EVERY GENRE PROJECT - February 13 - Heaven Trap
Genre of the Day - Heaven Trap
Album of the Day - Duality EP by SLANDER (2016)
Sometimes it feels as if this column is for the most part bound to oscillate between folk genres there isn’t a ton of information on and niche EDM scenes there isn’t a ton of information on either. In a way, this makes sense. Both overarching genres are mostly performed for people, so the whole music packaging and definition thing comes second. Not exactly easy when you’re trying to pump out a column with as much detail as theoretically possible for a quotidian project, but it keeps things interesting.
Heaven and trap are not two things you’d expect to be together, but I do believe that an ideal heaven would be musically diverse and thus include trap. Trap is such a driving force as a sound, so ubiquitous and reverberating in contemporary popular music like Earl Young’s four-on-the-floor sound so integral to the music of the ‘70s and ‘80s that truthfully I couldn’t easily define it off the top of my head. Originating in early 2010s, the main defining characteristics of trap are its particularities of drum programming—grimy snares, heavy sub bass and kicks, complex hi-hat use—and initially its lyrical themes that revolved around the trap house, i.e. a house from which drugs were being pushed. The sound achieved its first breakthrough in mainstream popularity with the rise of Gucci Mane and Young Jeezy in the 2000s, showing its endurance over the decades.
The kind of nerds that will always love some crisp and particular drum programming, though, are of course DJs, being the people most obsessed with tinkering with a drum machine or two. Therefore, trap inevitably made its way into EDM among DJs looking for a way to pair their drops with that crisp, propulsive sound of trap. Heaven trap seeks to bridge the gap in a way between the euphoric feeling of trance with the grittiness of trap and find a happy medium. It’s a sound that’s distinctive, and there’s definitely undertones of it in some major hits—think UCLA by RL Grime—but in terms of its listings on RYM, maybe it’s just under classified or maybe it really was just a flash in the pan, with releases peaking in 2015 and faltering after.
The real problem for me today was that there is literally no full album listed as heaven trap—most of the genre’s release listings are one-off singles of hit songs made into a heaven trap mold. There was one EP mainly listed as heaven trap, but it didn’t have more than one song remixed multiple times. I finally found one EP secondarily classified as heaven trap that had two songs with various remixes, but two is still a better sample size in an album context. It goes to show that albums aren’t an easy marker for dance music in particular. Nonetheless, SLANDER—considered the pioneers of the genre—still present a picture of their harder approach to the genre adeptly. “Love Again: is a more genre-aligned track, with a euphoric drop paired with the heavy snares and frequent drum transitions characteristic of trap. “Dead” features a metal influenced instrumental and a marriage of what seems like halftime to me and trap in the chorus, which is certainly sonically interesting but perhaps less euphoric than chaotic. Nonetheless, this sonic experimentation seems worthy of deeper exploration: the trap beats and breakdowns certainly accentuate the synthiness in a new and unusual way. Honestly, though, is heaven trap gone? With the upcoming mid-2010s revival given the ever-shorter cycle of trends, will a nostalgic take surface? One shudders a bit, but only time and the trap can tell.