Liminal Music: The Dark Origins of 2024’s Most Popular Genre

A new genre has exploded in popularity in 2024: liminal music.

Ethereal, unsettling, and deeply nostalgic, it has taken over TikTok, Spotify playlists, and YouTube channels. So where does this strange genre come from? And what makes it so unique?

That’s what we’ll explore in this guide 👇

The Origins of Liminal Music

Liminal music didn’t emerge in a traditional sense. It wasn’t pioneered by a single artist or record label.

Instead, it was shaped by the internet’s obsession with nostalgia and the uncanny. More precisely, the genre takes its roots in the “Liminal Space” subreddit.

In this subreddit, people share pictures of places that reflect “a transition (paths, hallways, stairs…) ” and evoke a sense of limbo. They are void of any people, even though they should often be crowded. This provokes a certain eeriness:

These place feel familiar, but unsettling at the same time. Abandoned malls, empty offices, and deserted streets are often considered liminal too.

So, where does liminal music fit into this story?

Early Influences

Drawing on these themes, liminal music developed as a sort of soundtrack to these images. The foundations of liminal music lay solidly in ambient music, but not only:

• Ambient and drone music: artists like Brian Eno and William Basinski laid the foundation with their atmospheric soundscapes.
  
• Vaporwave: the distorted nostalgia of vaporwave (a derivative of synthwave that started as an Internet meme) also plays a significant role.
  
• Field recordings & found sound: static, echoes, and environmental recordings contribute to the music’s eerie realism.

With the rise of social media, algorithms began pushing liminal music to wider audiences.

Viral TikTok and YouTube compilations of liminal spaces paired with haunting soundtracks got a whole generation curious about this new genre.

By early 2025, film directors, video game developers, and even pop musicians began integrating liminal elements into their work. A24, a leading film production company, is even set to release its own movie based on The Backrooms mythology, an internet meme derived from liminal spaces.

Key Elements of Liminal Music

Unlike other genres of music like Hard Techno or Tech House, liminal music isn’t strictly codified.

Rather, liminal music is based on a feeling, a mood, and an atmosphere. That is why liminal music playlists might include vastly different tracks.

However, there are a few recurring key elements:

• Time stretching & reverb: liminal music tracks often use the “slowed + reverb” technique. By slowing down and layering sounds, you create an elongated, dreamlike effect. Note that even mainstream artists such as Billie Eilish have started releasing “slowed + reverb” version of their own tracks.
  
• Tape hiss & vinyl crackle: the effects add imperfections to simulate the passage of time and nostalgia.
  
• Binaural audio & spatial effects: this creates an immersive, 3D sound experience that feels like a memory playing in the distance.
  
• Recycled & forgotten samples: liminal music producers often use snippets from old public service announcements, elevator music, vintage commercials, and old animes.
  
• Lack of drum elements: similar to ambient music, liminal music often features a total lack of drum elements.
  
• Distortion and detuning: these effects replicate a degraded tape cassette or vinyl, with notes being notably out of tune on purpose.

The Role of Playlists in Liminal Music

Liminal Music thrives on curated streaming playlists and YouTube channels that specialize in eerie and nostalgic soundscapes.

If you want to explore liminal music, check out some of these playlists:

• On Spotify: “liminal”, “Liminal Ambient 2025” and “Liminal Spaces / Backrooms / Uncanny Songs”
  
• On YouTube: “February, 22, 2001 – A liminal playlist” and “a playlist for exploring liminal spaces”.

Much like LoFi Hip Hop, liminal music is less about specific artists and more about playlists. This is because people love to play liminal music playlists in the background while they read, study, or play video games.

But there are many more appealing features to liminal music too 👇

Psychological Appeal: Why Do People Love Liminal Music?

It’s hard to capture into words why liminal music has become so popular. If I had to pinpoint it to just a few elements, it would be these:

• Mixed emotions: liminal music provokes a sense of nostalgia for a time or place we haven’t even lived through. At the same time, there’s a certain eeriness to the music that isn’t exactly comforting.
  
• Familiarity: much like liminal spaces themselves, the music feels eerily familiar yet just out of reach.
  
• Escapism: the genre offers a surreal escape, perfect for late-night contemplation or detachment from reality.

Key Artists & Notable Releases

While liminal music lacks mainstream figures, several underground artists and anonymous producers have gained a cult following:

• øneheart: with 7.5M monthly listeners on Spotify, øneheart is one of the leading producers of liminal ambient music
  
• my head is empty: another artist with multiple tracks that have dozens of millions of streams

• at the other end of the spectrum, Hotel Neon is a small underground band specializing in guitar-based liminal music.

Liminal Music: Here to Stay – or Just a Fad?

That’s it for this guide on liminal music! Hopefully, you now have a better understanding of this brand-new genre that is taking over social media. But the question now is: is liminal music here to stay, or just a passing trend?

That’s an extremely hard question to answer. While many other genres have seen their popularity rise and fall over time, it’s hard to predict if this will be the case with liminal music.

More likely than not, there will always be a strong following of fans who will continue browsing the Liminal Spaces subreddit and listen to these playlists. The upcoming A24 movie is also likely to generate more interest in this entire genre.

But will liminal music still be a thing in 20-30 years? Only time will tell…

If you’re interested in learning to make music yourself, check out our free Masterclass below 👇