Earlier this year, I stumbled across a guide to mixing underground rap on YouTube. The entire video was dedicated to recreating the sort of clipped distortion that most people would consider bad practice. But this is no accident. Music sounding like an Italian brainrot meme is now a highly sought-after aesthetic, with speaker-shattering distortion becoming pretty much the only defining trait of the UK and US’ emerging Ug (read:hellip;read more raquo;