With this scorching summer nearing its end and fall’s shortening days and cooling breezes following closely behind, musical playlists will likewise turn from sweaty dance hits and catchy pop anthems to moodier, more autumnal fare. Forget “sad-girl summer”—fall is the perfect seasonal backdrop for sadcore music.
Sadcore was first coined in the 1980s to describe the young musicians who turned away from the aggressive sounds of punk and hardcore to embrace melancholic lyrics, bitter-sweet melodies, and more textured and ethereal atmospherics. Labels like 4AD, Postcard Records, Sarah Records, Creation Records, K Records, and others were often associated with this style. Although sadcore was usually characterized by a particular guitar-based aesthetic, the term later became a catch-all encompassing various sub-genres and sub-scenes including dream pop, twee pop, shoegaze, folktronica, slowcore, chillwave, ambient pop, and chamber pop. What all of these styles had in common was an emotive sound best suited for introspective headphone-listening, and that encouraged daydreaming or nostalgic memorializing, dancing alone in the dark or tarrying in bed.
Since 2020, sadcore playlists and mixtapes have gained massive popularity among Generation Z, having exploded on platforms and sites like Spotify and Youtube. Many are intricately curated and include both professional songs and tracks created by anonymous bedsit musicians, or others remixed with tags like “slowed and reverbed” (also known as daycore), “super slowed,” and “corecore,” or songs looped for hours for maximum hypnotic effect.
This year has seen a range of new and established musicians releasing poignant works that celebrate the sad melodies of life. Here, Vogue has assembled a list of some of the best or most promising of these albums. Together, their oneiric and forlorn sounds offer the perfect weepy soundtrack for the autumn days ahead of us.
Dj Salinger, Voyage Voyage Voyage
Released earlier this year by the micro-label The Tapeworm, Voyage Voyage Voyage is a sublime collection of feedback and tape-loop tracks by Dj Salinger, a.k.a. French composer/producer Franz Kirmann, inspired by his memories of Europop chart-toppers from his youth. Kirmann takes snippets and stretches of popular ’80s songs like Desireless’s “Voyage, Voyage,” Elsa Lunghini’s “T’en va pas,” and Jean-Jacques Goldman’s “Comme toi,” over which he sculpts electronic drones, distorted guitars, and layers of reverb. (Sometimes, the familiar melodies rise up momentarily like radio transmissions before submerging again in the oceans of noise.) The astonishing result is like the sound of human memory unfurling over decades of time. Even for those who are not familiar with the source songs, Kirmann’s haunting album is a heartaching work of nostalgia and longing made for deep headphone listening.
Cigarettes After Sex, X’s
Getting an early jump on the autumn season, Cigarettes After Sex’s X’s finds one of the most lauded sadcore bands of the past decade producing more lilting, southwest-inspired balladry. Like Mazzy Star and its Paisley Underground forebears, CAS was always a band caught somewhere between summer and fall, sun-bleached desert and windswept hollows. Songs like “Baby Blue Movie” and “Ambien Slide” deliver on their fragile, soporific titles. More AM radio-inspired than the band’s previous releases, X’s proves that sad, dreamy albums are not the exclusive province of the bedroom—they can also perfectly soundtrack twilight drives down lost highways or lonely backroads.
Chrystabell and David Lynch, Cellophane Memories
Texas singer-songwriter/siren/actress Chrystabell returns from her deep-space hyper-pop album Midnight Star to present a collection of spare, cinematic torch songs in collaboration with filmmaker David Lynch. Like in her previous work with Lynch, on 2011’s This Train and in his Twin Peaks: The Return TV series (as Agent Tammy Preston), Chrystabell perfectly summons the mysteries of wide-eyed romance, simmering libido, and heartbreak. In fact, Cellophane Memories arouses an almost otherworldly sadness, with its songs often sounding like witchy conjurations cast for the broken-hearted and loveless over midnight bonfires.
