Chasing Fridays: Cloud-Rock explainer, quannnic Q&A, The Virgos

I decided to do something a little different for this week's Chasing Fridays. Instead of writing about a slate of new releases (last week's edition was packed with those, if case you missed it), I felt compelled to write a Giant Article, as I do from time to time. This article is about a developing genre/sound/sensibility that some people are calling "cloud-rock," and you can read 2,500 words about that phenomenon below. I also threw together a few thoughts on the new Virgos record, and then did a Q&A with quannnic about their beguiling new shoegaze offering, Warbrained, which I also spent a clutch of words unpacking. Hope you enjoy.

What the fuck is cloud-rock? The most 2025 rock sub-genre: explained

Last month, my friend Devon Chodzin and I were chortling at the term "cloud-rock," a nascent genre taxonomy that several outlets have begun employing to describe a burgeoning strain of contemporary alt-rock. In their semi-facetious "#cloudrock iceberg" diagram, the great music website Nina situates Alex G and Dean Blunt as the Adam and Eve of cloud-rock, and then positions the following artists as cloud-rock's figureheads: Bar Italia, ML Buch, Smerz, Chanel Beads, Double Virgo, Nourished By Time, the Escho label, and also Teen Suicide, for some reason. In his article titled "The Dreamy Malaise of Post-Pandemic Alt-Rock," Pitchfork's Kieran Press-Reynolds understands cloud-rock as being musical "styles wavering in a fuzzy zone between digital and analogue, indie guitar filtered through a cracked producer’s brain."

At first, Devon and I thought the cloud-rock tag was pretty ridiculous: much too vague in what it's aiming to encapsulate – Horse Vision and daine are simply not working within the same artistic framework – and also redundant, given that much of this music already falls under pre-existing tags like "dream-pop," "post-punk," or plain ole "indie-rock." [Adam Curtis voice] But then, something strange happened. The other night, Devon and I were listening to the inadvertent.index Satellite comp – one of the year's most tantalizing releases – with some friends, and the "what do you call this type of music?" question arose. Without missing a beat, the two of us said "cloud-rock," and then began unironically setting the parameters of this vibey, nebulous, genre-not-genre that we were scoffing at just one month before.

What Devon and I realized is that cloud-rock fills a vernacular void that's become gaping over the last two-ish years of musical progress. There's a new sound permeating indie-rock's creative forefront, and up until now, there hasn't been a convenient way to describe it. Last summer, Devon wrote the absolutely crucial scene report on Copenhagen alt-pop, in which he interviewed Fine, Astrid Sonne, Snuggle, Molina, and Escho label owner Nis Bysted, linking them all within a greater movement alongside ML Buch and Erika De Casier. Throughout his piece, Devon came up with half-a-dozen different ways to explain how these artists – all either soloists or duos, not formal Bands – are blurring traditional pop and rock frameworks into something new, an indistinct yet very much real sensibility that has elements of dream-pop, shoegaze, hip-hop, electronica, and even mainstream pop, but isn't quite any of those idioms. The music he was cataloging, the signature sound of the increasingly prolific and important Copenhagen scene, is cloud-rock.

Cloud-rock is a breed of alt-rock whose foundations are split equally between "internet music" – a catch-all I'm using to encompass the borderless territories where post-Soundcloud rap, post-Oneohtrix Point Never electronica, and post-P.C. Music avant-pop have assimilated in recent years – and "indie-rock." A cloud-rock song may sonically resemble indie-rock, but it has the oblique vibes of modern non-rock. This playlist by cloud-rocker A Good Year is something of a cloud-rock moodboard: Jim Legxacy, Bassvictim, an evilgiane beat, and a Duster song have very little in common musically, but they all share the suggestive, smudgy, cataracts filter of the cloud-rockers who dot the same mix (Fine, Chanel Beads, RIP Swirl). Under the overcast skies of cloud-rock, all of those diverse inspirations are shaded by the same cirrostratus tint.

