Is 90s style downtempo/trip hop making a comeback? If so, why?
I am autistically obsessed with the downtempo scene of the 90s, the stuff that's a little more pop than trip hop, and I keep my ear out for modern tracks that emulate that era. For most of this decade, it was limited to George Clanton, Doss, and I guess Hatchie. But there's been a shift over the last couple months, during which we got:
Different Religion by Miley Cyrus
and My Sins Are My Savior by Madonna (which samples a track from the 90s)
If you wanna go earlier in the year, there's the Girls Trip version of Saturn's Return by Zara Larsson and Home by Charlie Puth ft. Utada.
And then there's After, who released their debut album a couple of weeks ago, and whose whole thing is a false memory of late 90s/early 2000s "trip pop", kind of like how Kavinsky created a false memory of the 80s.
It may be a coincidence. But on RateYourMusic, tags for the genres under the 90s downtempo umbrella, like trip hop, baggy, UK street soul and downtempo itself are slowly creeping up, Frou Frou seem to be more popular now than they were 25 years ago, and Ray of Light has joined Blackout as the pop album every pop artist namedrops. So there are signs. But if it's real, the question is why, because "20 year nostalgia cycle" feels reductive. Why this, in particular?
I know modern shoegaze and industrial have been experimenting with 90s breakbeats for a while, "baggygaze" becoming a buzzword. A lot of the artists I listed make aggressive dance-pop, and might've just independently adopted the sound for pacing reasons, as Eurodance artists did in the 90s. Silent Hill has gotten more popular lately, and the games feature this sound heavily; After have called it an influence. They could all just be reheating After's nachos, but none of them actually sound much like them. I absolutely know which album is responsible for the tagging boom on RYM, but nobody else sounds like it, either, and at any rate RYM is not influencing the mainstream pop landscape.
Is this just some coincidental blip, an early sign of what pop music will be in the next few years, or something that will continue to be limited to one-offs?