With this scorching summer nearing its end and fall’s shortening days and cooling breezes following closely behind, musical playlists will likewise turn from sweaty dance hits and catchy pop anthems to moodier, more autumnal fare. Forget “sad-girl summer”—fall is the perfect seasonal backdrop for sadcore music.
“Sadcore” was first coined in the 1980s to describe the young musicians who turned away from the aggressive sounds of punk and hardcore to embrace melancholic lyrics, bitter-sweet melodies, and more textured and ethereal atmospherics. Labels like 4AD, Postcard Records, Sarah Records, Creation Records, K Records, and others were often associated with this style. Although sadcore was usually characterized by a particular guitar-based aesthetic, the term later became a catch-all encompassing various sub-genres and sub-scenes including dream pop, twee pop, shoegaze, folktronica, slowcore, chillwave, ambient pop, and chamber pop. What all of these styles had in common was an emotive sound best suited for introspective headphone-listening, and that encouraged daydreaming or nostalgic memorializing, dancing alone in the dark or tarrying in bed.
Since 2020, sadcore playlists and mixtapes have gained massive popularity among Generation Z, having exploded on platforms and sites like Spotify and Youtube. Many are intricately curated and include both professional songs and tracks created by anonymous bedsit musicians, or others remixed with tags like “slowed and reverbed” (also known as daycore), “super slowed,” and “corecore,” or songs looped for hours for maximum hypnotic effect.
This year has seen a range of new and established musicians releasing poignant works that celebrate the sad melodies of life. Here, Vogue has assembled a list of some of the best or most promising of these albums. Together, their oneiric and forlorn sounds offer the perfect weepy soundtrack for the autumn days ahead of us.