For those who follow left-of-centre pop, electronic music and adventurous club sounds, C2C Festival has long been one of the most exciting festivals in Europe. We went last year, and the experience confirmed what the line-up already suggested: this is a festival with a real point of view. It knows how to bring together big names, cult favourites and more experimental artists without making the programme feel random.

Among the new additions, The Avalanches are one of the biggest surprises. The Australian group, known for their sample-heavy, emotional collages, will play the opening night at OGR Torino. Their appearance comes as they are teasing their next chapter, following their 2020 album We Will Always Love You. And their recent single “Together,” featuring Nikki Nair, Jessy Lanza, and Prentiss, got us particularly excited.

Shygirl is another major addition. The London artist, who has become one of the most exciting voices in electronic pop, mixing club music, grime, R&B, hip hop and hyperpop, will perform in Italy for the very first time.

The announcement also brings Smerz back to the festival. Loyal readers will know that we have been following the Norwegian duo since “Because” in 2016. Their album Big City Life was one of last year’s most significant records, and they were also one of our highlights of the festival last year. In 2026, the duo will perform at Teatro Carignano for a special matinée. This is also one of the key pieces of news from the announcement: the historic Turin venue returns to the programme for the first time in eleven years.

Also joining the bill are Grouper, the much-loved project of Liz Harris, whose intimate ambient folk should make for one of the most beautiful moments of the closing day; ML Buch, one of the most interesting names from the new CPH scene; and Elias Rønnenfelt, frontman of Iceage, who arrives after a very prolific period including his solo album Speak Daggers and lucre, a collaborative project with Dean Blunt that was one of favourite releases of 2025.

C2C Festival 2026 will run from Thursday 29 October to Sunday 1 November. Tickets via DICE.

For its 25th anniversary, C2C Festival in Turin has just unveiled the first names of its 2026 line-up and, honestly, there’s no doubt why this festival is considered one of the best in Europe. Headlining this first wave: Robyn, Oklou, Arca, Kelela, Chanel Beads, Joanne Robertson, underscores, Yung Lean & Bladee, BADBADNOTGOOD, Theo Parrish, Crystallmess, KMRU, Chuquimamani-Condori… and this is only the beginning.

We were in Turin last year for the festival, and we can say it without hesitation: this is probably the best place for avant-pop and future-leaning indie music. The curation is on another level. The crowd is international, curious, and deeply tuned in. And the music selection really fits those brutalist, industrial venues.

From October 29 to November 1, 2026, during Turin’s Contemporary Art Week, the C2C Festival will once again turn the city into a global capital of next-gen sound. The full programme is still to come. The Super Early Bird tickets are already sold out, but a new wave of Early Bird passes (limited quantity) will go on sale Wednesday, Feb 4 at 12:00 via DICE.

In many ways this is a nostalgia thing. People who grew up with the music and are now adults are looking back on their teenage years. As nostalgia tends to make that which happened roughly 15 years ago cool again, we can maybe finally move on from our worship of the ’90s. Emo can finally come out of its dingy bedroom where it’s been living. Its transgressions forgiven. Its sentimentality no longer making us cringe.

The most interesting part of this shift in perception is not the revival of old styles (it never is), but the creation of new ones. This all started when I fell into a strange, sad internet hole and discovered the YouTube channel/pseudo-label “デーモンAstari“. Much of the music on the channel combines the music of your awkward phase with heavily autotuned sing-rap. Wedded to this musical blend is a decidedly internetty visual aesthetic that relies heavily on sad anime clips with a bit of vaporwave-ish Windows 95 worship thrown in for good measure. The musical style is as removed from My Chemical Romance as they were from Sunny Day Real Estate and they themselves from Rites Of Spring.

“Emo is the soundtrack to youth, and as times change, so does the music that resonates with young people. The history of emo is one of reinvention … of shifting musical styles.” – Andy Greenwald

There is something very now about this music. It’s more than just a breath of fresh air into an old style. This is a postmodern blend of internet mixtapes from Future to Odd Future, for kids who grew up on Adult Swim playing rap tracks before airing anime shows, whose first musical memory was hearing Jimmy Eat World on the radio. As Andy Greenwald wrote in his book “Nothing Feels Good”: “Emo is the soundtrack to youth, and as times change, so does the music that resonates with young people. The history of emo is one of reinvention … of shifting musical styles.”

