Underground music labels to know
Let’s bring back the old Internet, before annoying recommendation algorithms and AI slop!
The genre cloud of music available at everynoise.com
Reclaim your musical taste by curating it yourself!
everynoise.com is a great way to start: it’s a genre cloud of thousands of obscure musical subgenres: “forest psy”, “Lithuanian electronic”, and “britcore”, to name just a few.
You explore these genres yourself manually, like flipping through the crates inside of a free digital record store. With no algorithmic filter bubbles constantly pointing you back to where you started, there’s always something new and fresh to find.
Another great way to find interesting music is going old school and referencing the underground label scene. There’s tons of fantastic, specialized underground music labels with interesting things to explore, all human-made and human-curated. Here’s just a few to get you started.
Kranky
This label tends to specialize in abstract electronica. Fly the Ocean in a Silver Plane by Pan-American is a recent release, featuring some interesting electronic experiments combined with strings.
yellowelectric
About as underground as it gets (note the janky google sites web address), this label specializes in arty multimedia releases. They’re especially notable as being the home label for the indie artist Grouper for several of their biggest albums. Joining their mailing list is the best way to keep up with them.
Learn more about how Grouper achieved 325 million listeners working as an experimental artist.
Erased Tapes
Erased Tapes is a small indie label with more of a put-together vibe. They also specialize in electronica, but coming from a more sound-designey perspective. One of my favorite releases is the album Gravity by Ben Lukas Boysen.
I especially like how this label has done the work to stream their releases directly on their website in a way that also supports physical record sales. No linking out to outside tech middlemen is necessary to hear what they’ve been up to.
