Hit ’em is the summer’s crunchiest and most unlikely new genre

When Drew Daniel of experimental Baltimore duo Matmos went to bed earlier this week, he can’t have expected to wake up with a new genre of music rattling around his brain. The next day he shared what had been running through his mind as he slept: "had a dream I was at a rave talking to a girl and she told me about a genre called 'hit em',” he wrote on Twitter. “That is in 5/4 time at 212 bpm with super crunched out sounds.” He seemed to know that he was on to something, ending the tweet with “thank you dream girl."

Daniel has a history with unusual prompts, having worked on Matmos albums such as 2013’s The Marriage of True Minds, which was determined by a series of parapsychological experiments. His Twitter followers treated his tweet as a prompt of its own and began making hit ‘em instrumentals, taking the sound from the dreamstate to reality in a matter of hours.

So far hit ‘em is a lot less heady, with that unusually high BPM pitching it somewhere between gabber and speedcore. The early adopters of the hit ‘em are largely mixing their rapid-fire drums with booming bass lines and chopped up vocal samples, a sound to overwhelm the senses and baffle the dancefloor.

The true loyalists are taking the “super crunched out sounds” idea and running with it. An early favorite is this effort from Megaphonix, which sounds the most like what you may imagine from dream rave girl’s description. It’s hard, fast, a little goth-y, and very crunchy, too.

Daniel is clearly a fan of what he has created, writing: "Whoah! I am amazed at the response to this tweet- and it has been a literal 'dream come true' to hear people actually creating 'hit em' tracks (I have started tinkering on some too). Shout out to the mystery girl who started it all. Keep it locked at 5/4 and 212 bpm!"

But a word of warning. Let’s keep this purely for the heads right now. Nobody wants to see hit ‘em get overexposed.