If looksmaxxing, the culture of freakishly online men, incels, and Patrick Bateman-lite nutjobs obsessed with achieving some bullshit ideal of attractiveness, had a sound, it would probably be hardtekk, the electronic genre with beats hitting as hard as a hammer against a jawbone. Songs often use a special squeaky-serrated kick sound called the “piep kick” followed by a snare: Imagine a peptide injection to the brain. Looksmaxxers love deploying hardtekk for their mirror flexing clips and TikTok shitposts that reference the dark triad, a theory of personality for people who possess equal parts psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. Fetishizing ferocity and punishment-as-pleasure, hardtekk has rocketed out of nowhere to become one of the breakout genres of 2026, racking up hundreds of millions of plays across streaming services.
It’s the new TikTok meta: These songs are basically inseparable from the video clips they soundtrack. Hardtekk rises out of a digital wasteland where another very popular edit genre, Brazilian phonk, the overclocked offshoot of phonk that combines thudding beats with neon-splatter synths, has reigned supreme for the last two years. Brace yourself for something even further into the fringes of noise. In recent viral TikTok videos, artist-editors tantalize masochists with snippets of songs and on-screen text like “brutal” and “what have i created…”
TikTok content
Many tracks are minute-long seizures of raw power. Listening to YXMI’s “SLAYER” while sitting down at a desk seems insanely incongruous; I feel like Thanos thrashing in the moshpit of gods. While the wave of TikTokTekk is crammed with copy-paste clonery, there are some tingly ear torture gems and unexpected remixes, like the trashy and irresistible flip of SOPHIE’s “VYZEE.” Drums desecrate the swirling pretty prance of the vocals, their evilness making the beauty more beautiful. (I can also imagine SOPHIE fucking with a sound this broken and weird.) Hardtekk dates back decades in Germany and other countries that have their own names for this sort of hectic, choppy sound; each has its own culture of fluttery dances and choice drugs and local shows. It wasn’t always so grotesquely in-your-face. In the hands of the most creative, its drums become rhythmic furnishing for a 3D madhouse of hallucinatory vocals and synths.
New hardtekkers, some of whom were previously dabbling in other genres primed for virality like phonk and jumpstyle, cater directly to looksmaxxing culture. Song titles pull from looksmaxxer lingo (“MOG OR BE MOGGED,” “Brutal Mog,” “TRUE JESTER”). Monochromatic album covers make blade-sharp jawlines look epic and sinister. Artists double as content creators. Rather than hope to get lucky with an edit trend, they constantly dribble out mogging comps and videos plastered with dark triad logos.
The line between sickos and shitposters is blurry. snxff, a 21-year-old from Ukraine, uses the dark triad symbol as a watermark. “I just use it as a logo to attract more people on TikTok,” he says over a call. “People see the triangle and they’re like, Ooh, this is gonna be hard.” YXMI, a 27-year-old Dutch hardtekk producer with over a million monthly listeners on Spotify, laughs at the ridiculousness of the edits, which he intentionally feeds with song titles like “MAXILLA,” “CLAVICLE,” and “BLACK PILL.”
“For me and for many people, hardtekk is just a music genre you can listen to in the gym,” snxff elaborates. “If you wanna feel like you’re Sigma, you have an aura, you wanna mog someone then you just play the track from TikTok and you’re like, Yeah, I’m feeling great now.” While he’s not a looksmaxxer himself, he thinks it’s cool that ripped dudes use his tracks. “I see the guy who is like a 100kg of weight, pure muscles, and he’s flexing to my song. I’m like, OK, OK!”
snxff, who lives in Kyiv, started making music in 2022 as Russia invaded the country and its capital city. Anti-Putin and anti-Trump, he was once part of a crew called the Ukrainian Phonk Community that raised $10,000 for Ukrainian soldiers at a show. He pointed me to a site called PhonkersBase, which tracks political affiliations of artists “who are in some way connected to the phonk industry and other electronic music genres that involve a lot of Russians.” Among the artists flagged by the site is a producer who made a viral hardtekk song with cover art that snxff says features a missile that struck Ukraine. “We don’t wanna support it because it’s violence,” snxff says. “We have a lot of people dying right now, every day.” (One of his good friends, the phonk producer PRXZY, died fighting in the war.)
