It’s time to learn about the Russian sound you hear every time you scroll

Not long ago, ‘internet music’ meant something soft, silly, or ironic. Think ‘Nyan Cat’, vaporwave edits, lo-fi loops. Even TikTok’s early soundtracks leaned toward mellow, melodic moods. But in the past three years, something has shifted. Internet music got louder. Faster. Harder.

One meme captures the moment perfectly: Three pirates from a Soviet cartoon strut across a beach with absurd confidence. The animation is exaggerated, the visuals low-res. But paired with a cowbell-heavy, distorted beat, it suddenly looks – incredibly – cool. The clip goes viral. The music? Pure phonk.

Today, phonk is everywhere: In gym edits, drift montages, anime cuts, sports highlights. Its raw, lo-fi rhythms have become the default soundtrack of short-form video culture. And yet, few know the names behind the sound. The tracks rack up millions of plays, but the artists remain anonymous.

There’s a reason for that: Most of them are Russian. Phonk didn’t just find a home in Russia – it was reborn there. In the absence of industry infrastructure, labels, or PR teams, the genre evolved in unexpected ways. What began as an underground echo of 1990s Memphis rap has become something new: A Russian internet-native genre reshaping global soundscapes.

From Memphis to Moscow

To trace phonk’s roots, you have to go back to Memphis in the early 1990s – a city where a new kind of rap was taking shape in bedrooms, basements, and borrowed tape decks.

Memphis rap was bleak. Dark. The lyrics were grim, even by hip-hop standards – raw accounts of street violence, poverty, drug paranoia, and death. There were no anthems, no aspirations. Just survival and menace, spat into handheld mics in airless rooms.

The sound matched the message. These tracks were muddy, lo-fi, and haunting – warped by cheap gear, copied across dying cassette tapes, soaked in static and hiss. Melodies were scarce. Basslines throbbed like threats. And then there was the cowbell: A cheap percussion hit that somehow made the darkness danceable. It became a signature – a sharp clang cutting through the murk like a flicker of light.