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This music has been a long time coming. “808s and Heartbreak” pretty much set the template (as well as giving a great name to the aesthetic) of autotune assisted sing-rapping over hip-hop beats. That album blends Kanye‘s emotional autotuned singing with the eponymous drum machine of the title while ‘Ye indulges in pettiness after the dissolution of a serious relationship. Since then, rappers like Drake, Future, Young Thug, Lil Yachty, Travi$ Scott and Lil Uzi Vert have followed in this vein while making weird, emotional and melodic music that breaks with many of hip-hop’s established “rules”. Many of these rappers have even been described as “emo” for their soul-baring lyrics.

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While these rappers have bent the rules, they still have been successful in the mainstream hip-hop world: their singles topped Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop chart, they were interviewed in XXL and a few of them have collaborated with Kanye. There have also been outsiders who have made similar moves and received a different kind of success. Swedish rapper Yung Lean and his Sad Boys crew are hugely influential here with their white-boy autotune imitations of the above rappers. Part of Lean‘s appeal is the production provided by Yung Gud and Yung Sherman who combine the cloud rap of Clams Casino with electronic music touches.

The Canadian DJ/producer DJ Ryan Hemsworth has also been influential with his blend of electronic music, hip-hop and emotional indie rock. Hemsworth has even stated that two of his favourite albums are Waka Flocka Flame‘s “Flockavelli” and Weezer‘s “Pinkerton”, which sounds like the musical path for a good amount of this music. Both Lean and Hemsworth also have a very similar visual aesthetic consisting of Japanophile tendencies paired with a heavily emotional internet-worshipping aesthetic. This aesthetic might be best explained as the move from 90s emo’s obsession with bleeding one’s emotions and questionably poetry into a diary or a zine (“Diary” even being a seminal album in the genre) to publicly blogging these same issues on websites like Tumblr. Sad, suburban teenagers can now live on the internet in which they have created their own distinctive visual grammar.

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This new emo-goth-rap hybrid then combines elements of all of these musics. Some songs might sound like full-on emo tracks with hip-hop drums underneath, while some might be a more depressing and distorted version of current mainstream hip-hop. Like any genre or movement there are people who epitomise the movement and people who are hard to categorise, only seeming vaguely related. At the very least, even the artists who maybe don’t quite fit the mould are being included into this sphere by its fans and channels like デーモンAstari. Despite this, they generally share some family resemblances, these are: nostalgic cloud-rap influenced beats, clean guitars (sometimes sampled), short songs, autotune, emo-style singing, rapping and emotional lyrics (often about depression/suicide). These musicians are interested in rap music for its textures and its melodies not for technical rhyme schemes. It is not uncommon, then, to find some weak and fairly unexceptional rapping in lots of this music, but that’s not really the point. The production, however, is often wonderful. It captures the vague sense of emo sadness and nostalgia (the kind you might find in an American Football song) and blends it perfectly with the sad, hazy feeling of cloud rap beats. As with any of the music in a still developing scene, some of the music errs on the side of amateurish production values, but shows promise or is otherwise interesting for its pure novelty.

The music is also not without its issues. Combining the famously dodgy gender politics of emo and rap results in a perfect storm of douchebaggery. In both, women are frequently reduced to “bitches” or corpses. As Jessica Hopper wrote about in “Emo: Where The Girls Aren’t” , “We’re vessels redeemed in the light of boy-love. On a pedestal, on our backs. Muses at best. Cum rags or invisible at worst”. The rapper XXX-TENTACION has become a large figure in this scene despite (or, as Pitchfork suggests, because of) his imprisonment for domestic violence. With mental health issues the scene could be seen to be equally problematic. While in many ways having these artists discuss their sadness and depression can help others feel less alone and less stigmatised, it can also create an area where these issues are fetishised, where they can start to become cool. There are also the very current issue of sad, young men online with only an echo chamber of other equally frustrated young men to talk to. These situations have become the breeding grounds for extremist philosophies like the Alt-right. In terms of racial issues, it would be unwise to think that these largely white performers interest in Japan or African-American music signals any kind of allegiance with Black Lives Matter or other parts of the #woke internet.

