A group of young women in their 20s are walking into the cinema to watch the new slasher movie Scream. Their jeans are low waisted and their eyebrows are plucked thin. They’re teasing each other over the prospect that computers are soon going to cause the end of the world. One of them has a Walkman around their neck. Still playing out of the headphones, comes an angelic voice over sluggish Trip-Hop breaks. The year is 2026. 

Trip-Hop’s made its way back into the mainstream after its pomp during the 1990s. Whilst some of the pioneering artists of that time like Massive Attack, Portishead and DJ Shadow are now playing on the biggest stages around the world, there’s a new scene emerging and femininity is fanning the flame.

By the end of the 1990’s, Trip-Hop’s impact was indisputable. Massive Attack’s Mezzanine album tour passed through London’s prestigious Royal Albert Hall, an achievement magnified by its inclusion in The Matrix soundtrack a year later.

Whilst the genre’s influence on popular music never ceased, as people realised the world doesn’t end when computers switched to the year 2000, culture shifted towards more light-hearted sounds. Eminem made Hip-Hop more marketable. Grunge became Indie sleaze. Trip-Hop refracted, like light through a prism. Its rays inspired everyone from Gorillaz and Madonna to Kylie, PJ Harvey and Deftones. Trip-Hop remained, but it had fused into various strands of popular music. So, it faded out of the main stage.     

Until now…

Make it whimsical 

As with the analogue resurgence and widespread nostalgia for 2016, we know there’s a hunger from producers and music fans alike for music with emotional depth. That said, there’s a new need from younger audiences for all of those feelings to also feel ‘whimsical’. It’s the latest trend to cosy up and snuggle into the cultural zeitgeist.

For those unaware, to be ‘whimsy’ became a trend on social media amongst Gen Z last year. It was a quiet response to the pressures of productivity culture. It’s a female-led, mindset trend which emphasises reclaiming joy in the little things. Like fun trinkets and playful style choices. What’s refreshing is that it’s not necessarily achieved through commodities, but by embracing their inner child and allowing for a creative strangeness that may not necessarily fit with the corporate, clean-girl aesthetic of recent years. Whimsy is light, offline and runs alongside a desire for more analogue technology, like MP3 players and flip phones.     

This sweet spot of weighty and whimsical is a delicate nuance. One where Trip-Hop and arguably some strands of Indie and Post-Punk are solving similar functions. Younger listeners want honest music about the truth of the world. But, paradoxically, search for the escapism their parents experienced in smoke-filled after-parties in the 1990s. The success of these records relies on them responding to the widespread emotional struggles young people are experiencing. But doing it gracefully enough to help them escape it. Even if it’s just for a few minutes. That’s where the ambient, ethereal, dark and dreamy aspects of Trip-hop are connecting.

Leave it to the other girls to play

Whilst women like Beth Gibbons, Nicolette and Martina Topley-Bird fronted the original Trip-Hop wave, the ‘Bristol sound’ was largely produced by men. What’s special about this new Trip-Hop cycle is that a wave of young women are redefining what it sounds like entirely. 

Some of the most popular artists in 2025 to include Trip-Hop elements in their music include Neggy Gemmy, Erika de Casier and even social-media sensation-turned-singer Addison Rae. They embody whimsical weightyness not just through their sounds but through beautiful, nostalgia-inspired cover art. But of course, you can’t just transform a genre by wielding a microphone.  

French experimental producer Tryphème just released the track ‘Kalea Dream.’ Its an expansive ten minute, Trip-Hop exploration. One where a heavy drum break becomes a swirling electric guitar like a monster learning ballet. When she performs, she is alone on stage surrounded by her machines. She plays and sings melodies that are either colourful or dark. Besides Concrète, Visions Festival or Nuits Sonores in Lyon, she has performed live in the UK as part of a Boiler Room in collaboration with Warp Records. Since her debut on the British label CPU Records in 2017, Tryphème has been crafting her own flavour of Shoegaze-Trip-Hop.  

james K is another key figure in this new wave. With a strong art background from the Rhode Island School of Design, the musician/producer takes an interdisciplinary approach, meticulously crafting the visual world alongside the music. Her sound blends ethereal vocals and textural design with weighty, slow-motion breaks, filtered through a contemporary electronic lens. James K continues to help shape and define the modern day Trip-Hop scene with a great bi-monthly NTS show called ‘Trip Lick’.

