Maxim here. Making preset and sample packs at Monosounds is my day job, which translates into an unhealthy number of hours spent tracking what explodes on TikTok and what Spotify’s editors decide to push next.
This piece started life in mid-2025 as a snapshot of the trends I was watching. Now it’s July 2026, so I’ve combed back through it, deleted what aged badly, and added notes on what actually held up. Read it as a dated roundup with a one-year reality check attached. For hands-on production guides covering these sounds, we’ve published a whole Serum 2 series since then, and I’ll drop the relevant links along the way.
One major shift since the original post: Serum 2 launched in March 2025 as a free upgrade for every Serum 1 owner. Three oscillators, five engines including granular and spectral, real FX buses, and a built-in sequencer. Nearly every trend below became easier to produce as a result. Still on the fence about updating? My Serum 1 vs Serum 2 comparison settles it. And to follow along with the examples, pick up the free 250-preset starter bank from our Serum 2 free presets pack — zero cost, and it covers most sounds mentioned here.
1. Microhooks built for TikTok
You know the pattern. Some 15-second clip goes viral and suddenly the entire planet is humming one strange synth line.
Far from fading in 2026, this trend got more extreme. The hook window kept shrinking. A track that does nothing interesting inside the first two seconds loses to the scroll, every time.
What works:
- Hooks repetitive enough to stick after a single listen
- Weird sound design: pitched squeaks, reversed tails, formant-shifted vocals
- Lyrics starting mid-sentence, or reading like a meme caption
My usual recipe: grab a short vocal phrase, chop it into an 8th-note pattern, shift alternate slices up 3–5 semitones, then run a fast gate or trance-gate effect over everything. Either ShaperBox 3 or Effectrix covers the movement half. There’s a complete walkthrough of these builds in the Serum 2 vocal chops guide; the sample engine in Serum 2 makes chopping far less tedious than the old sampler-plus-slicer dance.
Can’t sing? Stutter vocal one-shots do the job as raw material. Our Platinum stutter vocal samples exist precisely for this flavor of hook bait.
2. Lo-fi pop revival, with a twist
Anyone remember chillwave from the late 2010s? It resurfaced in 2025 with tighter drums and cleaner toplines, and 2026 hasn’t slowed it down. Call it the “lo-fi but expensive” aesthetic.
Trending features:
- Analog tape grit sitting under modern, clean reverb
- Sidechain on the ambient pads, kept subtle at around 2–4 dB of dip rather than full pumping
- Dreamy vocals carrying slight detune, usually 5–10 cents
For the texture layer, RC-20 Retro Color remains the default: I run wobble around 0.3–0.5% and use the bandwidth control to shave everything past 10–12 kHz. Super VHS gets you the same mood cheaper, with one knob.
Prefer starting from finished material? The Magnetic Lo-Fi sample pack is our house take on the vibe, and the lo-fi Serum 2 tutorial walks through building the keys and dusty pads from nothing.
3. Bedroom pop grew up
The Billie Eilish effect never went anywhere. But bedroom pop in 2025–2026 aims higher. DIY no longer reads as amateur; it reads as emotionally raw and deliberately minimal.
Key elements:
- ASMR-style close-mic vocals, captured 5–10 cm from the mic with gain kept low
- Skeletal arrangements: three or four elements at any given moment, rarely more
- FX-heavy vocal chains, with Valhalla Room handling space and Little AlterBoy handling formant and pitch character
What separates good bedroom pop from a muddy demo is arrangement discipline. Every 8 bars, either remove something or add something, never both at once. And sum the low end to mono below about 120 Hz, since small-speaker listeners are the core audience here.
4. Club energy with emotional depth
From Berlin techno to UK garage, the club sound of 2025 fused punishing drums with emotional top layers. Warehouse power under sad-girl vocals. Twelve months later it’s arguably the dominant club aesthetic, with melodic techno and emotional tech house owning festival streams and Spotify’s dance editorials alike.