The final thing is what to call this nebulous genre/scene that, for now, exists mostly around a few YouTube channels. Emo rap might work, but it’s not all clearly emo and that term has been half-used to refer to rappers like Kid Cudi for years now. Sad rap? IDK. I’m sure someone will soon find a way to categorise this and annoy all the artists who claim they’re totally original and can’t be pigeonholed. I look forward to the day. All I can say is it’s a shame that I won’t be coining said term and irritating everyone myself.

A brief introduction to the artists and songs worth knowing (most of these are best enjoyed with both the music and the video whilst alone at 1am):

– Lil Peep is probably the best and so-far the most well-known. His music is also the most successful synthesis of emo and rap. According to a recent Pitchfork profile his influences are Crystal Castles, Panic At The Disco and Gucci Mane (which says everything really).

“In “Girls”, Peep and collaborator Horsehead appear to be two scene-kids that have snuck into a Chief Keef video. It’s a surreal blend of sleek rap video direction and white kids with face tattoos. It’s also a clear attempt to enter the conventional rap world on its own terms. The beat epitomises the dreamy vibe of much of this scene while the lyrics seem to capture its dodgy gender politics.

“M.O.S” is a gorgeously gothic track that manages to be quiet and loud at the same time. Peep‘s vocals are slurred and low in the mix as if this were a My Bloody Valentine song. It really draws comparisons between shoegaze and this scene with a general emphasis on emotion and texture over clear lyrics.

– XXXTENTACION makes music that is occasionally gothic and distorted, occasionally emotional and sung. The デーモンAstari channel’s most popular upload is “I Don’t Wanna Do This Anymore”, one of his weepier songs, so I’ll include it in this list.

– Nothing, nowhere goes even further into emo than Peep. His music generally combines sad-sack lyrics with clean guitars and emo vocals but throws in some hip-hop production and some whiteboy rapping for good measure.

– Brennan Savage‘s “Look At Me Now” has a great gothic trap beat that Savage mostly sings over, with a tiny bit of rapping.

– Lil Bo Weep‘s “I Wrote This Song For You” was recently championed by Diplo on Twitter. Its genre might be best described as cloud rap ballad.

– yunggoth‘s “idk how to kill myself” is one of the vaguest trap songs ever written. Pretty much the only word you can make out in this ethereal banger is “bitches”.

– OmenXIII‘s “Drop Dead” is basically just a great gothic punk-rap song. He looks the part too, dressed all in black with some black nail polish for good measure.

February 26 – Stockholm, SWE @ Sonár Festival1
March 16 – Philadelphia, PA @ Union Transfer
March 17 – Washington, DC @ Fillmore Silver Spring
March 18 – Pittsburgh, PA @ Altar Bar
March 19 – New York, NY @ Webster Hall
March 21 – Boston, MA @ Royale
March 22 – Montreal, QC @ Telus Theater
March 23 – Toronto, ON @ Hoxton
March 25 – Detroit, MI @ Populux
March 26 – Chicago, IL @ Concord Music Hall
March 27 – Minneapolis, MN @ Fine Line Music Café
March 30 – Seattle, WA @ Neptune
March 31 – Vancouver, BC @ Vogue Theatre
April 1 – Portland, OR @ Hawthorne Theater
April 4 – San Francisco, CA @ The Fillmore
April 5 – Santa Cruz, CA @ The Catalyst Atrium
April 6 – Santa Ana, CA @ The Observatory
April 7 – Los Angeles, CA @ Wiltren
April 21 – Brussels, BE @ VK Concerts
April 22 – Amsterdam, NE @ Melkweg
April 24 – Cologne, GER @ Club Bahnhof Ehrenfeld
April 25 – Hamburg, GER @ Uebel & Gefährlich
April 26 – Prague, CZ @ Roxy
April 28 – Krakow, POL @ Forty Kleparz
April 29, Warszawa, POL @ 1500 m2
April 30 – Budapest, HU @ A38 Ship
May 2 – Berlin, GER @ YAAM
May 3 – Frankfurt, GER @ Zoom Frankfurt
May 4 – Paris, FR @ Le Trabendo
May 6 – London, UK @ Koko
May 7 – Manchester, UK @ Sound Control
July 3 – Copenhagen, DK @ Distortion Festival