HexD
HexD is a style of electronic music built on one blunt idea: take a song and damage it on purpose until it sounds like a corrupted file. The name comes from a collective called Hexcastcrew, whose members described their work as casting spells on songs. The spell was digital distortion. The sound surfaced online in the late 2010s and had grown into a microgenre by the early 2020s. Where did the damage come from, and who first heard it as music? Which record gave a loose online scene something to rally around? And why do so many of the pictures attached to it look like they were pulled from a childhood computer?
Producers call the act of wrecking a song this way hexxing it. At its core sits bitcrushing, a technique that creates distortion by stripping away bandwidth and digital audio data. An artist might apply the effect to a single instrument or to the entire master track. Vocals are sped up and pitched up, and so is the instrumental.
Trance and cloud rap are the usual raw materials. As with nightcore, though, the method is not locked to them and can be turned on other genres. Alternative Press magazine summed up the result as "sped up, bitcrushed and glitched out." The radio station WKNC-FM heard something older in it. To that station, the mixes recalled the "low quality trance/adjacent EDM" that backed early Internet anime fan videos known as AMVs. The effect itself, however, had been used as a deliberate aesthetic for years before anyone called it hexD.
In 2011, a mixtape called "Deleted Seniors" by Untrance paired EDM with heavy bitcrushing. It was one of the first times the extreme effect was used as an aesthetic quality in its own right.
Music journalist Kieran Press-Reynolds, writing for Complex, traced the scene's roots further back to the rappers SpaceGhostPurrp and Cartier God. A more direct line runs through she_skin, a West Coast producer. She_skin had bitcrushed trap songs by Virginia rapper Diamondsonmydick, and that earlier experiment influenced the Hexcastcrew collective. By 2019 the ingredients were all in circulation, and one mix was about to pull them together.
In June 2019, a DJ mix titled Rare RCB hexD.mp3 appeared under the alias tomoe_theundy1ng, the name used by Stacy Minajj. It sampled and remixed songs by Reptilian Club Boyz, an American Internet rap collective.
The collective's founder, the Nashville rapper Hi-C, is described by the Fader as a key influence on the development of hexD. Pitchfork's Kieran Press-Reynolds placed Reptilian Club Boyz alongside other groups as "the nexus for a new vanguard." He also wrote that the early 2020s underground was "splintering every which way, from wailing digicore to bitcrushed hexD." In his Complex writing, he argued the scene did not crystallize until this very release. A mix of obscure Internet rap still needed a home, and it found one at a netlabel.
On the 23rd of August 2019, the netlabel Dismiss Yourself uploaded the Stacy Minajj mix to its YouTube channel. The label focused on obscure Internet music, and its founder, who goes by Sticki, is the source for how hexD got its name. That upload became instrumental to the style's wider spread, and Pitchfork credited the label with helping to "kickstart the hexD scene."
In April 2020 the label released Surge Compilation Vol. 1, a various-artists album on which artists in the scene "found a collective identity." Surge, the word in that title, briefly became a name for the whole style in the early 2020s. A Discord friend of Sticki coined it and made a fictional cover, which the label later adopted as the official cover art. Crushed trap had served as another early synonym.
Complex described the surge sound as "mellow and murky" and as a "lo-fi trap sound." It was compressed, the magazine wrote, to sound like it was recorded on "an old laptop microphone."
Blingee, the 2006 online GIF editor, left its fingerprints all over hexD's look. The style's visuals draw on anime, internet aesthetics and the early Web 2.0 icons and artwork most associated with that site. The pull is childhood nostalgia, a feeling that has been compared with the vaporwave microgenre. Those images traveled with the music as it reached a widening circle of artists.
Sigilkore is one microgenre that hexD helped shape, and it leans on extensive bitcrushing. Several artists became associated with hexD itself, including Yabujin, Fax Gang, ZBITO18, $pirit Gurlz and the group HelloKittyWaffenDivision.
By March 2021, Alternative Press was calling Fax Gang "hexDers" and noting that they merged the style with shoegaze. The magazine also compared them to $pirit Gurlz. It credited ZBITO18 and the rest of HelloKittyWaffenDivision with a catalog of "neon Myspace-core rave insanity." In April of that year it pointed to Helix Tears, a collective led by Blackwinterwells, as "SoundCloud's most exciting rabbit hole of glitchcore/hexD emo-rap transcendentalists."
The early story runs through Nashville and the American West Coast. Yabujin, by contrast, is a Lithuanian rapper, a sign of how far the scene's reach extended.
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Common questions
What is hexD music?
HexD is an Internet microgenre of electronic music and a style of audio mixing that emerged in the late 2010s to early 2020s. It uses heavy bitcrushing plus sped-up and pitched-up effects, mostly on trance and cloud rap.
Who coined the term hexD?
The music collective Hexcastcrew originally coined the term hexD. According to Sticki, founder of the netlabel Dismiss Yourself, the collective described bitcrushing songs as casting spells on them.
What does hexxing a song mean in hexD?
Hexxing a song means mixing it with heavy bitcrushing and digital effects, usually with the vocals and instrumentation sped up and pitched up. The result is a distorted, glitched-out sound.
Which release marked the start of the hexD scene?
The June 2019 DJ mix Rare RCB hexD.mp3 by Stacy Minajj, under the alias tomoe_theundy1ng, marked the scene's crystallization. It sampled songs by the Internet rap collective Reptilian Club Boyz.
What role did Dismiss Yourself play in hexD?
The netlabel Dismiss Yourself uploaded the Stacy Minajj mix to YouTube on the 23rd of August 2019, which helped spread the genre. In April 2020 it released Surge Compilation Vol. 1, where scene artists found a collective identity.
Why was hexD once called surge or crushed trap?
Crushed trap was an early synonym for hexD, and surge briefly became a name for it in the early 2020s. Surge came from the title of the Dismiss Yourself compilation Surge Compilation Vol. 1.
Which artists are associated with the hexD scene?
Artists associated with hexD include Yabujin, Fax Gang, ZBITO18, $pirit Gurlz and the group HelloKittyWaffenDivision. Alternative Press also linked the Helix Tears collective to hexD.
All sources
19 references cited across the entry
- 3THE FACE's guide to the American rap undergroundKieran Press-Reynolds — 30 April 2024
- 4NewsBlank space: how Taylor Swift – and an aching sense of loss – dominated music in 2023Alexis Petridis — 2023-12-22
- 5How Dismiss Yourself Became a Hub for Internet WeirdnessKieran Press-Reynolds — 2021-07-08
- 6A Brief History of Lobit Musicchalcopyrite — 2024-03-07
- 7The Year in Music on TikTok 2021Cat Zhang — 2021-12-14
- 810 musicians who are shaping the underground scene on SoundCloudGiedre Matulaityte
- 10Luci4 Unleashed a Generation of Glitchy Underground RapKieran Press-Reynolds — 2026-02-26
- 11Meet the Most Cracked Music Archivist OnlineKieran Press-Reynolds — 2025-07-23
- 1215 bands and solo artists who are rewriting the emo rulebookGiedre Matulaityte
- 14The Influence of Rare RCB + HexD MP3Tom Meyer — 14 September 2020
- 16Evanora (truly) UnlimitedBernarda Basualdo
- 1710 bands who are reimagining everything you know about shoegazeGiedre Matulaityte
- 18How the cult of Drain Gang rose from meme to mythKieran Press-Reynolds — 2022-05-27
- 19Gorgeous Glitches and Nightcored Melodies: The New Generation of SoundCloud Music is HereKieran Press-Reynolds — August 13, 2020