Ryuichi Sakamoto, Opus
The late Japanese experimental musician, producer, and composer shot to fame in his native Japan by inventing an early form of minimalist techno music, but turned increasingly to acoustic piano works and film soundtracks in the 1980s and ’90s. His classic pieces, like “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” and more recent piano works, including the stunning “andata,” show the aching melancholy that Sakamoto could coax from his piano. The posthumously released Opus is the soundtrack to a 2022 live concert film by Sakamoto recorded months before his death. The mournful sounds of Sakamoto at the piano are shiver-inducing.
The Cocteau Twins and Harold Budd, The Moon and the Melodies (Reissue) (August 23)
Once upon a time, the king of romantic minimalism met the scions of dream pop, and together they recorded The Moon and the Melodies—one of the most uniquely baroque records of the 1980s—and the seas foamed, the greying clouds overtook the sky, and the world took a leisurely Saturday slumber. Album tracks like “Sea, Swallow Me,” “She Will Destroy You” and “Why Do You Love Me?” oscillate between treacly vocal melodies and long interludes of vaporous guitar, tinkling piano, and plaintive saxophone. There are few sadcore albums that feel as weirdly storybook or out of time, hovering somewhere between the 1980s and centuries past.
Fennesz, Venice 20 (August 23); Mosaic (TBA)
Austrian composer Christian Fennesz is often credited with reintroducing the guitar—along with melody and emotion—to laptop-based music. His Endless Summer, now considered a contemporary classic, blended the wistful guitars and chimes of Smile-era Brian Wilson with My Bloody Valentine’s oceanic layers of distortion and the processed glitches of Markus Popp. The follow-up record Venice, soon to be re-released in a 20th-anniversary edition with extras, was similarly thalassic but created a darker, more abrasive atmosphere alongside melancholic vocals by David Sylvian. Unreleased track “Sognato di Domani” has an almost divine beauty, its wailing guitars and dense waves of feedback evoking a mystical, choral chant. Fennesz’s newest album, Mosaic, follows sometime in October.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Wild God (August 30)
Australian goth punk-turned-hellcat Nick Cave has always specialized in songs about sinners and preachers, serial killers, carnies, and vampires. While his fire ’n’ brimstone-laced rave-ups and devilish performances gained him the most infamy, it was Cave’s baritone torch songs and funeral ballads that proved the greatest entries in his vast musical catalogue. Classic numbers like “Into My Arms,” “Nobody’s Baby Now,” and “Henry Lee” are some of the most heart-wrenching songs in modern pop music. And Cave’s penchant for tearful balladeering has only intensified in the later part of his career: The single “Long Dark Night” from the new Wild God has the hallmarks of a classic Cave torch song suitable for tearful, midnight drinking sessions.
Seefeel, Everything Squared (August 30)
The British IDM/multi-hyphenate band, composed of Mark Clifford and Sarah Peacock, was one of the most innovative guitar/ambient crossovers to emerge from the post–My Bloody Valentine shoegaze era of the mid-1990s. The group’s earliest EP, More Like Space, and the later Aphex Twin remixes of “Time to Find Me (Come Inside)” approximated the melancholic sound of a Vox guitar making love to an iMac G3 in the depths of the ocean. Everything Squared’s first single, “Sky Hooks,” reinvokes something of the mesmerizing reverb and pitch-shifted vocals of “Time to Find Me (Come Inside),” dropping the listener into an ocean of guitar loops and drum machines, all of which sound like the slow-motion ecstasy of falling in love and, simultaneously, drowning in soporific despair.
Max Richter, In a Landscape (September 6)
Minimalist pianist, orchestral arranger, and soundtrack composer Max Richter once produced an eight-hour-plus concept album called Sleep that was to be played in its entirety by listeners over the course of a night. When he performed the work live at a London venue in 2015, the audience was fitted with beds instead of chairs. Richter’s performance background in the works of Arvo Part, Philip Glass, and Brian Eno betrays his love for repetitive, trance-like melodies, while his stated interests in dreams, memories, and personal trauma have imbued his recordings with a delicate, childlike tone not unlike the piano compositions of Erik Satie or the ambient works of Aphex Twin. If the image of dust motes dancing in early morning sunlight were a sound, it would belong to Max Richter.
