For those that aren't already aware, Breakcore has exploded in popularity a bit over the past year or so. Not to a crazy extent, but someone on r/breakcore made a post recently about how Breakcore is more popular right now than at any point since 2012, according to google trends.

The interesting thing though, is that this increase in popularity hasn't been for the older Ventian Snares type of rough & aggressive sound, but rather for a newer Hyperpop/y2k take on the genre, inspired namely by Sewerslvt & other artists with similar sounds. Evolutions like this are things that happen to musical genres all the time of course, as much as it might annoy purists.

What I do find interesting though is that this new wave of popularity is bringing in a lot of brand new people (zoomers especially) to Breakcore, and to related genres like DnB and Jungle. As such, they have very few preconceived notions of what breakcore is supposed to sound like other than it needs to use breakbeats and be faster than house, and very little understanding as to the differences between the genres of Breakcore, Jungle, DnB or even Hardcore.

For example, I subbed to r/breakcore about a week ago, and I've been browsing the subreddit at least once a day to see what people are posting there. One thing to note is that r/breakcore is very open to self-promos, so most of the music that's being posted are tracks made by amateur producers, many of whom are from this wave of new people flocking to the genre. From what I've seen, I'd say only about half of what people are posting there nowadays is actually Breakcore, with the other half most consisting of what I'd label as Atmospheric Jungle, as well as a few oddities like one user who posted a lo-fi fusion of Trap & Breakbeat Hardcore (here's the track, it's actually really good imo).

The fact that most of these people are making Atmospheric Jungle but labeling as Breakcore is something that I find pretty interesting. Namely, if Atmospheric Jungle has already been a genre for ~25-30 years at this point, and much of this new "Breakcore" wave is actually people creating/enjoying a modern Hyperpop-esque take on Atmospheric Jungle, then why is it that they're all flocking to (the label of) Breakcore?

Going back to how a lot of this new wave was inspired by the rise of Sewerslvt, one of the main features of her sound that makes her music so distinct is the heavy use of atmospheric pads, but in a way that sounds more like Trance/EDM/Hyperpop than traditional Atmospheric Jungle, which is usually more jazzy or ambient. On top of that, it seems that her music got stuck with the label of Breakcore at some point for reasons that I'm not really sure of tbh (she has some Breakcore tracks, but most of her music would fall into Atmospheric Jungle/DnB).

Since a lot of the people listening to her were being introduced to Jungle/DnB/Breakcore for the very first time through her music, many of them didn't have any genre names to go on, let alone the definitions of those genres. To them, Sewerslvt made high energy atmospheric music with fast breakbeats, and once the term Breakcore became associated with her music, it seems like a lot of people inferred that Breakcore was just high energy atmospheric music with fast breakbeats, which explains why so many of them are actually making/listening to their own fresh take on Atmospheric Jungle, rather than actual Breakcore, atmospheric or otherwise.

Anyone else have thoughts on this? I kinda rambled on for a bit, hopefully this was coherent lol. I've also only been paying attention to this for the past couple weeks, so if someone's got some more insight into this, then that'd be interesting to hear.