The other night Drew Daniel went out raving and the club was pumping out loud and distorted music. His friend Max was ignoring him, toying with a piece of hardware, as a girl approached Daniel. She began to talk about a new genre of music called “hit em” containing “super crunched-out sounds” in a 5/4 time signature and 212 bpm. Later that night Daniel found himself covered in slime and looking down at his own grave.

When he awoke from this strange dream at 6am in the rural mountains of California, it wasn’t envisioning his headstone that stayed with him but the specifics of this singular music. He had never posted publicly about a dream before but decided to share on X this tale of a rave girl and hit em. “I didn’t think much about it and went back to sleep for an hour,” he says. But as he slept the numbers on the post kept creeping up. “Then it got really crazy when people actually started making the music.”

In the space of a few days, hit em has gone from a dream to a social media post to a real-life genre. “I’ve been astonished,” Daniel says. “I never expected to have hundreds of people making this sort of music.” The music being made is often fairly wild given the unusual speed and timing combination. There’s jittery, glitchy tracks that are almost gabber-like in their intensity, there’s some muscular industrial-leaning stuff; others recall a wonky jungle vibe, while some artists have even managed to spin it into jazz or ambient pieces. “It’s a very broad church,” Daniel says.

Daniel himself is no stranger to out-there music. As one half of Matmos he’s spent decades making left-field electronic music that pulls from all kinds of unconventional sources, whether capturing the sounds of surgical procedures or recording skulls, teeth and spinal cords to spin into experimental techno. He hasn’t yet contributed to the burgeoning hit em genre, but is collaborating with the US electronic artist and producer Machinedrum to have a stab at making his own version; meanwhile Machinedrum has put out a public call for submissions for a compilation. Daniel is even fielding calls from festivals to play hit em sets. “I feel weird about that,” he says. I don’t want to gate keep or for this to be a proprietary thing. Nobody owns it. Anybody that stitches this stuff together should just roll with it.”

It has also led to some retrospective allocating. Apparently some close contenders for preexisting hit em tracks, which have a high bpm and 5/4 timing, include the Mission: Impossible theme and Radiohead’s 15 Steps. We also talk about songs shaped by dreams, from Bill Callahan’s Eid Ma Clack Shaw to Roy Orbison’s In Dreams. Echo and the Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch credits The Killing Moon to divine intervention, with God delivering him what he considers the greatest song ever written while dreaming. “I’m a little more feet on the ground, no disrespect,” laughs Daniel. “I feel it’s all about the rave girl, she was the one that came up with this idea. I’m glad I went to that rave in my dream. It sounds so corny, like a bumper sticker, but I think the idea of believing in your dreams matters.” (A dream researcher even plotted the night chart of Daniel’s dream and shared “thoughts about hit em as a dream genre”.)

Aside from being a bit of fun that has led to a surge in spontaneous creativity, and an organic musical moment that happened outside the industry and the algorithm, it’s also a display of social media at its best, during a time when it feels largely like a cesspit. “There’s a lot of fascism, misinformation, and bad actors,” says Daniel. “It can make you feel like the whole thing is nasty and it’s just about scraping data and being surveilled. But the beautiful thing about the internet is that there are group forms that can emerge that are about collective creativity and sharing. I mean, there’s now gay furries in Germany that are hipping me to weird break core that I’d never heard of. I’m from Baltimore and we can all be together in that space and just make things. That’s beautiful. It sounds kind of soggy, but it’s true.”

So is hit em a fleeting moment of niche virality (the original post has had more than 4m views at the time of writing) or a genuine new musical movement about to unfold? “It seems to keep growing,” says Daniel. “The rumour mill among friends is they’re all working on hit em songs now. Bedroom producers are often real perfectionists, so I think there’s a wave still to come.”

An account claiming to be Charli xcx even posted “kamala IS ‘hit em’”, mirroring the singer’s viral post about Kamala Harris being “brat”. “I had people DMing me like ‘Charli xcx is talking about you’,” laughs Daniel. “But I was like, no, it’s a fake. But it’s a beautiful fake. Hit em summer? Why not.”