How do you explain digicore to someone unfamiliar with the genre? d0llywood1 offers “feeling” by Kite and blackwinterwells as the platonic ideal. “It has the emo vocal inflections, it has the personal lyrics, it’s got the loud synth, they got the loud bass.... everything that I want to encapsulate in [my] version of that sound.”

d0llywood1 (“NOT d0lly, NOT dollywood, NOT d0llywood,” she emphasizes) could be considered a cult classic. The Louisiana born-and-raised rapper first gained notoriety as one of a number of promising young stars who found critical success as hyperpop and (to a lesser extent) digicore surged in popularity during the pandemic. The 2010s career arcs of SOPHIE and A.G. Cook laid the foundation for the wider acceptance of hyperpop’s omnivorous sonics that arrived with 1000 gecs, the debut album from unruly cyberstars 100 gecs. But after COVID-19 sent everyone home, lockdown psychosis made the deranged textures and tones of these warped synthesizers and 808s even more appealing.

Labels quickly took notice, signing young artists like glaive and ericdoa as Spotify and Apple constructed hyperpop playlists to siphon listeners from SoundCloud, where most of the scene’s artists built their audiences and found collaborators (a key difference between hyperpop and digicore is the latter’s heavier integration of Internet-native hip-hop subgenres like cloud rap, plugg, and trap, with a heavier dose of distortion. A rudimentary distinction: hyperpop sounds more like Charli XCX and digicore sounds more like Sicko Mobb).

“I have a really weird perspective on [hyperpop and digicore], 'cause even though I technically came up in the midst of it, I was really before it,” d0llywood1 explains. “I saw that scene get created right before my eyes... I watched a lot of people become who they became, and even though there were some people [me and my friends] inspired, they inspired [us] too.”

My first encounter with d0llywood1 was “nonchalant,” an initially delicate ditty that blossoms into a chaotic melange of overdriven 808s and autotuned harmonies. I was immediately taken by her melodic instincts, the kind of flow that turns every line into a mini-hook, and the glitchy, SFX-stuffed aesthetic her collaborators helped construct. When I heard “ihonestlymightgiveup,” I was convinced that of the various digicore artists my friends recommended, d0llywood1 was my favorite. In more recent years, “a song about our feelings” and “Who the hell do you think you are” have landed in my On Repeat for weeks on end, even if I’m not always certain what exactly she’s saying. But that raw talent never quite translated into a mainstream embrace for d0llywood1, whose music refuses easy digestion.

It makes sense that the pop-friendly, EDM-adjacent bent of hyperpop was more readily commercialized, but institutional investment frequently came at the expense of the black and queer artists integral to the formation of the sound. “It’s no surprise that labels like to sign straight people,” blackwinterwells said in a 2022 interview with Finals Blog. “In most industries, if you’re transgender it’s hard to get anywhere. I’m not going around kicking rocks or anything, but I understand why people feel like the narrative has been pulled in a weird direction because of it.”

d0llywood1 is trans herself, although you wouldn’t know it by looking at her — and that’s by design. “The way that I present is also a huge part of the music, cuz I be saying I’m she/her, but n***a I don’t shave! I be saggin’ my pants, on some hood n***a shit, you feel me?” she laughs. “But that's the point for me. I want people who are like me that know for a fact they’re trans and know how they want society to view them, [to know] that you can still do whatever you want. I can still rap how I want, I can still rap about fuckin’ bitches and you still gotta call me a girl. Because I’m a girl.”

d0llywood1 goes to college in New Orleans, and although her family lives in a more rural part of the state, she says she mostly avoids any transphobic hate day to day. “I'm lucky to be in the places that I have to go back and forth between,” she explains to me. “I'm mostly uptown, where all the fucking annoying ass frat whites [are]. They'll call you a faggot, but they won't do nothing else to you.” When I ask her about what it’s like living in such a conservative state, she cites the recent militarized police response to student protests at Tulane University, crumbling infrastructure contributing to New Orleans literally sinking, and the cruelty of the state prison system, notable even among the banal evil of American prisons at large.

“It gets to the point that it’s numbing. Everywhere you look is a reminder that n***as in our state don’t care about us,” she says. “And then obviously prison labor — bro, we have slaves. N***as think it’s over here and it’s not... But just being in the midst of it, so much of that is in the music.”

