Maxim here. I make preset and sample packs for a living at Monosounds, which means I spend an unhealthy amount of time watching what blows up on TikTok and what Spotify’s editors push next.
I wrote this piece in mid-2025 as a snapshot of the trends I was seeing. It’s now July 2026, so I’ve gone back through it, cut the parts that aged badly, and added notes on what actually stuck. Treat it as a dated roundup with a one-year reality check baked in. For step-by-step production guides on these sounds, we’ve since published a full Serum 2 series — I’ll link the relevant ones as we go.
One big change since I first posted this: Serum 2 shipped in March 2025 as a free upgrade for every Serum 1 owner. Three oscillators, five engines including granular and spectral, proper FX buses, and a built-in sequencer. Almost every trend below got easier to produce because of it. If you’re still deciding whether to update, my Serum 1 vs Serum 2 comparison covers it. And if you want to follow along with the examples, grab the free 250-preset starter bank from our Serum 2 free presets pack — it costs nothing and covers most of the sounds in this article.
1. Microhooks built for TikTok
You’ve seen it. A 15-second clip goes viral and suddenly the whole world is humming one weird synth line.
This one didn’t just survive into 2026 — it got more extreme. The average hook window shrank. If your track doesn’t do something interesting in the first two seconds, the scroll wins.
What works:
- Repetitive hooks that stick after one listen
- Odd sound design: pitched squeaks, reversed tails, formant-shifted vocals
- Lyrics that start mid-sentence or read like a meme caption
My go-to recipe: take a short vocal phrase, chop it to an 8th-note pattern, pitch alternate slices up 3–5 semitones, and ride a fast gate or trance-gate effect over the top. ShaperBox 3 or Effectrix both handle the movement part. I wrote a full walkthrough on building these in the Serum 2 vocal chops guide — Serum 2’s sample engine makes chopping way less fiddly than the old sampler-plus-slicer routine.
If you don’t sing, stutter vocal one-shots work fine as raw material. Our Platinum stutter vocal samples were built exactly for this kind of hook bait.
2. Lo-fi pop revival, with a twist
Remember chillwave from the late 2010s? It came back in 2025 with tighter drums and cleaner toplines, and it’s still going strong in 2026. The “lo-fi but expensive” sound, basically.
Trending features:
- Analog tape texture under a modern, clean reverb
- Sidechain on the ambient pads — subtle, around 2–4 dB of dip, not full-on pumping
- Dreamy vocals with slight detuning, usually 5–10 cents
For the texture layer, RC-20 Retro Color is still the standard: I keep wobble around 0.3–0.5% and shave everything above 10–12 kHz with the bandwidth control. Super VHS is the cheaper one-knob route to the same mood.
If you’d rather start from ready material, the Magnetic Lo-Fi sample pack is our in-house take on this vibe, and the lo-fi Serum 2 tutorial shows how to build the keys and dusty pads from scratch.
3. Bedroom pop grew up
The Billie Eilish effect never really left. Bedroom pop in 2025–2026 is more ambitious, though. DIY stopped meaning amateur — it means emotionally raw and deliberately minimal.
Key elements:
- ASMR-style close-mic vocals, recorded 5–10 cm from the mic with the gain low
- Sparse arrangements — three or four elements at any moment, rarely more
- FX-heavy vocal chains: Valhalla Room for space, Little AlterBoy for formant and pitch character
The trick that separates good bedroom pop from muddy demos is arrangement discipline. Every 8 bars, remove something or add something, never both. And keep the low end mono below about 120 Hz — small-speaker listeners are your main audience here.
4. Club energy with emotional depth
Whether it’s Berlin techno or UK garage, the club sound of 2025 mashed hard-hitting drums with emotional top layers. Warehouse energy meets sad-girl vocals. A year later this is arguably the dominant club aesthetic — melodic techno and emotional tech house took over festival streams and Spotify’s dance editorials alike.
Ingredients:
- Deep, saturated kicks — 126–130 BPM for tech house, 132–140 for the harder stuff
- Atmospheric breakdowns with analog-style synths
- Mournful vocal one-shots or ethereal melodies floating over the groove
Kick 2 is still my pick for designing the low end, and Serum 2’s granular engine turned out to be perfect for the airy breakdown textures — stretch any vocal phrase into a cloud and ride the filter. The melodic techno Serum 2 guide goes deep on that exact move.
