The Soundtrack of the Doomscroll Generation? It’s Phonk.

Phonk has become the near-constant soundtrack of vertical video—YouTube Shorts, TikTok and Instagram Reels—playing in the background of dance clips, gaming montages, workout edits and highlight reels. In the last month the phonk producer Slxughter reached 981 million unique users across YouTube platforms, more than twice the audience of Taylor Swift and more than six times that of Bad Bunny as listenership figures now combine classic views with Shorts streams.

The style traces back to late-’80s and ’90s Memphis rap, where producers like Tommy Wright III and Three 6 Mafia shaped a raw, sinister sound of heavy bass, eerie lyrics, cowbells and hypnotic loops. It re-emerged in the 2010s through lo-fi internet producers—SpaceGhostPurrp popularized the spelling—and, as Diplo wrote, young producers weren’t just sampling Memphis but giving it new context by feeding it to the algorithm; Diplo has since released a phonk album called 'D00mscrvll.' Russian and Eastern European creators helped birth drift phonk and a new commercial wave.

Russia, Memphis

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