Set to release later this month, her new mixtape This is just a Dream (and soon I will awake) is an exhilarating return to form. It’s also the product of careful refining and tinkering — in the two months between when d0llywood1 first sends me a private SoundCloud link and when we finally hop on a video call, the tracklist has expanded, shrunk, and expanded once more, with songs added and deleted and shuffled around day to day.

That holds true even after our call — as of last weekend, d0llywood1 was still waiting on one last feature, though she reassured me, “I got every other song exactly how I want it.” We talked about the origins and evolution of digicore, finding a balance in her lyrics, and double standards in the underground hip-hop community.

When we were DMing last month, you said this tape you've been working on is a throwback of sorts to the original sound of digicore. And so I'm curious to hear your thoughts on what that original feeling or idea of digicore is, and how the scene has shifted and developed into now.

What I consider OG digicore sound is like, OG Vinso from 2018, 2019 [which] would go on to inspire other people I look up to like lovbug and redpriest. They had a specific callback to 2010s trance and EDM of that era; [later] 3ds and kuru would come along and add their own little sauce and make it different. I feel like that era was when it was perfected, but we moved on from it so fast. The high profile stuff started and people liked the EDM elements. So [mainstream hyperpop artists] started just making EDM and I'm like, “What happened to the rap influence?” Like, y’all used to be rappers! Why you don't wanna rap no more?

I just liked that mix and even like Braxton Knight, huuuuge precursor to all this. Braxton Knight was still doing it and getting no attention. And I'm like, “bro, this is the best mix of all the stuff that we're doing, why y’all not messing with the sound no more?” So I was just like, “bruh I’m bringing that shit back,” the fuck? But also jaanay did it before me, and kite was still dropping songs. I don’t take no credit for none of this, jaanay been doing that. I just wanted to help his vision because he believed in the old sound too.

One thing that you’ve mentioned as an important factor in the digicore sound is loudness, both in the bass and the vocals.

For me, the function of it is texture. It’s all in the service of hearing the music, yeah, but also feeling it physically, feeling it on your ears. Like, you listen to My Bloody Valentine, you're gonna hear a guitar that sounds like it's reversed and it's gonna sound crazy to your ears. I want people to do that in trap!

For me, what I’ve found brings the texture out is just distortion. When you turn up the bass and your vocals are distorted in a certain way, you hit certain resonances. And [without that distortion, this song might] sound like a normal trap song. But it's the little noises that the distortion causes: sometimes it drowns out the melody, sometimes you really want to hear the melody. But that's gonna make you think, it's gonna make you listen to it harder. You’ve gotta search for the melody — I'm not gonna make it easy for you. I could make some accessible rap music, but that's boring. I want to make you work for it.

That's really interesting to me, because I know you’ve written about emulating the vulnerability of Bryson Tiller, specifically T R A P S O U L, in your lyrics [about relationships]. It’s interesting to think about that sort of “I can be right, but I can also be wrong” emotional maturity, and the emo-type vulnerability you’ve noted as a key aspect of digicore, and then to contrast that with the idea of “you really have to listen for this, I’m going to make you work for it.” Where’s the balance between what are essentially contradictory impulses for you?

I think it comes from a place of me going through 2020 and 2021, when I wasn't even really thinking about [my approach]. I just had a mumbly delivery [that]I got from Zootzie. But now I feel like I'm in a place where I can really write about real stuff and I want people to tap into what I'm saying. But at the same time — I think the balance comes from me just being a troll. Like yeah, I want you to listen, and I'm gonna be mad when you don't listen. But I feel like it's more rewarding in the end if I'm making it harder, because the people that really rock with me really rock with me. I don't really care if a casual listener is gonna peep and be like, “Nah, you want all these things out of me, I can just go listen to somebody else.” Yeah, go listen to somebody else! But the people that get it, super get it. And I like interacting with those type of people. I’d rather build a strong community of people that got the same goal, so we can do some real stuff in real life, then just have anybody listen to me.

Last month, you had an Instagram story where you were talking about how people in the underground rap community react to Osamason and tana versus [white rappers] like Brennan Jones and Shed Theory.

