Rate and Hate: Our Top 10 Most Despised Musical Genres

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So Mishkin and I have been doing a little bonus series on the podcast called Rate and

Hate, and in our most recent episode we did something that felt long overdue — a full, rundown of the musical genres that would, without question, serve as our punishment in hell. No malice towards the humans making the music (mostly), just a very honest accounting of what makes us want to vomit.

We came up with a list of ten, and I want to walk you through them here, because getting it off my chest felt therapeutic, and I suspect some of you will feel exactly the same way.

10. Trap

We think this should be renamed Slap, because every single drumbeat sample feels like a light but persistent tap on the face. Over and over. There's no melody, just samples dropped in with what I can only assume is genuine contempt for the listener. Sorry, Brighton park-goers. I know you love it.

9. Lounge Jazz

We do actually play this stuff sometimes, which makes the hatred more complicated, but as a genre it's the sonic equivalent of growing old against your will. It wafts around hotel bars like a bad smell and gives you wrinkles just by being in the same room as it. It belongs in the past, where it had the good manners to stay for a while before someone dug it back up.

8. Jazz

I hate jazz so much I had to include it twice but just as a disclaimer, I respect the craft. It takes real skill to sound that irritating. The issue is that jazz has no boundaries, no edges, no sense of when to stop. Everyone gets a solo, nobody writes a song, and the whole thing operates on this unspoken agreement that if you play enough wrong notes confidently enough, people will call it genius. As Spinal Tap once described it: music based on fear and a series of accidents. If we were in a jazz bar we would ask for Angela.

7. Folk Punk

Some good folk exists. Some bearable punk exists. Folk punk is what happens when someone takes everything beautiful out of folk music, cranks the tempo up by a hundred BPM, and then shouts over the top of it while people in bars do what I can only describe as very fast, very aggressive line dancing. The ukulele folk punk variant — which is a real thing that exists in the world — is simply unforgivable. Seven minutes of ukulele is not an anthem. It's a crime.

6. Power Metal

Cringe in a genre. That's all it is. Everything about it, from the guitars in inexplicable colours to the vocals arriving like a medieval siege, makes you curl up inside. It's usually about dragons, or Vikings, or unicorns flying over Dundee and there's an unspoken entry requirement of loving a pentatonic run and having no taste whatsoever. I say this as someone who went through a brief Dragonforce phase as a teenager. The difference is, I didn't know better and then I grew out of it.

5. K-Pop

The K should stand for kids, not Korea. Entirely manufactured, deeply exploitative of very young people who have signed away their rights before they're old enough to know better, and sonically it sounds like AI wrote a love song for an algorithm. When AI fully takes over musical performance, K-Pop is where it starts.

4. Pop Punk

Annoying because it's so catchy, and because it's always there — at the wedding, at the party, in the background of every formative teenage memory. Smash Mouth. Sum 41 doing their little countdown in Spanish. The Offspring. It has its place, and that place is a fifteen-year-old's bedroom. The trouble is the people making it are now in their fifties and haven't noticed that the bedroom metaphor no longer applies to them.

3. Hair Metal

Music made by people who love themselves so much they've forgotten they might not be as attractive as they think. If cocaine were a genre, this would be it — relentless, ego-driven, utterly convinced of its own brilliance, and exhausting to be around. Exceptionally talented musicians using their talent for evil. The orgasm face while playing guitar was never cool. It was not cool then. It is not cool now. Please stop.

2. Lad Indie

We're not sure this is a formally recognised genre but if you've ever worked a bar shift, you know exactly what we mean. Kings of Leon. Kasabian. The Kooks. Every song designed to be sung with both index fingers pointed in the air by eight drunk men who have completely lost the use of one eye. Disturbingly catchy, impossible to escape, and a direct pipeline to attempting to hit on the barmaid. We both left a lot of bar trauma in this episode. It felt good.

1. National Socialist Black Metal

This entire genre was created so that racist black metal fans had somewhere to also be Nazis, and it sounds exactly as terrible as that origin story deserves. Fuzz, hate, and production so bad it makes you wonder whether the awfulness is the point. I believe that closed-minded people make terrible art, and this is the proof. Can't wait for it to die.

Let us know which genres make your skin crawl. And if you actually love pop punk, we still accept you. Just not your taste in music.