Tindersticks, Soft Tissue (September 13)
Tindersticks singer/songwriter Stuart A. Staples is the consummate baroque pop singer, mixing the various emotive styles of Scott Walker, Serge Gainsbourg, Isaac Hayes, and Lee Hazlewood. As a longtime collaborator with film director Claire Denis, Staples and his band have always painted their melodramatic ballads in lush Technicolor while evoking lachrymose longings for lost lovers, debauched nights, and the stale mornings-after. Soft Tissue’s first single, “New World,” contains all of the band’s classic features: maudlin organ, shuffling bass, and swelling horns caressing Staples’s haunting vocals, which go down as smooth and intoxicating as a double malt scotch.
Sarah Davachi, The Head as Form’d in the Crier’s Choir (September 13)
Sarah Davachi works between baroque and chamber music, contemporary classical and experimental pop. Like her contemporaries Kali Malone, Claire M Singer, and Kara-Lis Coverdale, Davachi is redefining the possibilities of experimental music by looking into its deep history. From organ to piano to strings and electronics, her compositions are intricate, often meditative, and produce a profound feeling of the spectral. However, on more traditional ballads like “Play the Ghost”—one of the most haunting songs in recent pop music—Davachi’s voice adds a lullaby-like lilt that is as sensual as it is ethereal.
Galaxie 500, Uncollected Noise New York ’88-’90 (September 20)
If the Cocteau Twins were the inventors of a certain style of British baroque dream pop in the 1980s, then Galaxie 500 was the decade’s American, college-rock equivalent. Over three albums, the three-piece Boston band mined the most narcotic elements of The Velvet Underground, along with New Zealand’s Dunedin bands like The Chills and The Clean; the resulting sound was unmistakably their own. Uncollected… gathers various outtakes and unreleased tracks from the band’s years at Noise New York, the studio run by musician and producer (Mark) Kramer. Album track “I Wanna Live” sums up the band’s trademark blend of dreamy and sadcore pop.
Christopher Owens, I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair (October 18)
As a cofounder of indie duo Girls with Chet White and a third of the underground LA band Holy Shit (with Ariel Pink and Matt Fishbeck), Christopher Owens came to represent the hazy, nostalgia-heavy California underground pop of the 2010s alongside bandmates like Pink. His sad-eyed ballads borrowed from the Beach Boys, but also from the twee and dream pop sounds of ’80s groups like Orange Juice, Felt, and Galaxie 500. Following White’s death in 2020 and his own near-fatal motorcycle accident, Owens has returned with a solo album whose single “I Think About Heaven” has all of the jangly slide guitar and plaintive lyrics of a twee pop anthem.
Lana Del Rey, Lasso (TBA)
The suzerain of sadcore, Lana Del Rey’s music has become synonymous with a certain American Gothic-by-way-of Instagram pop that summons the noirish images of David Lynch films and the dark underbelly of Laurel Canyon folk rock. Lugubrious tracks like “Summertime Sadness,” “Born to Die,” and “Black Beauty” are like sugary candies laced with cyanide. Del Rey’s upcoming album Lasso has been described as the singer’s turn to country music, but her recent covers of “Stand By Your Man” and “Unchained Melody” suggest her keenness for the saturnine and melodramatic remains unchanged.
A few runner-up titles:
Broadcast, Spell Blanket—Collected Demos 2006-2009, Distant Call—Collected Demos 2000-2006 (September 28); Dora Jar, No Way to Relax When You are on Fire (September 13); Mercury Rev, Born Horses (September 6); Sophie, Sophie (September 27)