The Guide #268: Laptop twee is the gloriously awkward sound giving British music a new lease of life

In this week’s newsletter: From wonky electronic production to painfully earnest lyrics, a new wave of artists are embracing nostalgia, cute vibes and DIY pop

If you’d told me back in January that one of my favourite tracks of 2026 would count noughties new rave outfit Hadouken! and goofy Kesha parodists The Midnight Beast among its influences, I would have looked at you skeptically, at the very least. I’m all for the nostalgic reappropriation of the most neglected and deeply uncool relics of pop music past, but these particular reference points would have seemed like a step too far. I would have been very wrong.

The Ballad of St Nick’s Park by 300SkullsAndCounting (AKA Leamington Spa native Hal Hewetson) and his collaborator Jenny Sparks is one of the most unexpected and addictive songs I’ve heard in years. It’s also not as much of an outlier as it might initially seem; the pair’s album This Is Spa Town! is part of a new sound that was last year christened “laptop twee”. Other affiliates of the largely British scene include Bassvictim, an electronica duo made up of Goldsmiths alumni Ike Clateman and Maria Manow, and Worldpeace DMT (pictured, top), AKA Leo Fincham and Rowan Miles (also a member of the similarly minded Femcels), whose work a Guardian critic recently compared to that of kooky early 2010s indie outfit Darwin Deez.

It’s always fun – and nowadays, much rarer fun – to have a new musical subgenre to argue about (is it good? Is it annoying? Will it really end up being the next big thing?). There’s been a bit of an end-of-history air about music of late: some good stuff, but none of it particularly audacious or divisive. The most respected songwriters – Phoebe Bridgers, Olivia Rodrigo, Fontaines DC – break new ground only in the subtlest of ways, while the internet’s splintered soundscape plays host to infinite niches that never gain proper traction in the press or among the public.

Laptop twee is different, both because it actually sounds new and because it’s breaking online containment. (I saw Worldpeace DMT play to a sizable, word-perfect crowd in London earlier this week, while This Is Spa Town! was released on kingmaking independent label XL). And though it might not be the perfect generic moniker, the label does helpfully highlight some of this emerging cohort’s unifying features. Here, “laptop” is shorthand for a backdrop of wonkily DIY electronic production that, according to Pitchfork’s Kieran Press-Reynolds, often includes “intricate sound design, fatass sleaze bass, or otherwise cracked 2020s style-shards”. “Twee” refers to the guileless, unrefined and jarringly intimate vocal stylealong with the sing-song melodies.

Yet laptop twee is not a monolith. Worldpeace DMT leans more quaint, even Nico-ish, with their digital (and literal) bells and whistles bringing to mind a blundering Wallace and Gromit-style automaton. Meanwhile 300SkullsAndCounting and Jenny Sparks add in cutesy screamo, womping bass and the Streets-esque clowning.

As an epithet, “laptop twee” does capture the unfiltered, unmistakably human nature of the music – an unconscious response to the age of AI, perhaps. Yet it doesn’t quite express the overall sensibility of these artists. There’s a deliberate cringeworthiness to the lyrics, either in the form of loserish candour (Hewetson has a song about how his mum doesn’t like his music) or extreme sickliness (“Wrote this song just so you’d know/ To love yourself no matter what,” goes Worldpeace DMT’s Love Yourself). This chimes with the amusingly lame but undeniably earwormy noughties references I mentioned earlier. Much of it is also steeped in affection for underwhelming Britishcore, with album titles like Stick Around For Tea and references to buying sweets in the local Spar.

The tone is both hyper-sincere and intensely self-aware, something it shares with Charli xcx’s Brat, which merged the brash production of PC Music founder AG Cook with unexpectedly earnest and awkward lyrics about insecurities, professional rivalries and the whether to start a family. You could certainly say laptop twee is the first post-Brat musical movement, though I’m fairly confident it won’t have the same cultural cut-through. What I don’t know is whether this new scene will end up reshaping the zeitgeist or promptly disappearing into the ether. I hope it’s the former, but in an era of vanishingly little musical innovation – let alone brand new subgenres – I’m mainly grateful to be asking the question at all.