Era of origin
1990s music genres
Explore music genres with documented origins in the 1990s.
52 genre guides
1990Adult Alternative
A radio-born umbrella term for polished, adult-facing alternative music, strongest in the 1990s and still useful as a listening shorthand.
1990Bounce
A tightly rooted New Orleans rap style built for participation, bounce grew out of local party culture and later travelled outward through artists like DJ Jubilee and Big Freedia.
1990Britpop
A concise Britpop entry grounded in the genre’s 1990s UK context, with examples kept to official or broadly canonical artist sources.
1990Contemporary Latin
Kept the record deliberately broad and reframed it as a market-facing umbrella rather than a single fixed style. Added only evidence-backed origin context, artists, and example links tied to official artist pages or search-safe YouTube references.
1990Dark Electro
A compact, club-ready strain of electro-industrial that darkens the machinery until it feels haunted.
1990G-Funk
A polished West Coast rap style that made gangsta rap feel wider, smoother, and more melodic without losing its edge.
1990Gothic Metal
A dark, melodic metal style that emerged from early-1990s UK doom and death-doom scenes, with Paradise Lost often named among the first defining bands.
1990Hard Dance
A broad, scene-based label for the harder edge of EDM, with its strongest documented roots in European rave culture and its clearest modern use as an umbrella over hardstyle, hard trance, hard house, and hardcore.
1990Intelligent dance music
A broad, slightly controversial tag for detailed electronic music that grew around Warp's early-1990s catalog and online discussion. The name is imperfect, but the music under it remains some of the most inventive headphone electronic music of its era.
1990Jam Bands
A live-first American rock umbrella built around improvisation, stylistic drifting, and a concert culture where no two nights are quite the same.
1990Jungle / Drum’n’bass
Jungle and Drum’n’bass are characterized by fast breakbeats, typically between 160-180 BPM, with heavy bass and sub-bass lines, and often features complex sampled loops, synthesizers, and occasionally vocal elements.
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1990K-Pop
A polished, performance-first pop tradition rooted in South Korea and built around idol groups, choreography, and highly engineered hooks. Its best-documented modern origins point to the early 1990s, with later global growth driven by major label systems and internationally visible groups.
1990Kwaito
Kwaito is best understood as a post-apartheid South African township sound: house music slowed down, made local, and turned into a language of youth identity. The strongest documented core is its 1990s emergence, its house-and-local-rhythm fusion, and its deep ties to artists like Boom Shaka, Bongo Maffin, and TKZee..za)
View guide1990Latin Rap
A broad umbrella term for Latino-rooted hip-hop, with Cypress Hill as the best-documented early touchstone in the available sources.
1990Low Bap
A Greek hip-hop movement that grew around Active Member in the 1990s, Low Bap pairs slower, bass-forward beats with socially engaged writing and a strong sense of scene identity.
1990Modern Blues
A contemporary blues tag for music that keeps the genre’s emotional core but updates the sound with electric muscle, polished production, and cross-genre touches.
1990Motswako
A rooted, language-first South African hip-hop style that turns Setswana and English into a lively, local conversation over rap beats.
1990Nu Jazz
A concise, evidence-based update that treats nu jazz as a broad, still-loose umbrella for jazz-electronic crossover scenes rather than a single tightly bounded school.
1990Nuevo Flamenco
A documented late-20th-century flamenco fusion label most closely associated with Ottmar Liebert, with deeper roots in the genre-expanding work of Paco de Lucía and related crossover flamenco scenes.
1990Post-rock
A loose, influential style that treats rock instruments like materials for long-form atmosphere, pressure, and release rather than standard verse-chorus momentum.
1990Speedcore
A fast, abrasive corner of hardcore techno that crystallized in the 1990s and still lives mostly through underground labels, artist pages, and scene-specific releases.
1990Trip hop
A Bristol-born, press-labeled strain of downtempo music that turned hip-hop rhythm, dub weight, and soul fragments into something foggy, intimate, and unmistakably nocturnal.
1990Turntablism
A Bronx-born DJ art form that treats the turntable as an instrument, turntablism moved from hip-hop party technique into a formalized performance and battle culture in the 1990s.
1992Dark Jazz
A moody, filmic corner of jazz that emerged through European experimental scenes, dark jazz favors slow burn over swing and atmosphere over virtuosity.
1994Breakcore
A compact, high-intensity electronic style with roots in jungle and hardcore, breakcore lives on contrast: precision and chaos, humor and abrasion, dancefloor speed and collage-like experimentation.
1994Dirty South
A Southern hip-hop label that emerged in the mid-1990s, Dirty South names a regional sound and a regional self-assertion. Its early history is closely tied to Goodie Mob, OutKast, and the Atlanta scene that helped make Southern rap impossible to ignore.
