Glitch, wrock and zeuhl: Music genres have become a new vocabulary

Girl group. Glam metal. Glam rock. Glitch. Can you pick the odd one out? Surely glitch is not a music genre. Yet raiding the digital jukebox, I learnt that glitch is a synth-pop love-child of 1990s Germany (where else?), a techno offshoot devoted to the aesthetics of failure. Think Kraftwerk with CD skips, ambient hum and software bugs.

There’s even glitch hop and glitch trance: two more categories among the 1383 genres and subgenres of tunes classified by the Spotify streaming app, a mega-list stretching from a cappella to zydeco.

Depending on who you ask, Spotify is your passkey to the record store, or evil incarnate. Either you dig your beats, or you fret about the “corporate digital enclosure where your every move is tracked” – to quote Liz Pelly in her book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist (Hachette 2025).

I’m not here to argue the platform’s pros and cons. Not today. Rather, I want to highlight how spytrack and dangdut are music styles, just as dark progressive house is not the Addams Family but a hypnotic cousin of trance. Spytrack, on the other hand, is 007 suave-o-rama, akin to scorecore, while dangdut is Javanese onomatopoeia for that island’s tabla drum.

My audit was inspired by December’s arrival of Spotify Wrapped, a forensic summary of a year’s listening for each subscriber. Back then I discovered I’m 31 years old, taste-wise, with a weakness for freak folk, which I’d never heard of, despite adoring it for 12 months.

Spurred to learn more, I sifted the whole catalogue, exposing my vocab to scores of variants alien to the average pop-rock population. Labels like rai, a discursive Algerian hip-hop deriving from the Arabic word for opinion. Or doujin, literally “a colleague with similar interests”, identifying self-published fan tracks in Japan.

Beyond rust, corrosion is heavy metal bleeding into industrial electronica, akin to charred death – another rabbit hole. Kwaito is an Afrikaans word for cool-cum-angry, a style of Joburg house. Vallenato, literally valley-born in Spanish, is Colombian folk complete with accordions and sugar-cane scrapers. Riddim is an alternative to wonky in the dubstep realm.

Zeuhl, at #1377, is among the weirder. It stems from Kobaian, an artificial language of tones and semitones, created in 1969 by Christian Vander of the French prog band outfit Magma – a Gallic pun on soft rock. To Kobaian diehards, zeuhl means celestial, a fitting tag for a psychedelic choral jazz fusion at home in space operas.

Despite what you think, complextro is not a Pokemon, British blues isn’t Brexit, power noise is not an electric drill, and relaxative and foxtrots aren’t gastrically entwined. Just as no-wave (an atonal NY punk) isn’t the antonym of surf music, gauze pop is not the mummy’s dad, while lowercase (the genre) sits separate from k.d. lang.

K-pop you know, but what about wrock (wizard rock), Madchester, Lithumania, acousmatic or Bmore (Baltimore hip-hop)? Indeed, as prefixes go, eclipsing classic, chill, dark and death, deep is the clear winner, boasting 90 spinoffs from deep adult standards (songs, not virtues) to deep uplifting trance. That last label is a fair synopsis of my week-long espionage in Spotify backroom, rummaging the app’s secret taxonomy. Cue spytrack.

Get tips, tricks and word games from our crosswords guru, plus links to our online puzzles and quizzes, delivered to your inbox every Saturday. Sign up for our Puzzled with David Astle newsletter.