I’ve been working on some kind of post about my favourite music of the past year, and when I wanted to write something about how, in spite of the year being quite bountiful with good tracks, none of these exactly fit my particular preferred aesthetic. I say aesthetic, because genre doesn’t really work. I could slap a name onto the kind of music I love the most, probably something with “post-“ or “prog-“ or “-gaze” somewhere in it, but none of these affixes would ever fully cover the overall — let’s call it a “vibe” — I’m looking for. Besides, music genre discourse is notoriously nonsensical. In other words, I figured out I don’t really know what to call my favourite kind of music, and that’s a pretty weird feeling for someone who likes talking and writing about music.
Luckily, identifying and describing music isn’t an exact science, it’s a language act. I happen to love those, so I quickly realized that before writing this one throwaway line in my post about my favourite music of the year, I had to write an entirely separate post about the kind of music I wouldn’t be able to talk about in the former. As a result, here is my attempt at defining my specific brand of bullshit, as the internet so poetically puts it. You know what, let’s call it “aquacore”. Is that something? Is my ego big enough to pull something like that off? I dunno.
Anyway, for a song to qualify as — ugh— “aquacore”, I would need to possess most, if not all of the following characteristics:
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The song needs to be anthemic. It needs to contain a core melody that is catchy and fun to belt along with, even if the song itself is about as distant from conventional pop music as you can imagine. This core melody doesn’t necessarily have to be a chorus, however, it can also be a riff or some other recurring element in the composition.
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The song needs to be dense and maximalist. This doesn’t necessarily mean loud, though in practice it often does. What is more important than volume, however, is a sense of depth and atmosphere. It should feel like a wave of sound crashing over you, engulfing and overwhelming you. It cannot be stripped-back or skeletal. When you listen to the song, the song should sound as if it is the only thing that matters.
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The song needs to express emotional catharsis in contrast with sensory overload, or in catchier terms, the song needs to find beauty in brutality. It is in this contrast that the core appeal of many of my favourite bands lie — heavy riffs expressing euphoric relief or grinding electronics finding a way to be uplifting in their crushing overwhelmingness. It needs to sound like the reaching the top of a mountain just when a blizzard subsides, or
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The song needs to express order in its complexity. It can contain, and often does, all the weirdness it wants, from poly-rhythms over operatic orchestral arrangements to unconventional song structures, but there needs to be some sort of logic in it. It doesn't matter if that is a recurring chorus, a repeated motif or variations on the same theme, the whole thing needs to make sense in a way that make the song feel like a song rather than mish-mash of ideas. Failure to do this results in little more than self-absorbed braggadocio, as anyone whose ever suffered through some of the worst prog the 1970s have brought forth can probably attest.
What does all of that sound like, you may think? Here is a short playlist of some of my favorite songs I believe more or less fit this definition, roughly ordered into three tiers, from accessible to more challenging.
Tier 1: Baby's first aquacore
These are all relatively poppy songs that should give you a good impression of the kind of aesthetic I've been trying to describe in this post.
Agent Fresco - Howls
You may recognize this band's vocalist, Arnor Dan, as the guy singing indescribably beautifully on the soundtracks of anime series such as Terror in Resonance and Made in Abyss. Suffice it to say, the rest of his band have the chops to back him up.
Anathema - Untouchable pt. 1
The song that proves you don't need distorted guitar shredding to make this aesthetic work.
Leprous - Stuck
I get the feeling people stopped liking Leprous when they stopped making Very Serious Metal for Intellectuals and started making over-the-top operatic stadium singalongs like this song, but hey I never said emotional catharsis needed to have a sense of dignity.
Porcupine Tree - Blackest Eyes
You can't make a list of this kind of music without Steven Wilson. Also, oddly enough not even the dumbest band name on this list. Far from, in fact.
TesseracT - Of Mind/Nocturne
Apparently, this specific kind of guitar sound is known amongst aficionados as "djent", which is a somehow even stupider word to call a genre of music than "aquacore".
VOLA - Straight Lines
This is just two nerds wearing a trench coat and pretending to be one big song. And with "big" I mean "BIG".
Tier 2: Oh God, the mountain continues underwater!
These are songs I'd consider to be less to everyone's taste, either because they're quite long, repetitive or contain harsh vocals. In any case, this is stuff that might need to grow on you.
Envy - Blue Moonlight
Can't make a list of this without shouting out the Japanese scene, and the guys who we can probably credit with starting this whole "beauty in brutality" thing.
Liturgy - Generation
As far as I can tell, this song only contains two different chords, thereby flying in the face of my very own definition. And yet it fits. It's magic, I tell you.
Slint - Good Morning, Captain
Perhaps another odd one out to the list, seeing as this song is not very melodic, not very maximalist, and certainly not "beautiful" or "euphoric", au contraire. Nevertheless, Slint pretty much invented the cathartic crescendo that is a core tenet of this aesthetic, so they deserve to be on here, as an important historic aside.
STAKE - The Sea is Dying
Even my home country can make this kind of stuff if it wants to. Slightly disturbing detail: the average age of the band — known as Steak Number Eight at the time — when they recorded this song was about fifteen. Yikes.
Tier 3: What the fuck is this noise? You call this music?
This is where we have fully moved into the kind of music that would give your parents an aneurysm. Expect sensory overload that gradually turns into an appreciation for all the finest things in life, coming from bands you'd normally expect to be accused of satanism on cable television.
Blanck Mass - House v. House
The only song on the list without any guitars. Why is it in the third tear, then, you may ask? Well, no one said you need instruments to make a lot of beautiful noise.
Deafheaven - Canary Yellow
Any post that talks about heavy music that is also oddly gorgeous and doesn't mention Deafheaven was written by someone who is lying to themselves. I picked this over some of their more well-known tracks because the ending makes it fit requirement no. 1 of my definition.
Numenorean - Adore
So despite the fact that these guys sing like Cookie Monster and are named after something from The Lord of the Rings, they ac—hey, no wait, come back!