Whereas dream-pop evokes the celestial anti-gravity of the heavens, cloud-rock hovers liminally within earth's atmosphere. As opposed to the pinkish coloration of Beach House and Cocteau Twins' dream-pop, cloud-rock's tonal hues are muddy and gray – the murky iridescence of ​contaminated rainwater. Albums like ML Buch's Suntub and Chanel Beads' Your Day Will Come epitomize the cloud-rock sound. On Suntub, Buch's clean, tactile guitar strums refract against occasional synth plumes, brisk drum samples, and vocals that are sung with a stately elegance, then treated with smeary reverb and/or light auto-tune. Like all cloud-rock, the album is a slate of contrasts: minimal and majestic, ethereal and naturalistic, pop and rock, electronica made with guitars.

Chanel Beads' Your Day Will Come is bustling compared to Suntub, its cloudiness more cumulus than cirrus. The conceit of nearly every song is to take a somewhat rudimentary indie-pop tune and hollow out its innards while simultaneously buffing out its exterior with swelling strings (some real, some fake), pitched-up vocals, persistent drum thwacks, and vaporwave-ian basslines. All of the dynamic stimuli of a standard "pop" or "rock" song are flipped topsy-turvy. Guitars that your ear expects to chime merely wobble like a thin slab of aluminum. Choruses that're sung with a speaker-leaping might are buttressed flimsily by wispy strings and dinky drumbeats. Emotional highs are dampened by a filmic haze that pervades each musical peak and valley.

That textural upholstery, paramount to all cloud-rock, doesn't portend psychedelic transcendence (shoegaze), elevated sensuality (dream-pop), or nocturnal coziness (ambient techno). It just lingers behind the music with a benign blurriness, like a subtle yet persistent bout of COVID brain fog. Cloud-rock's musical consistency is reminiscent of its ancestral genre cloud-rap, where artists like Yung Lean and smokedope2016 rhyme through a chalky, eye-watering smog that's certainly surreal, but never amounts to the blissful ebullience of qualitatively "dreamy" music. For as chipper and suave as cloud-rock can be, there's a dull ache, an existential dourness, at the core of this music.

The cloud-rock sound I hear in Chanel Beads is all over Nourished By Time's new album The Passionate Ones: a set of glassy-eyed indie-pop that's opaque and vivid, funky and fragile, slick and sooty, always gossamer but never quite dreamy. Fine songs like "Days Incomplete" and "Run," are peak cloud-rock, as are untitled (halo)'s "doomcomplex" and "Pedal Petal." However, to me, Suntub is the quintessential cloud-rock album – not just for its sound, but because cloud-rock feels the way Suntub's artwork looks: at once organic and uncanny, bright and unnerving, playfully intuitive and rigidly intentional. Peruse the artwork from several other cloud-rock luminaries – Fine, Horse Vision, Molina, Tiffi M, Satellite – and you'll notice a pattern: figures in motion, lots of white space, a sort of fastidious emptiness that captures the music's contour-less drift.

The Satellite comp, which I wrote about earlier this month, is a primary resource that all future cloud-rock scholars should consult. If I were using the tracklist to construct a cloud-rock syllabi, I'd pluck out the following: the indecipherable auto-tuned coos of Kalione's "fly away," the quaking bass-bomb that interrupts Ossian Flavin's hymnal "U Arrive," the pitched-up baby burbles melting over Cleaver Blue's "Moogli," the synthetic bleats and acoustic warbles of Tiffi M and lukakrush's "Seen," and the squeaking slowcore bionics of Horse Vision's "Tracker." Horse Vision, a Stockholm duo who were briefly signed to cloud-rock hub year0001, released their stunning debut album earlier this year, and until now, I struggled to define its familiar yet futuristic sound. An artificial hinterland where creamy synths and digitized purrs frolic alongside wooden acoustic chords and nasally indie-rock murmurs, a setting where Bladee-ian mysticism and twee-pop whimsy abound.

