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
9. Yung Lean: “Smirnoff Ice”
I will never forget the sheer force of shrieks that erupted last March, when I saw Yung Lean perform in Stockholm. The instant the synths that start “Smirnoff Ice” began to play, the entire row beside me screamed; a complete stranger standing next to me grabbed my hand. That’s the power of this song, a goofy, giddy, not-totally-coherent romp that lets you borrow nostalgia for Yung Lean’s youth. He offers up a series of images: pitbulls running over asphalt, cheap vodka in the park, bounding across the beach. “They fell in love with the kid,” he brags; you can see why.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
The Amplifier Playlist
“9 Ethereal, Emotional, Chaotic and Goofy Cloud-Rap Gems” track list Track 1: Lil Peep and Lil Tracy, “White Tee” Track 2: Bladee, “Eyelash” Track 3: Lil B, “Wonton Soup” Track 4: fakemink, “Blow the Speaker.” Track 5: Bones, “CtrlAltDelete” Track 6: Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, “Just One Thing” Track 7: ASAP Rocky, Clams Casino and Imogen Heap, “I Smoked Away My Brain” Track 8: Ecco2k, “AAA Powerline” Track 9: Yung Lean, “Smirnoff Ice”
Read past editions of the newsletter here.
If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here.
Have feedback? Ideas for a playlist? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at [email protected].
Dani Blum is a health reporter for The Times.
The post 9 Ethereal, Emotional, Chaotic and Goofy Cloud-Rap Gems appeared first on New York Times.