1994Instrumental Hip Hop
A beat-centered hip-hop lane shaped by sampling culture, turntablism, and landmark producer albums rather than vocal performance.
1994Math Metal
A flexible metal label for music that twists heavy riffs through strange meters and sharply interlocked patterns. The term is documented, but it is not a single neatly bounded scene, so the best way to understand it is through the bands and recordings that people have used to anchor it.
1994Spazzcore
A cautious update: spazzcore looks more like a listener-made umbrella label than a formally documented genre, so the record now emphasizes the best-supported bands, the chaotic aesthetic, and the uncertainty around its origin.
19972-Step
A late-1990s UK garage offshoot that traded four-on-the-floor certainty for a more elastic, skipping groove, 2-Step became one of the defining sounds of its scene.
1997Aggrotech
Aggrotech is best understood as a harsh club-oriented branch of dark electro and electro-industrial, shaped by the late-1990s industrial scene and carried by acts like Hocico, Suicide Commando, and Combichrist. The term is real and useful, but it’s also a scene label with fuzzy borders rather than a tightly policed style.
1997Americana
Americana is best understood as a broad roots-music umbrella rather than a single locked-in sound. Its name is relatively recent, but the style reaches deep into older American folk, country, blues, bluegrass, soul, and rock traditions.
1997Asian Underground
A British Asian electronic movement from the 1990s, Asian Underground fused South Asian musical elements with club-oriented electronic production and became a key site for diaspora identity in UK music culture.
1997Conjunto Progressive
This entry should be treated cautiously: the documented evidence supports progressive conjuntos as a descriptive, later-evolving branch of conjunto rather than a sharply bounded standalone genre.
View guide1997Contemporary Country
A mainstream-friendly country sound that keeps the genre’s core storytelling intact while leaning hard into polish, hooks, and crossover appeal.
1997Country Rap
A loose but real crossover lane where country imagery, Southern drawl, and rap cadence meet. The label is fuzzy around the edges, but the trail runs through early 2000s hick-hop releases and into the mainstream surge around 'Old Town Road.'
1997Crunk
A compact, evidence-based update that keeps crunk grounded in Atlanta club culture and early-2000s Southern rap.
1997Cumbia Rap
A useful umbrella term for cumbia-and-rap hybrids, but not a rigid genre with one fixed origin story. The strongest documentation places it in Mexican and Mexican-American crossover scenes, where artists adapted cumbia’s bounce to rap’s cadence.
1997Cybergrind
A compact, evidence-based portrait of cybergrind as a grindcore offshoot shaped by electronics, internet-era production, and underground scene tagging.
1997Electro Swing
A danceable hybrid of old-school swing textures and modern electronic polish, electro swing grew from sample culture and club experimentation into a recognizable scene with a handful of major touchstones.
1997Electro swing
A compact, club-friendly offshoot of swing revival culture, electro swing sits between old records and new machines. The best-documented early names are Caravan Palace and Parov Stelar, both tied closely to the style’s rise in Europe.
1997Glitch Hop
A flexible, beat-driven electronic genre built from hip-hop rhythm and glitch-era sonic damage; the tag is real, but the borders are porous.
1997Glitch Pop
A flexible, loosely documented tag for pop-minded electronic music that keeps its digital seams audible.
1997Hardstyle
A concise, evidence-constrained hardstyle entry centered on the Dutch-origin festival scene, with artist examples linked to official platform pages.
1997Hellbilly
A fuzzy, artist-centered label for Hank Williams III’s rough-edged country-punk strain, with roots in outlaw country and psychobilly.
1997Hill Country Blues
A north Mississippi blues style built around repetition, groove, and a hard, hypnotic pull. The modern label is relatively recent, but the music’s local roots run deep in hill-country juke joints and community dance settings.
1997J-pop
A broad and useful label for Japanese pop, with roots in postwar popular music and a clearer mainstream identity in the 1990s.
1997Merenrap
A compact crossover label for Dominican merengue laced with rap, best understood through late-1990s diaspora recordings rather than a single formal origin story.
View guide1997Neo-soul
A late-1990s soul revival with hip-hop patience and jazz harmony, neo-soul was shaped by D'Angelo, Erykah Badu, Maxwell, and Lauryn Hill.
1997Nerdcore
A DIY hip hop label that grew out of internet culture, nerdcore turns fandom, code, sci-fi, and games into rap material without losing the punch of the beat.
1997Stoner Metal
A 1990s heavy-music style built on oversized riffs, druggy atmosphere, and a desert-rock sense of space. The core story is clearest in the Kyuss-to-Sleep-to-Electric Wizard lineage, even if the boundary between stoner metal and stoner rock can blur at the edges.
1997Underground Rap
A broad, independence-minded hip-hop tag rather than a tightly bounded sound. The best-known examples lean lyrical, inventive, and a little off-center, but the genre name is really about where the music stands in relation to the mainstream.