Before I submitted to the cloud-rock manifesto, I would've filed Horse Vision's music under "Alex G type shit." Of course, "Alex G type shit" isn't a genre, and cloud-rock isn't just music that sounds like Alex G. It's music that sounds like a very particular portion of Alex G's eclectic sound. Specifically, the electronica-inflected hyper-folk that's scattered throughout 2019's House of Sugar and 2022's God Save The Animals (less so the music on 2025's rootsier Headlights). Alex G songs like "Taking," "Near," "S.D.O.S.", and "Cross the Sea" are formative cloud-rock artifacts. Those aren't "indie-rock" songs in the way other Alex G tracks like "Hope" and "Runner" are most definitely "indie-rock" songs. They're something else. Bleary. Cyborgian. Adjacent to Soundcloud music. Evocative of the cryptic fog-pop of Dean Blunt.

Dean Blunt has been propagating cloud-rock's hazy essence for much longer than Alex G. His 2014 album Black Metal has the hallmark dimness of cloud-rock, as well as the genre's feint singing style and weary drums. If cloud-rock's more overt and palpable musical attributes can be traced to Alex G, Blunt's oeuvre is most responsible for bestowing cloud-rock its turbid aesthetic and fatigued tempo. It's less about the specific instruments he uses than the overall vibe: a fumy odor that evokes the late-summer mugginess of chillwave, the hypnagogic psych-pop of Ariel Pink, and the mesmeric repetition and dank ambiance of internet-native rap.

Nourished By Time is a confirmed student of Dean Blunt, as is Erika de Casier, who's probably more cloud-rock-adjace, though still essential to the whole Copenhagen cloud contingent. Joanne Robertson, a featured vocalist on many Dean Blunt songs, is gearing up to release a new album that's sounding rather cloudy based on the singles. Moreover, Chanel Beads' "Police Scanner" is an exemplary blend of Blunt-ish mood and G-ish melody: paradigmatic cloud-rock for its illusory density and quirky pop skittishness. Blunt himself is even in a cloud-rock group with Fine called The Crying Nudes, whose 2024 compilation is rickety and serene.

Press-Reynolds' interpretation of cloud-rock (see paragraph 1) sounds a lot like the initial incarnation of "post-rock," a term his father, Simon Reynolds, devised to describe how early-90s acts like Bark Psychosis, Disco Inferno, and Seefeel were overhauling alt-rock with the structural looseness of jazz and the compositional fluidity of electronica. Before "post-rock" became synonymous with the crescendo-core of Explosions in the Sky and Sigur Ros, it was applied to a grip of bands who rejected pop songwriting conventions and adopted state-of-the-art samplers and synths to re-build rock from the ground up. In my 2023 feature on TikTok shoegaze, I described Jane Remover's digicore-cum-shoegaze LP, Census Designated, as "inverted post-rock; moving out of electronic-based music and into traditional rock, thus arriving at a similar cross-genre nexus as post-rock progenitors like Disco Inferno and Bark Psychosis, but from the opposite direction."

While I wouldn't call Jane Remover's music cloud-rock, I think one of the genre's key tenets is that its current of influence flows mutually between rock and non-rock. Cloud-rock isn't merely indie-rock with electronic flourishes. And unlike post-rock, cloud-rock isn't posing a challenge to rock convention by way of freeform structures and intense dynamics. Cloud-rock is "rock" that's anatomically rooted in outsider rap and electronica. Nina describe it as "electronic musicians exploring rock through a decidedly tweaked production lens." I think of it as rock created in a stem cell lab; an inorganic mutation on an "organic" form.

Chasing Fridays: Water From Your Eyes Q&A, Double Virgo, She’s Green, more

Catching up on shoegaze, “cloud-rock,” emo, and talking pop with an art-rocker.

Chasing SundaysEli Enis

Since cloud-rock is a new phenomenon with no defined perimeters and little-to-no cultural baggage associated with the term, what qualifies as cloud-rock is still up in the air. The Nina iceberg is a great starting point, though I personally disagree with the inclusion of Teen Suicide (too scrappy) and Bar Italia (too post-punk) under the cloud-rock banner. The Bar Italia side-project Double Virgo, on the other hand, definitely have cloud-rock vibes. Right now, I'm less interested in determining what is and what isn't cloud-rock than I am in using the term when it feels right. When I hear a piece of music that has all the neatness of pop, the controlled disorder of rock, the surreal textures of electronica, and the exotically dreary mood of internet-native rap, then I might call that music "cloud-rock." If you step out under the skyline of contemporary "indie" music in 2025, I'd recommend bringing an umbrella. The cloud-rock front is moving in.

