Los Angeles has long been known as an industry town, a place where artists go to get manufactured, packaged, and sold. Nowhere is that more apparent than in music, where pop stardom is engineered in the city’s countless studios scattered like stars on Hollywood Boulevard, then delivered to the world in a 17-track album, TikTok dance, and a sold-out tour. But that narrative only captures LA’s cultural export, not its music scene. The scene itself is born underground, volcanic in nature, pushing upward until it finally erupts, spilling ash and lava that ripple far beyond the city limits.
Today, though, the eruption feels different. The underground doesn’t always wait to break the surface before shaping culture. Its influence is already everywhere, propelled by artists working on the fringes who remind us that real innovation rarely begins in the mainstream. Take Beyoncé’s Renaissance, released in 2022: a bold departure from the sound that defined her career. The album’s subversive house beats and experimental twists quickly reaffirmed her GOAT status, but part of that reinvention came from Los Angeles.
On the opening track, “I’m That Girl,” a declaration of her still being that b—, Beyoncé tapped Kelman Duran, a Dominican-born, LA-based artist whose electronic sensibilities bend genre lines. For years, Duran’s sound has oscillated between ambient and dembow, often spilling into underground venues where experimentation took precedence over expectation. His performance series, Deluge, “dedicated to exploring ambient, experimental, and avant-garde sound,” marked a turning point for LA’s music scene, pointing toward the broader cultural shifts we’re now seeing at large with the adoption of these genres and sounds in the zeitgeist.
Now, with the world feeling darker, audiences have leaned harder into music that could both move bodies uninhibitedly and unburden spirits. Enter FKA Twigs with her critically acclaimed album Eusexua, a 9.1 Pitchfork darling and instant fixture in year-end playlists, providing a soundtrack for the human experience, pillared by ways of being. Its title track, with rolling synths and ethereal vocals, infused techno’s pulse into pop’s bloodstream.
Behind it was Bapari, another LA-based artist pushing electronic music into uncharted territory. “I love music with duality, emotion, and that demonstrates something to the listener that’s a little unexpected,” they explain. “If I can connect to a song thematically, sonically, or emotionally, it’s easy for me to get ideas and envision where a track can go.” Their production is a feverish dream of experimentation, shaping Eusexua and helping redefine what mainstream pop can sound like. Now, the world is anticipating Twigs’ second offering within the same sonic and visual universe, Eusexua: Afterglow.
In their own work, Bapari continues to carve out a lane that is wholly their own: electronic soundscapes colliding with hard club beats, textured experiments balanced between ambience and catharsis. Before the pandemic, they established a weekly Chinatown party, Puffy, later inspiring their NTS show, which let their sound reverberate across dancefloors, offering solace in a city where club culture struggles under limited infrastructure and heavy policing. For Bapari, warehouse parties became the fix, a remedy to those barriers. “Warehouses to this day are some of my favorite events to play—seeing how someone transforms a place from scratch and the level of production value someone can bring to an empty box is inspiring as well,” they note. This is why the underground is truly underground, fermenting ideas once dismissed as “noise” but now celebrated by pop stars and audiences alike.
While A-listers may borrow from fringed scenes, musicians across the industry have leveraged the brilliance of LA-based artists who continue to expand upon culture and innovate. One steady force is Shygirl, an unconventional pop vixen who fuses electronic dance with razor-sharp hooks. Her momentum has been amplified by Los Angeles-based producer and DJ Kingdom, whose fingerprints appear on both her 2022 debut Nymph and her 2024 project Club Shy.
Beyond the studio, Kingdom has for years ignited LA’s nightlife with visionary sets that stretch the boundaries of club sound, offering dancers fleeting glimpses of what the future might feel like. With Club Shy, activations unfolded in cities around the world, transforming nightlife into a traveling experiment, naturally stopping in Los Angeles along the way. Other artists have also taken the route of nomadic raves, including Kelela, FKA Twigs, and Charli XCX, where she opted for the city’s smaller bars and venues, from West Hollywood to Chinatown.
People often say that LA suffers from an identity crisis, but the city tells a different story. With nearly 4 million people, each community—Latin, Black, Queer, and beyond—layers its own perspective into the fabric of the sound. While dance music can be found anywhere here, if you dig beneath the surface, artists are crafting blueprints for tomorrow, creating sonic landscapes that the mainstream will later build upon. With pop entering a new era and genre becoming more porous than ever, boundaries are going to continue to be blurred, and audiences are going to continue to crave sensations they’ve never felt or heard before.