My thing is, there’s already so much inauthenticity in the underground, specifically on our side of the [underground] like, OPIUM, rage, pluggnb, [type music that’s] bordering on mainstream. Like even che and Slump6s, there’s already so much [inauthenticity] just baked in because we know a lot of them were suburban little kids. I was a suburban little kid, n***a!

So we know it’s a lot of rap cap already, and I’m like… Bro, the picking and choosing on what to let slide, to me is very interesting. Because you can say all this stuff about Osamason, you can say all this stuff about tana, [but] when they finally come out with something different after you saying, “Oh, they sound the same all the time,” and you get mad? And then you go listen to Joeyy [from Shed Theory] and you’re like “Oh this is hard” — dude they’re literally making fun of people that nod out. They’re making fun of addiction, why would you listen to that?

People just pick and choose on what to let slide and what they think is funny. Like, I don't think going back to Osamason’s old TikToks and [laughing at him like] “look at him trying to go viral!” and reposting them in modern times, I don’t think that's fair. Because if you were anybody else, you could have been doing the same thing. Of all things that need to be called out, we need to be calling out these n***as that are literally racist [or] that be talking to kids.

And bro just, somebody needs to say something about it because it's just gonna keep going on and we're just gonna keep letting it happen! Like I'll be looking at comments and it's just black people like, “NETTSPEND NETTSPEND” like — I get it bruh, he's fine. But you're gassing this up and then y'all go listen to wokeups and be like “Oh no this is terrible, this is —” what are you talking about, like actually. What are you talking about?

They even said it about “Playing Wit Da Autotune” by Duwap Kaine when it first came out, don’t let that revisionist history get you! Them n***as did not like that snippet! And [then] n***as was eating up “Poland!” They shit on Duwap Kaine for that just like they’re shitting on wokeups for it now, but they’ll go gas up Nettspend, they’ll go gas up — I ain’t even gonna say the other n***a name bruh nah. [pauses] You know, you know, you know. [grins]

Bro, these n***as are imaginary rappers, in their aura, in their atmosphere. I just want to bring back that, “I’m a real person, you’re a real person, I’m gonna talk to you like a real person.”

It's funny, going back to this idea of authenticity, because you rap about guns and all these other things that aren't really true. This is something that has been an argument in rap for the longest and obviously the flip to that too is that if we want rappers to be authentic, then there's a lot of violence that goes along with that, that most people are just fundamentally not prepared to engage with.

I have a lot of conflicting perspectives, but at some point I even think it's unfair to G-check n***as now. Even though I talk about it a lot, there's part of me that's like, “who cares?” But for me it’s intention [because] some of these white n***as are coming up and they say shit — some of them I overlook because they're either trying to find their sound or they're saying it in such a lazy, simple way that it artistically, somehow, in some sick way, comes back to whatever creative thing they're trying to present to us. But a lot of it is also just white people not knowing anything else about rap besides "kill n***as, smoke weed, fuck bitches."

I feel like the way that I [use those same ideas] is like a reprieve, because a lot of my shit is not that, a lot of it is very personal. Like, I'm gonna talk about self-harm and I'm gonna talk about the trans shit, and I feel like even on this tape, I talked about it so much that I gotta hit you with some of the cliches to give you some time to not have to think about some of the other shit, because n***a it get dark, n***a! Like the demon is fucking, it’s in your face. It’s Dead [Per Yngve Ohlin] from Mayhem — that’s the whole shit. Like the name of [the tape] is a quote from his suicide note. But I feel like that’s the difference for me personally, it’s to give you some time to not think about some shit, like ahh, kill a n***a go get some money.

It's a more accessible touchstone. So when people feel like they've gone too far from shore, they've got a tether that can reel them back.

Yeah, and I feel like at some point, I'll probably get over it. I'll probably get over giving n***as reprieves. It’ll depend on how this project is received. If people think I'm not going hard enough and I'm not experimenting enough and I'm still too in my bag, I’ma give them what they want and just, no reprieve like fuck it. But if n***as like the balance that I have — I feel like the balance is cool, but I give n***as what they want! If n***as want weirder — if n***as want more mainstream, I’m NOT doing it [laughs].