Anti-pop and an alien sigil: how Aphex Twin overtook Taylor Swift to become the soundtrack to gen Z life online

QKThr, an obscure cut from Aphex Twin’s 2001 album, Drukqs, sounds like an ambient experiment recorded on a historic pirate ship. Shaky fingers caress the keys of an accordion to create an uncanny tone; clustered chords cry out, subdued but mighty, before scuttling back into dreamy nothingness.

This 88-second elegy has always been overshadowed by another song on Drukqs, the Disklavier instrumental Avril 14th, which alongside Windowlicker is the Cornish producer’s best-known track. But QKThr has become a weird breakaway success, featuring on nearly 8m TikTok posts, adorning everything from cute panda videos to lightly memed US presidential debates, and a fail video trend dubbed “subtle foreshadowing”.

Aphex Twin has even overtaken Taylor Swift in monthly YouTube Music listeners, with 448 million to her 399 million. Electronic music DJ and producer RamonPang noticed the milestone last week, and credits the uptick to QKThr. “It really puts in perspective how popular Aphex Twin’s music is in short-form content,” he tells me. “It’s not like there was a cultural shift and everyone’s suddenly listening to ambient techno over the grocery store speakers. The actual shift has been way smaller: Aphex Twin’s back catalogue is having a renaissance through gen Z.”

Those QKThr posts are just a sample of gen Z’s apparent addiction to Aphex. Whether it’s Dagestani men joyfully line dancing to Pulsewidth from Selected Ambient Works 85-92, corecore edits – the wistful internet trend that processes post-Covid melancholy through video collage – set to Avril 14th, or even a fart remix of Alberto Balsalm from I Care Because You Do, Richard D James’s music has become the backdrop to life online.

Chloe Saavedra, an LA-based musician and drummer for the band Chaos Chaos, who has also played with Lee Ranaldo, Caroline Polachek and Conan Gray, has been an Aphex superfan since the 2010s, and often posts drum covers of his songs to TikTok. She describes his largely programmed music as “not written for humans to play”, and its unpredictability as key to his appeal. “Learning his song Flim on the drums made me really appreciate his beats: there will be a couple bars where everything will feel super on the grid and super mechanical, but then he’ll throw in a swung rhythm, or do something on a triplet beat, or go completely off the grid.”

Aphex’s music is mercurial by definition, which might be why it’s become such a natural companion to gen Z and gen Alpha, who have grown up with a fractured hybrid of digital and real life. Digital culture journalist Kieran Press-Reynolds says that hearing Aphex over, for example, a banal get-ready-with-me video of a person showing off that day’s outfit “added an immense poignancy to what you were seeing”. A cynic might say that spooky affect arises because his outsider-ish music has become so prominent on platforms associated with commerce and personal branding. But it’s also there in the way his songs are so often used in posts of picturesque views, or “nostalgiacore” videos, the combination of sound and visuals gesturing towards feelings or locations far away from the insular experience of scrolling.

Made for scrolling … Aphex Twin making a rare public appearance closing Field Day festival in London in 2023. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Press-Reynolds, RamonPang and Saavedra also all agree on the appeal of the Aphex aura: the swathes of lore about him owning a street-legal tank, or allegedly living in the glass structure on a roundabout in south London; the inscrutable aliases, including Polygon Window and the Tuss; the endless rabbit holes and Soundcloud dumps. The trickiness of pinning down his identity and motivations is innately countercultural and offers a liberating, non-prescriptive form of fandom and discovery: Saavedra calls him “anti-pop” in a world where most young listeners experience music being “rammed down our throats”.

To RamonPang, Aphex’s youth appeal lies in the freakish, timeless wonder of it all, from the “alien looking sigil” of his logo to the mischievous “ghastly face” seen in his videos for Come to Daddy and Windowlicker, and childlike, emotive sound worlds: “I like to think the younger generation finds all of that completely fascinating and digs deeper.”

Some older listeners might balk at the idea of Aphex Twin’s esteemed catalogue being “reduced” to the algorithmic equivalent of background music. But it’s always had a utilitarian aspect: 1992’s Digeridoo was originally written to clear people away from Cornish beach raves at dawn. His otherworldly music, the best of it a good three decades old, has the sort of rare, ever-renewing appeal that means each generation finds new resonances in it and tries to claim him as their own. “He’s one of those artists that you feel like a lot of people will try to flex,” says Saavedra – namely claim as a marker of alt-ness and questing music taste.

Aphex’s refusal to ascribe meaning to most of his music also keeps the slate blank for endless reinterpretation. When it comes to QKThr, “he probably just felt like writing some dreamy and lush shit one day,” says RamonPang, “and then decided to do it because he doesn’t care what anyone else thinks”.