V/A Reel Talk – Best of Douyin Tracks

Label / Heat Crimes
Category / Phonk, Leftfield, Electro, Darkwave, Baile Funk, Post-Memphis, Drift Music, Electro-Pop, Minimal Wave, Trap
Code / HC019

For the last two years, Heat Crimes has been combing the deepest recesses of TikTok, rooting out the forward-thinking producers that are helping to define a movement that’s still not fully appreciated or understood in the meatspace. ‘Reel Talk – Best of Douyin Tracks’, named after the popular China-only Douyin app’s viral, short-form music videos, assembles 46 of the burgeoning scene’s most bizarre and brilliant experiments, shining a spotlight on 21 producers from 15 different countries. It showcases a new kind of fusion, a virtual melting pot where K-pop, Afrobeat and Brazilian funk aesthetics ooze into AI-generated ambience, hyperpop and meme music – there aren’t any set rules, as yet, and that’s exactly why the sounds are so consistently fascinating. TikTok launched just under a decade ago in 2016, and has quickly changed the way we consume music. Prioritizing discovery and community-focused viral trends (like lip-syncing and shareable dance routines), the app became a place where obscure, unsigned artists could tap into a vast, global fanbase without having to take the expected PR steps. It’s hard to imagine tracks like Lil Nas X’s ‘Old Town Road’ and Doja Cat’s ‘Say So’ could have achieved their ubiquity without first catching a wave of support online, and the scene at large has evolved to take this into account. Now even labels and established artists are looking for short, sharp soundbites instead of hit singles – the landscape has completely shifted. But look beneath the surface and there’s innovation in every dark recess. TikTok has provided a democratized space where the world’s most eccentric producers – raised on a diet of easy-to-access sounds from across the genre spectrum – are able to share sketches, concepts and experiments that otherwise may never have seen the light of day. Trending movements like phonk/drift music (a copy-of-a-copy relative of Southern rap that’s usually set to car videos), bedroom pop, nightcore and slowed + reverbed mashups emerge precisely because the platform allows it – the DIY music of 2025 might not sound like oldschool punk, but it’s just as transgressive, and just as mesmerizing. The set opens with a doom-y dungeon synth club vignette from Argentina’s $cru, quickly jump-cutting into Swedish producer MEGA TROLL’s ‘Silly Robie’, that manages to glue an AFX-style synth melody to chopped ‘n screwed hard dance kicks. DJ Paulinho Da Puta meanwhile represents Brazil’s current dominance with the trappy, gruesomely distorted ‘TΞRRØRPLX’ and ‘Nullphonic’, a punishingly dark mashup of French electro and half-speed minimal techno, and Ukraine’s CrossPNG gives the phonk scene a nod with his eerie ‘Друг’, dipping into the shadowy bardcore world on ‘Медитація’. Hailing from Bulgaria, DJ Angelo truncates psy-trance and Eurodance on ‘Club Psyche’ and ‘Club God’, while the UAE’s Blackout Cathedral curls a sultry sawtooth lead around dubbed-out house synths on ‘Obsidian Frequency’. Kelis’s ‘Milkshake’ gets a new lease of like thanks to Japan’s Lil Kaylee on ‘BetterThanYours’, and German producer S3pulchral dissolves a Brazilian funk loop with corrosive side-chained kicks on the brief ‘bailesidechainpitch’. This isn’t an album that’s too preoccupied with one specific track or the other though, it’s like swiping through TikTok itself: a rapidly shifting, borderless experience that’s best absorbed in a single sitting.

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V/A Reel Talk – Best of Douyin Tracks

Same Artist :: V/A

Same Label :: Heat Crimes

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