AViT (and Digicore) Is Pop-Punk's Future
Angst is back, baby. After a decade and change of stoic, passive masculinity flooding the “cool” rock scenes, mainstream emo-music has almost completely transferred to the broader hip-hop community. There, artists like the late Lil Peep and Juice Wrld have taken the label “emo-trap” to new stratospheres of popularity. And as a result, the contemporary rap landscape is now littered with songs throwing Midwestern-emo guitar licks and strained melodic crooning in front of bangin’ trap drums. It’s great.
A fortunate byproduct of this genre shift is that angst has become cool again--something the digicore scene is well aware of. The scene’s combination of trap music, experimental electronic instrumentals, and emotional vocal cadences represent a natural and beautiful expansion of emo-music’s past. And for AViT, a fast-emerging player within this contemporary hyperpop subset, their songs evoke memories of emo and pop-punk with such veracity that they sound like reconnecting with a friend for the first time in a while, feeling as if no time had passed at all. Their most recent project, Imperfect & Incomplete, emblematizes the nostalgia for that classic pop-punk sound of the 2000s while still imbuing itself with a distinctly 2021 hyperpop flair.
The album’s opener, “Stuck-up,” a coleslau and Ria Chuelo-produced song that came out a couple months ago, speaks perfectly to that aforementioned mission statement. Soft acoustic guitars open up the track before giving way to an explosive beat of short, blown-out 808 kicks and plucked synths. It is AViT’s vocals, however, that immediately stick out. Their range is quite unlike most (if any) other artists in the digicore community, and their timbre and melodic sensibility perfectly encapsulates the sound their music is reaching for. And then the second verse hits, and their impeccable howl quite literally blows you away. “Don’t even try, It’s not worth it/Just say goodbye, yeah you won’t be missed,” they sing. *Chef’s kiss*
What’s even more amazing about that song is that it makes the listener’s sense of pop structure go completely out of sync. On first listen it’s difficult to tell what’s the chorus and what’s the verse--each section gives the same amount of payoff. And AViT’s evident ability to deliver consistent ear-candy continues throughout the whole project. There are so many good songs here. Try to get the hook from “Ur the Reason im This Way,” produced by dltzk, out of your head. And while the closer “Twitterloser,” produced by Noki, was also already taking off before this project dropped, it still fits perfectly in the general sonic framework of Imperfect & Incomplete.
There isn’t too much else to say about each song--they all basically follow more or less the same formula, with a breakcore beat or grungy guitar riff thrown in there for good measure. But what a formula it is. With Imperfect & Incomplete bending genres this well, picking beats this good, and containing this amount of catchy melodies (with a stacked feature list including d0llywood1, angelus, Heavn, and Noki), it represents in my mind the full potential of what digicore/contemporary hyperpop can be. And on top of all that, it will fully satisfy any of your gaps of ‘Mom get out of my room!’ type of music music with its angsty goodness.
Emo-rock music isn’t completely dead-- of course, bands like Dogleg, The Hoteliers, and Gulfer very much exist. But it is nice to know that a new form of emotional music is resonating with a new generation of listeners, not just older fans clinging to the sounds of their youth.
Written By Noah Simon