It’s the music you'll hear playing in every Bushwick cafe. Listen to it for too long, and you may suddenly find yourself in knitted clothing, pasting stickers over your laptop cover and collecting throw pillows. The artists are legion—Laufey, beabadoobee, Clairo, grentperez, Lizzy McAlpine, and so on—but their purposes are all the same: making background music that doubles as self–medication.
This is music in lower–case, the kind of songs that you shuffle into a playlist called “cry like it’s 1999” and leave on low volume while you’re staring at matrices. Or your Anki deck. Or a picture of your ex, except for some reason you don’t feel anything now when you do. You don’t feel much of anything at all … which is the point.
As I write these words, “death bed (coffee for your head),” by Powfu and beabadoobee has 1,906,946,243 Spotify streams. That’s six streams for each and every American. The majority of the song’s 2:53 runtime consists of the following lyric, repeated like hypnotic suggestion: “Don't stay awake for too long, don't go to bed / I'll make a cup of coffee for your head / I'll get you up and going out of bed.”
Don’t be awake, don’t be asleep, exist in limbo with beabadoobee.
Most music in this “genre” (henceforth “Xanax music”) is softly romantic. The instrumentation is laid back, often consisting of just acoustic guitar and drums. The vocals are soft and breathy—sometimes melancholic, sometimes lovestruck, often both. It drifts at whim between bossa nova, jazz, and indie pop, without being firmly tied to any genre.
Of course, Gen Z didn’t invent the acoustic guitar. From Joni Mitchell in the ’60s to Elliott Smith in the ’90s, stripped–down instrumentation and a certain existential anxiety run in the DNA of folk and indie musicians. Our algorithmic age, however, calls for something new. “ceilings,” Lizzy McAlpine’s breakthrough hit, is set against a quiet, rainy backdrop and beautifully describes a love which mostly consists of lying around questioning oneself. “From The Start,” Laufey’s biggest hit to date, sees her lying on her bed staring into the blue, gripped by awkward silences. Their structures are repetitive, their wording simplistic—these tracks strive to occupy as little space in our mental hard drives as possible.
Three years of lockdown, three minutes of song, three seconds to grab your attention on TikTok. Operating in periods which are brief yet also interminable, Xanax music has adapted to fit a time when time itself seems to have lost all coherence. Why not lie around all day in bed? Throw off the blanket, and the questions you’re asking yourself about your appearance, your goals, and your affections might actually need to be answered. That’s scary.
Xanax artists are by no means only capable of making Xanax music. It would be ludicrous to question the abilities of Laufey, an incredibly accomplished classical musician, or Lizzy McAlpine, a Berklee graduate who has been writing music since the 6th grade. Many of their songs tackle more mature subjects or take a sharper tone. But despite these artists' clear talent, their projects outside of the Xanax genre, like beabadoobee’s electric debut Fake It Flowers or Laufey’s recent album A Matter of Time, tend to land with a relative thud. The most–streamed song on Fake It Flowers, “Care,” in which the artist shouts, “I don’t want your sympathy!” has been streamed nearly two billion times less than “death bed.” I suppose she cared too much.
Tone and topic are not the only drivers of this enormous gap in popularity, of course. The songs can simply receive less attention due to algorithmic whims or deficiencies in execution. Laufey’s earliest single from her most recent album, “Silver Lining,” is one example. The song laments that she is falling into self–described bad habits: drinking red wine, kissing on the playground, making dirty jokes, sniffing … cinnamon? The chorus then abruptly proposes that, as punishment for such grave crimes, Laufey is going to hell. Poor Laufey—I had no idea Pope Leo XIV was her ghostwriter.
Regardless of whether Xanax artists stick the landing when crafting less mellow material, they are rarely rewarded for their efforts. Less streams, less exposure, less revenue. It would appear as if we've collectively decided to tell them to stick to softness, to swallow their anger, their pride, their shame, their happiness, their fear, their boredom, their annoyance, their jealousy, their envy, their ecstasy, their guilt—to swallow themselves.
Don’t be awake, don’t be asleep, exist in limbo with beabadoobee.
We should embrace artists’ attempts to express themselves in their full humanity. When artists get loud, when they engage with uncomfortable subjects, when (God forbid) they tell a dirty joke, they only prove they are human. Maybe by embracing their rough edges, we, too, can start popping our bubble–wrapped existences, where we try to “un–alive” every discomfort. We can finally throw open the curtains on our collective Xanax nap. Maybe, just maybe, we can feel genuine joy as we step into a world full of fears and dangers by gathering the courage to face them.