Ingredients:
- Deep, saturated kicks at 126–130 BPM for tech house, 132–140 for the harder end
- Atmospheric breakdowns built on analog-style synths
- Mournful vocal one-shots or ethereal melodies drifting over the groove
For designing the low end, Kick 2 is still my choice, and Serum 2’s granular engine turned out to be ideal for those airy breakdown textures: stretch any vocal phrase into a cloud and ride the filter. That exact move gets the deep treatment in the melodic techno Serum 2 guide.
Want club tones ready-made? Technocraft handles the techno side while Fishlake Vol.1 covers tech house basses.
5. Genre-fluid everything
Hard genre borders are dead, and TikTok is what killed them. One minute you’re hearing Afrobeats, the next it’s French electro over reggaeton drums with a hyperpop hook on top.
Combinations I keep running into:
- Middle Eastern scales laid over trap drums
- Latin grooves tucked inside chill R&B
- Bollywood-style samples flipped into drill at 140 BPM
- Phonk cowbells creeping into house tracks — the “house phonk” crossover was among 2025’s odder success stories
For auditioning worldwide sounds inside a project fast, nothing beats Arcade by Output. And if that phonk-meets-house hybrid catches your ear, we packaged exactly that into the House Phonk sample pack and Serum 2 presets.
What actually makes a song go viral
Virality is strange and hard to predict, but random it is not. The same ingredients keep appearing in tracks that break on TikTok and then hold on Spotify:
- No warm-up. The hook fires within the first 2 seconds. Save long intros for the album version.
- Emotional switch-ups. Calm into chaos, or the other way round. Contrast gets shared.
- Audio easter eggs. A single tiny, odd sound that people rewind to hear again.
- Interactive potential. Can it be danced to, lip-synced, memed? If not, it travels slower.
A 2026 footnote: sped-up edits now routinely ship officially next to the original, typically 15–20% faster with a pitch rise. If one of your tracks starts moving, get your own sped-up and slowed versions out before somebody’s rip becomes the canonical one.
Tools that survived into 2026
The original cheat sheet, with everything that aged badly removed:
| 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 verdict a year later: the AI-synth wave generated piles of demos and almost no keepers, while the boring dependable tools above remain on every producer’s shortlist.
FAQ: music trends 2025
What genre dominated TikTok in 2025?
Hyperpop-adjacent pop, sped-up edits of catalog pop and R&B, and sad drill ruled most of the year. Toward late 2025, melodic club sounds and phonk crossovers were gaining fast, and that momentum rolled into 2026.
How do I make music that fits Spotify editorial playlists?
Study the editorial playlists in your niche: log the tempo range, energy curve, and instrumentation across the last 20 adds. Match that vibe, then give your track one clearly recognizable twist of its own. Pitch it through Spotify for Artists at least a week ahead of release.
Are slowed and sped-up versions still worth releasing?
Yes. By 2026 they’re standard practice, with labels shipping official sped-up (+15–20%) and slowed-plus-reverb editions within days of the original. Doing it yourself keeps those streams on your profile rather than on some re-upload channel.
Should I focus on TikTok or Spotify?
Both, in order. TikTok makes the spike; Spotify keeps it alive. A track gaining traction on TikTok typically hits Spotify’s algorithmic radar within a week or two, so have your release live and your profile looking active before you push any clips.
Final thoughts: make music that moves people, not just algorithms
Chasing the algorithm is tempting. But produce only for trends and you’ll stay permanently one step behind whoever sets them.
My position hasn’t moved since 2025: know the trends, study them, use them, and keep the sound recognizably yours. What cut through then, and still cuts through now, was never technical polish. It’s personality and emotion in a shape people want to pass along.
Need a free starting point for any sound above? The free Serum 2 presets pack holds 250+ patches spanning bass, keys, pads and leads. Download it, dissect a preset, and go make something strange enough that people rewind it.
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 →