The Virgos - Lord Have Mercy

For the third year in a row, The Virgos have dropped a new album just in time for Virgo season. Each one of the Wilkes Barre, PA band's records has wowed me in a different way. Their first, 2023's Pennsylvania Death Trip, for its proudly incoherent mish-mash of grunge, power-pop, and stoner-metal. Their second, 2024's Road to Noxen, for being a supposedly "live" album that doesn't sound the least bit live. And their third, Lord Have Mercy, for its chalice-raising might, its barbaric heft, and its understatedly brilliant fusion of genres that have no business blending as well as they do under The Virgos' stewardship. If you've never heard The Virgos, then Lord Have Mercy is the optimal starting point: the band's best, heaviest, most fully-realized effort yet.

While the prior two Virgos albums were rough-and-tumble DIY affairs, Lord Have Mercy was produced and mixed by hardcore/metal bigwig Taylor Young, who used to play in Nails with Virgos frontman-guitarist Andy Saba. Young's slick and beefy production gives these cosmic doom-rock songs the proper amount of bulk, and tracks like the Kyuss-y "Her Majesty" and the eight-minute "Iron Gauntlet / Velvet Glove" strike with a newfound force. Lord Have Mercy has less straightforward alt-rock fare than previous Virgos offerings, but their knack for lunar eclipse hooks – both blindingly dark and dizzyingly bright – shines through on the psychotic Type O trip "She Was in a Trance," the Nirvana-meets-Melvins jaunt "Personal Thing," and the tremendous dream-funk/psych-doom closer "Babylon (Live)," one of the year's coolest rock songs. Lord Have Mercy, this record fucking smokes.

Chasing Down

QUANNNIC
of
quannnic

quannnic is one of the most interesting figures in the ongoing shoegaze revival. Their 2022 song, "life imitates life," is a crucial piece of the whole Deftones-gaze thing, but I'm more interested in the music they've made since that track's viral takeoff. Their 2023 record, Stepdream, is a boldly modern interpretation of indie-rock classicism, and their new album, Warbrained, is their most focused yet. A jagged, clattering, sometimes shoddily blown-out, other times expensively smooth take on shoegaze that doesn't comport with any of the decade's most tired trends.

quannnic's voice is sharp and mewling, rarely buried and never gussied up. The surrounding music is mostly fitful and growling, sometimes floating with a Slowdive-ian weightlessness, but usually thrashing with an over-caffeinated itchiness. Unlike Stepdream, quannnic isn't handing over earworm melodies and blissful chord progressions with no strings attached. Warbrained's hardened exterior is craggy and unforgiving, and it took me a few listens before its shell began to flake off and grant my ears access to the cryptic beauty beneath the surface. It grows on me a little bit more with every playback.

For this week's Chasing Down Q&A, I asked quannnic about what changed between Warbrained and Stepdream, the music that makes them want to step their game up, aiming to make listeners scratch their heads, and more. Read the full interview below.

What was the last song or album you stumbled into online that blew your mind?  

"In Amber" by DIIV. I was watching their KEXP session on the tv with my roommate, and I kept talking over the song about how mind-blowing that opening chord progression was. It's addicting.

Warbrained is such a different album than Stepdream. What was your vision going into this record – musically, lyrically, visually, etc.?

My original thought was to try to combine the worlds of Kenopsia and Stepdream together.. the end result came out entirely different. I tried to paint this dark, regretful world that felt more serious than the last two records, like death was creeping up on me in my writing. When the singles came out, I remember reading someone say that it "felt off" and I was like, "Perfect!!" That's exactly what I want you to feel when listening to this project.