Speeding up tunes: How nightcore went from a school project to a TikTok sensation

If you were to hazard a guess, you’d probably veer towards it being associated with heavy rock or metal. In fact, nightcore is essentially a subgenre of trance music, with a few not-so-subtle differences: for the most part, songs are sped-up versions of well-known songs (an average of 35pc faster) and are often accompanied by anime artwork. If you’ve ever accidentally played a 33rpm record on a turntable at 45rpm speed, that’ll give you some idea of what to expect: a very fast song with vocals like a cartoon chipmunk that has got into the sugar stash.

Nightcore’s roots can be traced to two students, Thomas S Nilsen (DJ TNT) and Steffen Ojala Søderholm (DJ SOS), from the northern Norwegian city of Alta. Influenced by the high-pitched vocals of songs like The Logical Song by German techno band Scooter, the duo — who gave themselves the moniker ‘Nightcore’ — experimented with pitch and tone for a school project in 2001. “There were so few of these kinds of artists,” they said, “we thought that mixing music in our style would be a pleasure for us to listen to.”

They went on to release five albums but even now, it’s difficult to track down any of Nightcore’s back catalogue. Originally distributed amongst family and friends, some of their work would eventually find its way online in the primitive days of filesharing. Nevertheless, they clearly made their mark: by the 2010s, nightcore as a genre was finding its way to larger audiences (including a hugely popular remix of Estonia’s 2011 Eurovision entry, Rockefeller Street) — albeit one that remained online and as a predominantly underground movement.

That all changed recently. As with many music trends of the past couple of years (the sea shanty/Wellerman buzz of 2021 was thankfully short-lived), TikTok has proven a significant force in breaking trends, artists or movements in the music biz. When users recreated Jenna Ortega’s infamous dance scene from Netflix’s Wednesday and set it to a sped-up version of Lady Gaga’s 2011 song Bloody Mary, it compounded its popularity on the platform. Modern nightcore has strayed somewhat from its original formula and its trance-based roots, but a search of the hashtag ‘#spedupsounds’ — shorthand for the type of sound that nightcore has become synonymous with — yields videos with millions of TikTok views.

The trend has spread to Spotify, too, where you’ll find an officially curated ‘Sped Up Songs’ playlist featuring songs by everyone from SZA to Madonna, to Lana Del Rey and Sam Smith (all Warner Music Group artists) — all of them played up to 150pc faster than their normal speed.

It may seem strange that these major artists (or their label) aren’t complaining about their work being significantly altered, claiming piracy violations and immediately issuing takedown notices — but with the revenue from millions of monthly streams contributing to their coffers, why would they? A remix is a remix, after all; will we soon be seeing artist-endorsed sped-up versions of songs released in tandem with the original? Stranger things have happened.

As it has gained traction over the past year, however, there already seems to be a fork in the nightcore road. This is particularly apparent via that same Spotify playlist; ‘Sped Up Songs’, featuring more mainstream-focused tracks that fans are already familiar with, has 1.4 million likes, yet the Spotify-curated ‘This is Nightcore’ playlist has just 83,000 likes and contains fewer, if any, well-known songs.

You’ll notice something else about the latter playlist, too; like many of the purists of the genre, it is accompanied by anime artwork, while many YouTube nightcore videos also feature an anime placeholder image instead of a music video. The origin of this pairing has never been fully explained, although there are many theories, including one that points out the simple fact that both nightcore and anime feature high-pitched vocals. Another suggests that the influence of several J-core (Japanese hardcore techno) artists have played a role, or that nightcore has proven popular as a background soundtrack for players of the online game Osu!, which is also heavily associated with anime culture.

Despite the division, there is no disputing the fact that there is a nightcore or sped-up version of pretty much any song you can imagine, from (purists, look away now) Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata to Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’. Search ‘Nightcore Ireland’, meanwhile, and you’re faced with a motley assortment of hits: there’s a nightcore Ireland’s Call, a nightcore take on The Wild Rover and even a nightcore version of Ireland’s latest Eurovision entry, Wild Youth’s We Are One.

That same ‘Nightcore Ireland’ search also throws up another curious result. Many proponents of the genre operate under a pseudonym, and Damo Furlong is no exception. The Kilkenny-based musician is reluctant to share his ‘other’ name, but he founded the Wexford-based Scauldwave Records and released an album called Nightcore in 2019. Unlike the recent wave of popular songs being sped-up, however, Furlong’s tracks were nightcore versions of songs by an act called Whitebois, released on the independent label and now available on Bandcamp.

“From a purist’s sense, nightcore derives from classic Eurodance recordings and that genre’s overlap into hardcore and trance, more traditionally,” he explains, “but the approach can be used on all kinds of music.”

Furlong first encountered the genre around 2009, later being introduced to the aforementioned Norwegian duo and particularly their album Caliente. “I like how it ends up just being a more intense version of the original work,” he says of nightcore’s appeal. “It’s not dissimilar to approaches used in old hardcore techno, jungle and gabber — where R&B vocals and horror film samples get pitched up and reworked into a track.”

There is potential for the genre to shift into the mainstream, he says, and in many ways it already has, pointing to the influence hyperpop (a genre closely associated with nightcore) has had on music, via artists like Charli XCX and AG Cook. “[But] nightcore that relates more closely to more experimental, harder or niche styles could become more popular,” he says, “if current trends towards [gaining a] wider understanding of genres like trance, happy hardcore or Eurodance — as well as the reference points for those genres — increase in public consciousness.”

There is a niggling sense underneath it all, however, that there is arguably little skill involved in changing the pitch or the speed of a song. Can nightcore proponents really be considered artists?

Furlong admits that the genre’s detractors are correct on that count, at least to some extent. “That’s a large part of the appeal,” he argues. “While there are nightcore releases that pay attention to detail on how songs are selected or sped up to a certain level, it’s entirely possible to make and release this [type of] music without any evidence of formal skill. But clichéd as it might be, I think the Duke Ellington quote, ‘If it sounds good, then it’s good music’, does carry some weight.”