Many of these producers’ artistic journeys did not begin with hardtekk. The Ukrainian MURDERPLAYA started releasing songs after being galvanized by the sight of a 14-year-old going viral with phonk music in 2022. snxff also began with phonk, then Brazilian phonk, until in December last year, he stumbled on an “extremely viral” hardtekk TikTok and ditched his failing phonk page. In the first quarter of this year, he’s reeled in millions of streams. Across his edit music career, he’s netted $15,000 between label deals and advances: “For Ukraine, it’s crazy money.”
A slew of labels also dedicate themselves to chasing the latest microgenre going viral via TikTok edits. Since the sounds are so ephemeral, these labels often try to snatch royalty rights to individual hot phonk and hardtekk songs. Like sniffer dogs trained on TikTok metrics, once the label detects a song taking off, they reach out to the musician, usually offering hundreds or thousands of dollars and marketing help like DSP pitching and artist page creation. Andre Benz, the founder of the YouTube channel Trap Nation and the label Broke, which has worked with hardtekk producers, told me last year that some teen producers were raking in $150,000 a month from edit music.
TikTok content
snxff has worked with numerous labels, including one deal that he calls his “biggest mistake.” This was a contract that immediately paid him $750 for a super viral song, but he could never recoup the marketing expenses. “If you take an advance, it’s fast money. It’s super cool. You feel good. You have a few thousands dollars, woo-hoo,” he explains. “But then you spend it and have nothing. So I’m trying to do independent music more now.”
It’s difficult to tell exactly how much these producers care about their work. snxff says he loves to make original music, but he also often only spends an hour on a song. For covers, he types “dark vibes” and “evil guy” into Pinterest or Google and adds effects. “Not a lot of hardtekks are unique; most of them are just copying and pasting from another artist’s style. Even some of my tracks are copies of other good producers,” he states plainly. “Most of the time I play my own song, I’m just walking to a grocery store or to meet someone. Not because I enjoy it, but because I wanna listen to it in my AirPods, so I know how other people will hear my music and I can check if I have mistakes.”
YXMI waffles between confident and embarrassed. His first hardtekk song, the uber-simple, uber-viral “INTERVENTION,” took him just 15 minutes. “I think you can even make the song within one day of learning FL Studio,” he assures me. “It’s just a kick pattern, snare and hi-hat, and funny effects and automation clips. That’s why I’m staying a little bit humble because this is, like, science.”
As an A&R at the edit music label liquid, he’s constantly scouting for new hits, giving him an eagle-eye view on the scene’s development as he’s simultaneously one of the star producers. He traces TikTokTekk’s mini-stages, from the pure, painful onslaught of ragers like HELLBLADE’s “Tank Triad” and V1AL’s “TRIADTEKK,” through the dreamier melodic visions of “pianotekk” like XEOE’s “SERAPH,” to the current fixation on popular song remixes. Next up, YXMI thinks, is the psychotic cyclone of hardstyle/hardtekk rap by guys like Brooklyn rapper Rocket Rese. (I hope so.)
A couple of the producers gushed about the German musician Fabian Jürgens, aka Fabitekk. He was making hardtekk long before the current boom, inspired by DJs like Die Gebrüder Brett, Eycer, and Cracky Koksberg. His tracks sometimes extend to 10 minutes, adorning the bludgeoning kick-funnels with precious dots of detail and vocal madness.
“I’m really curious what Fabitekk is thinking about us. I have a feeling he’s looking down on us, because we are sort of printing the songs out,” YXMI sighs. “Ah, that sounds so negative.”
I ask YXMI why, if he’s so bummed by the emptiness of his output, does he not simply try harder? “The industry is all about what works and what doesn’t,” he shrugs. “I have fingers trained to make songs that work, basically. I think I’m just gonna focus on these songs that are working and, next to it, when I have time, make songs that are, yeah, more in my own style.”
“I mean, I don’t want to lie. I just can’t lie,” he continues. “There’s a lot of passion in the songs that I made because the melodies are creative and born in my brain. But the kicks, the things that are working that I’m implementing in a song: They don’t have a soul in it.”
It’s a tantalizing proposition: Work on a track for a few minutes, upload it to TikTok, and maybe receive a label advance worth thousands of dollars. Who would say no? And who would waste time laboring over the fine details of a hardtekk tune, when that might just make it less algorithm-friendly? “I guarantee you if Fabitekk had a track for one minute instead of 10 minutes, he would have a million monthly listeners,” snxff tells me. “Easy.”