For ready-made club tones, Technocraft covers the techno side and Fishlake Vol.1 handles tech house basses.
5. Genre-fluid everything
Strict genre walls are gone. TikTok blurred them for good. One minute it’s Afrobeats, the next it’s French electro with reggaeton drums and a hyperpop hook.
What I keep hearing:
- Middle Eastern scales over trap drums
- Latin grooves inside chill R&B
- Bollywood-style samples flipped into drill at 140 BPM
- Phonk cowbells sneaking into house tracks — the “house phonk” crossover was one of 2025’s stranger wins
Arcade by Output is the fastest way to audition worldwide sounds inside a project. If the phonk-meets-house crossover interests you, we bundled that exact hybrid into the House Phonk sample pack and Serum 2 presets.
What actually makes a song go viral
Virality is weird and unpredictable, but it isn’t random. The same ingredients keep showing up in tracks that break on TikTok and then stick on Spotify:
- No warm-up. The hook lands in the first 2 seconds. Long intros are for the album cut.
- Emotional switch-ups. Calm to chaos, or the reverse. Contrast is shareable.
- Audio easter eggs. One tiny, odd sound people rewind to catch again.
- Interactive potential. Can people dance to it, lip-sync it, meme it? If not, it spreads slower.
One 2026 note: sped-up edits are now often released officially alongside the original — usually 15–20% faster with a pitch rise. If a track of yours starts moving, publish your own sped-up and slowed versions before someone else’s rip becomes the canonical one.
Tools that survived into 2026
My original cheat sheet, minus the stuff that didn’t age well:
| Tool | What it’s for |
|---|---|
| RC-20 Retro Color | Analog warmth and texture |
| ShaperBox 3 | Movement, sidechain, gating |
| Kick 2 | Custom kick design |
| Little AlterBoy | Vocal formant and pitch character |
| Super VHS | Instant lo-fi and retro color |
| Valhalla Room | Clean, musical reverb |
| Arcade | Loop-based instrument, constant content updates |
| Serum 2 | The wavetable/granular/spectral workhorse — free upgrade from Serum 1 |
The honest takeaway a year on: the AI-synth wave produced a lot of demos and very few keepers, while the boring reliable tools above are still on every producer’s shortlist.
FAQ: music trends 2025
What genre dominated TikTok in 2025?
Hyperpop-adjacent pop, sped-up edits of pop and R&B catalog tracks, and sad drill led most of the year. By late 2025, melodic club sounds and phonk crossovers were catching up fast, and that carried into 2026.
How do I make music that fits Spotify editorial playlists?
Study the editorial playlists in your niche: note the tempo range, energy curve, and instrumentation of the last 20 adds. Match the vibe, then give your track one clearly recognizable twist. Pitch through Spotify for Artists at least a week before release.
Are slowed and sped-up versions still worth releasing?
Yes. In 2026 they’re standard practice — labels routinely ship official sped-up (+15–20%) and slowed-plus-reverb versions within days of the original. Doing it yourself keeps the streams on your profile instead of a re-upload channel.
Should I focus on TikTok or Spotify?
Both, in sequence. TikTok creates the spike, Spotify sustains it. A track that moves on TikTok usually lands on Spotify’s algorithmic radar within a week or two — make sure your release is live and your profile looks alive before you push clips.
Final thoughts: make music that moves people, not just algorithms
It’s tempting to chase the algorithm. But if you only produce for trends, you’re permanently one step behind the people who set them.
My take hasn’t changed since 2025: understand the trends, study them, use them — and keep the sound yours. What stood out then, and still stands out now, isn’t technical polish. It’s personality and emotion in a form people want to share.
If you want a no-cost starting point for any of the sounds above, the free Serum 2 presets pack has 250+ patches across bass, keys, pads and leads. Grab it, pull a preset apart, and go make something weird enough to get rewound.
I run Monosounds.studio and make the packs myself. Ten-plus years of producing, 97+ releases, 16,000+ downloads. Every Serum 2 preset we ship passes a CPU check on a mid-range laptop and gets used in a real track before release. If it does not survive a mix, it does not go in the pack.
More about Maxim & the studio →