These artists are taking the holistic approach, involved in all aspects from production to choreographed music videos. You were unlikely to see Beth Gibbons dancing around on stage back in the day. Everything But The Girl’s Tracey Thorn often struggled with stage fright. The new generation are boldly vulnerable and very much in the spotlight.
It helps that many of the original Trip-Hop pioneers are still releasing great music. Beth Gibbons released a powerful album, Lives Outgrown, in 2024. Everything But The Girl’s new-ish records are great. Morcheeba dropped a new album last year called Escape The Chaos. The genre is very much alive.

Trip-hop fusions  

Over in Berlin, a.s.o. is a musical duo who keep quite true to the older Trip-Hop sound. But even with them you can hear that the refraction of Trip-Hop was permanent. In a.s.o.’s case, their production is led by Lewie Day, who built his musical identity entirely on the dancefloor. Whilst their sound feels like a direct continuation of Massive Attack’s record Black Milk, where a.s.o can be distinguished from their predecessors is that instead of gloomy, grimy and still soundscapes, we have luxurious, glossy sheen atmospheres that create whole worlds of sound. 

On her NTS show, james K played a record from Taiwan-based ambient and experimental musician Imryll. In an interview with Low End Theorists, Imryll deemed their music to be “too unusual for the norms, but too lame for the cool kids. At least that’s how I feel all these years trying to find my place here.” Whilst they’re not exactly Trip-Hop, they’re a satellite of that planet, transmitting glitchy ambient, post-classical experiments, reinterpreting more 1990s Art-Pop signals into the scene.  

French singer and producer Oklou has created a silky holographic fusion of Trip-Hop blending elements of Synth-Pop and Alternative R&B. She often elects to use beautiful eternal composed loops instead of drums, crediting that style choice to an upbringing soundtracked by classical music. Oklou has worked with the futuristic musical entity that is FKA Twigs and Dance-Pop princess PinkPantheress. Both known for weaving elements of 1990s sounds into their music whilst making their sound distinctly modern. Where the 1990s was often about detachment and melancholy, the new wave carries something rawer: identity, body politics, intimacy. The golden age sound was a cigarette-smoking silhouette in the background. This new sound is many things all at once, firmly in the foreground.

Venus is a girl

This piece wouldn’t be complete without a mention of a whimsical wonder who’s still shaping Trip-Hop today and was a part of the original sound: Björk. Since reaching international stardom at just 27 with her first studio album, Debut, she’s personified whimsy through her unique perspective in interviews as much as her artistic approach. Her playful ideas toward art, music and technology can be heard in the music that she continues to release, even almost 50 years after her very first musical release in 1977 as a child singer at the age of eleven.

She laid some of the foundations of Trip-Hop and continues to inspire the next generation of Pop stars, recently working with Rosalia, Shygirl and Arca. Her sound is more cinematic and dramatic than it used to be, but always resets the bar further into the ethereal with every release and performance.    

Trip-Hop has always been music for people who feel slightly outside the mainstream. Its return to mainstream consciousness has coincided with a generation that is falling in love with 1990s fashion, photography and tech. As they pull away from their phone screens, it only makes the music in their wired headphones hit that much harder.

Whilst it would be easy to pin Trip-Hop’s growing popularity down as a nostalgic recreation, it’s much more than that. Modern artists are using the blueprints of the sound to say something those before them couldn’t back in the day. As women gain more agency in an industry still dominated by men, it’s nice to see Trip-Hop’s still a woman.

Check out more Trip-Hop mixes on Mixcloud.