Fabitekk, indeed, disdains the current hellscape of hardtekk profiteering, especially the craze around hardtekk remixes of popular songs. “You can’t tell me you’re just shitting down a pattern, copying someone’s bassline, and putting it on some viral radio songs, then [saying], ‘Yeah that’s art,’” he tells me over the phone. “I don’t like the way hardtekk is going right now.”
When we spoke at 5 p.m. his time, he was a little groggy; he’d just woken up because twelve hours before, he was playing a hardtekk set in a repurposed fabric shop. Fabitekk, 24, started producing as a teen after hearing hardtekk at a birthday party. He went to a school for plumbers at the beginning of his career; he would repair pipe systems during the week and then obliterate crowds with piep kicks on the weekend. Eventually, the booking requests overwhelmed him.
It’s easy to see why he’s revered. Ditching the DAW, he devises loops and records live from his Korg Electribe 2. A perfectionist who can’t stop adjusting the tracks, he treats hardtekk as an unlikely canvas for his emotions. “Vyruz,” a six-minute song that cuts between monstrous kicks and flashes of melody, came after a bad breakup. He was startled to find that people wrote him letters saying they felt the same emotions when they listened to the wordless track.
Fabitekk is well aware of his influence on the new torrent of TikTokTekkers. A snippet of his nearly eight-minute 2022 song “Outlaw” inspired one of the earliest hardtekk TikTok edit trends, and he claims a bunch of recent songs have straight-up ripped the song’s gnarly bassline. But what makes the tune so neat are all the micro-weirdnesses: the airy bits that conjure up ghosts hyperventilating after running a marathon, the tinny tweakage that hits a third of the way in. “Outlaw” popped off years after it dropped, suddenly hijacked for dark triad and alpha male edits, along with more fascist and hateful content that Fabitekk deplored.
“A lot of people say, ‘Get politics out of the music.’ But I say, I think these people are against human rights,” Fabitekk tells me. Hardtekk’s association with the far-right is well-documented. The YouTube video “Hardtekk: Schreddersound und Ostalgie,” from the media outlet Arte Tracks, explores the popularity of the genre in East Germany. The region is a stronghold for the far-right party AfD, which manifests in multiple AfD-themed hardtekk playlists and TikTok edits. The genre’s adoption by looksmaxxing, a sort of globalized alt-right bastion for young men who feel rejected by society, makes perfect sense. Just like the underground rap edits about Agartha I covered last year, these videos might function as another alt-right pipeline for kids whose politics could be swayed by the mix of hateful messaging and tough-sounding music. While Fabitekk says he hasn’t witnessed violence at any shows over the years, concertgoers have shown up wearing “stickers with racist jokes.” He says that a lot of white hardtekk fans believe there’s no racism in the scene, simply because they’re not the targets of the bigotry. But he’s observed people with superiority complexes trying to keep minorities out of the culture: “You’re not better because you’re German and you say, ‘Yeah, my bloodline is German only, and only we can listen to tekk.’ It’s so stupid,” he says. “Everyone can listen to [hardtekk].”
The way Fabitekk describes it, the genre seems plagued by bigots, shitposters, and opportunistic imitators. But he retains optimism, insisting that the scene is mostly wholesome, and praising new talents like the German producer Beatforge’s synthy sewage. He’s got the right mindset: When a genre is overrun with fakes and enshittified, the solution is to hold your ground and fight for the space. Refuse to flatten yourself to the ephemeral trend landscape. Make art. Fabitekk deleted TikTok a year ago because it drained his mental energy.
With so much edit music just gruel for the algorithm, it's tempting to toss away the whole enterprise. But there's a reason why I keep trying to interrogate this bottom-of-the-barrel music-as-content world. These are some of the most quietly impactful musicians today, who may not even be aware of their influence; it's their copy-pasted drum and synth patterns that keep 50-year-old dads entertained while doomscrolling and teens energized as they play Roblox. It's the music 24-year-olds loop as they lift; kids study to this shit. The format of the edit doesn’t have to be doomed. People can still rescue it; they can use it to educate and nourish and make the most audiovisually satisfying and inventive montages in history. To a real believer's ears, edit music could be the country-crossing soundtrack to the global shortform village.